Sherief, FYI

The Windows approach to ensuring the integrity of executable code is signing via Authenticode - the executable file is digitally signed, and the signing certificate can be traced back to a trusted root.

I do a lot of debugging in Visual Studio, and while having symbols for all modules loaded in my process (whether from public or internal symbol servers) is a huge boon, most of the time I’m trying to isolate issues in my own code and after every system up…

Playing Commandos 2 on a modern Windows 10 system with a 4K display revealed a major, unexpected pain point of the game: the menu will only run in 640x480, regardless of the resolution the game is set to.

In the classic world of OpenGL and Direct3D <= 11, an app would create GPU resources (buffers, textures) and receive opaque handles to them which it later binds to specific slots before issuing draw or compute commands.

Ever since I got my latest laptop (a 2022 Razer Blade 15 Advanced) I’ve noticed that sometimes the mouse cursor would become jumpy, not tracking finger motion correctly, and when that happens some gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger-tap for

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart came out on PlayStation 5 in 2021 and as a first-party title it was built around, and to show off, the architecture of the PS5 - especially its fast IO system and hardware decompression support.

Jedi Survivor has been recently released and has suffered from some performance problems.

Ever since Batman: Arkham Knight hit PC and its performance profile has been quite something - despite running well on consoles, it launched in an abysmal state best covered in this TotalBiscuit YouTube video and I found it legitimately fascinating to find

Microsoft recently announced DirectStorage’s PC availability in a blog post, and I was immediately excited to try it out.

[UPDATE: This is actually a Microsoft bug in Windows.

A little while after I wrote the titlebar fix for THPS 2 described in Tony Hawk’s Pro Cleanup I got annoyed by how every time I launch the game I have to sit through a display mode switch, since even with community mods and patches there’s no way to get t…

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was one of the first games I played as a kid, and while visting family my sister mentioned how she misses that game which I so happened to have installed on my laptop — so naturally, we decided to hook that up to the TV and replay…

“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it…

This post is a work-in-progress follow-up to Arkham Quixote - while this disclaimer is up expect it to be frequently updated.

“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it…

In The Atomic Application I mentioned that “With only about a day’s work you can turn your app into a standalone file” - and after talking the talk I decided to put my effort where my mouth is and walk the walk.

I was writing some game networking code when all of a sudden Visual Studio was becoming increasingly non-responsive as more networking events occured.

In a 1987 email, Leslie Lamport described a distributed system as “one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”.

Most people would interpret saying “I would like to leave now” as a sign that the person uttering that sentence expressing a desire to leave now.

The C10k Problem is about handling ten thousand connections at the same time.

Let’s continue what we started in Part I.

Programmers coming from a procedural background and trying to approach functional languages for the first time are usually told to forget everything they’ve learned and approach functional programming from a tabula rasa state of mind.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.

Sherief Farouk: Software, systems, and game development.