October 31, 2003Oct 31, 200310/31/03Often people will say, “Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color.”
This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective.
Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted.
October 30, 2003Oct 30, 200310/30/03I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn’t analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock.
October 29, 2003Oct 29, 200310/29/03“Why would somebody ever want to do that?” you might ask. Well, this is a common appearance
for floating toolbars. (But aside from that case, I can’t think of any other valid
reason to draw a window as active even though it isn’t.)
Fortunately this is easy to do.
October 28, 2003Oct 28, 200310/28/03During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their company name in our INF files in a manner that made their company name similar to an insulting word.
October 27, 2003Oct 27, 200310/27/03Explorer does it. Now you can too.
It’s a simple matter of detecting a context menu on the caption icon and displaying
a custom context menu. Here are the simple changes to our scratch program to display
a rather pointless one-item menu.
October 26, 2003Oct 26, 200310/26/03For Hallowe’en this year, I’m going to be the Nobel Peace Prize. (I like being things that people would never even think of as a possible Hallowe’en costume. Last year, I was an inter-office envelope. People addressed me from place to place.)
I chose the Nobel Peace Prize in part because I’m studying Swedish so I thought it would be fun to be something Swedish.
October 25, 2003Oct 25, 200310/25/03Laura John entertains her colleagues with Kinder Surprise eggs. I love these things.
I understand that Kinder Surprise eggs are illegal in the US for two reasons.
Small parts. But that can be fixed by labelling the egg as “for ages 3 and up”.
October 24, 2003Oct 24, 200310/24/03Welcome Knowledge Base article 932955 readers! Remember, the information on this Web site is not official Microsoft documentation. Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend in most of North America and Europe, so it seems a good time to discuss the whole problem of Daylight Savings Time and timestamps.
October 23, 2003Oct 23, 200310/23/03When you are writing a sort comparison function (say, to be passed to
ListView_SortItems or *gasp* to be used as
an IComparer), your comparison function needs to follow
these rules:
Reflexivity:
Compare(a, a) = 0.
Anti-Symmetry:
Compare(a, b) has the opposite sign of
Compare(b,
October 22, 2003Oct 22, 200310/22/03Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0.
DOS 1.0 didn’t support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3.
When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation went something like this:
A>asm foo the “.asm”
