September 2003 | The Old New Thing

Why is the readonly property for folders so strange?

Raymond ChenSeptember 30, 2003Sep 30, 200309/30/03

It's actually a signal to Explorer to look harder. It doesn't mean that the directory is read-only. If a folder has the Readonly or System flag set, then Explorer will look for a desktop.ini file which describes the folder customizations. For performance reasons, Explorer does this only if the d

In case people got the wrong impression

Raymond ChenSeptember 29, 2003Sep 29, 200309/29/03

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." Th

Why you can’t rotate text

Raymond ChenSeptember 29, 2003Sep 29, 200309/29/03

In a previous entry, I said that the word "Start" disappears because the alternative is worse. Somebody in a comment asked, "Why not draw the text vertically?" Ah, now you get to learn about the exciting world of vertical text. We originally intended to run text vertically in the new XP Start menu. In original designs for the menu, your nam

Back from Europe

Raymond ChenSeptember 29, 2003Sep 29, 200309/29/03

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

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

Raymond ChenSeptember 20, 2003Sep 20, 200309/20/03

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 p

Pre-travel insomnia

Raymond ChenSeptember 19, 2003Sep 19, 200309/19/03

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?

Raymond ChenSeptember 19, 2003Sep 19, 200309/19/03

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

Raymond ChenSeptember 18, 2003Sep 18, 200309/18/03

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 d

Emergency vacation

Raymond ChenSeptember 18, 2003Sep 18, 200309/18/03

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 vac

The end of the scrollbar series

Raymond ChenSeptember 17, 2003Sep 17, 200309/17/03

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 li

The Old New Thing

September 2003 | The Old New Thing

Why is the readonly property for folders so strange?

In case people got the wrong impression

Why you can’t rotate text

Back from Europe

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

Pre-travel insomnia

How much is that gigabyte in the window?

Improving the world one bad analogy at a time

Emergency vacation

The end of the scrollbar series

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