The Old New Thing

Why is the readonly property for folders so strange?

September 30, 2003 Sep 30, 2003 09/30/03

Raymond Chen

It's actually a signal to Explorer to look harder.

In case people got the wrong impression

September 29, 2003 Sep 29, 2003 09/29/03

Raymond Chen

I really did enjoy my trip. I just like talking about the goofy things. I intend to go back to Sweden in the spring. I'm currently enrolled in Swedish lessons but this trip came far too soon for me to have learned anything useful aside from "tack", "ursäkta" and "Jag taler inte svenska." ...

Why you can’t rotate text

September 29, 2003 Sep 29, 2003 09/29/03

Raymond Chen

Answering a comment from an earlier entry.

Back from Europe

September 29, 2003 Sep 29, 2003 09/29/03

Raymond Chen

Here are some things I learned in Sweden, Germany and Denmark...

When I dock my taskbar vertically, why does the word "Start" disappear?

September 20, 2003 Sep 20, 2003 09/20/03

Raymond Chen

Because the alternative is even worse. If the taskbar is not wide enough to display the entire word "Start", then the word "Start" is hidden. To get it back, resize the taskbar wider until the word "Start" reappears. This behavior is by design. From a design point of view, a ...

Pre-travel insomnia

September 19, 2003 Sep 19, 2003 09/19/03

Raymond Chen

I can't sleep the night before an airplane flight. Certainly I'm not the only person with this problem, right...

How much is that gigabyte in the window?

September 19, 2003 Sep 19, 2003 09/19/03

Raymond Chen

Slashdot is in an uproar over a lawsuit charging computer manufacturers for misleading consumers over hard drive capacity. The manufacturers use the ISO definition, wherein a "gigabyte" is one billion bytes, even though most people consider a gigabyte to be 1024 megabytes. This is a tricky one. The computer industry is itself inconsistent ...

Improving the world one bad analogy at a time

September 18, 2003 Sep 18, 2003 09/18/03

Raymond Chen

One thing I am known for at Microsoft is my frequent use of bad analogies. Everybody else at work has had to suffer; now it's your turn. Why are there so many copies of svchost.exe running? What is svchost.exe anyway? Traditionally, each service runs in its own process. When you are ...

Emergency vacation

September 18, 2003 Sep 18, 2003 09/18/03

Raymond Chen

Hurricane Isabel made a mess of my weekend travel plans, so I decided, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." My outbound flight was cancelled, and even with the best possible substitution - a flight out the very next day - losing a day on a weekend trip pretty much kills it. So I extended it to a weeklong ...

The end of the scrollbar series

September 17, 2003 Sep 17, 2003 09/17/03

Raymond Chen

Okay, that's basically the end of the scrollbar series. Do people actually like the idea of a coding series? It gets very few comments, and it's a lot of work to write, so if nobody actually cares I can just write about quick little things and not try to be coherent from day to day. I guess that's what most blogs are like anyway. If you ...

The Old New Thing

September 2003 - The Old New Thing