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The Old New Thing
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    The Old New Thing

    September 2003 | The Old New Thing

    Why is the readonly property for folders so strange?
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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,

    In case people got the wrong impression
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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”,

    Why you can’t rotate text
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenSeptember 29, 2003Sep 29, 200309/29/03

    Answering a comment from an earlier entry.

    Back from Europe
    Raymond ChenRaymond ChenSeptember 29, 2003Sep 29, 200309/29/03

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

    If you are an airplane pilot, you should avoid communicating on the emergency frequency unless you have an actual emergency.
    In Sweden, marmalade comes in a flexible tube that looks like a really fat sausage.

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

    Pre-travel insomnia
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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 ChenRaymond 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.

    Improving the world one bad analogy at a time
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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,

    Emergency vacation
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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 –

    The end of the scrollbar series
    Raymond ChenRaymond 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.

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