Showing archive results for 2003

Oct 1, 2003
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Jag taler lita svenska.

Raymond Chen

Attended my first formal Swedish lesson last night. It's great to recapture the simultaneous thrill and frustration of trying to have a conversation in a language you don't really know. It's a small class - Swedish isn't exactly one of the "big-name" languages out there. I always feel sorry f...

Non-Computer
Oct 1, 2003
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Why do I get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages?

Raymond Chen

In order to understand this properly, it helps to know where messages come from. When the hardware mouse reports an interrupt, indicating that the physical mouse has moved, Windows determines which thread should receive the mouse move message and sets a flag on that thread's input queue that...

Code
Sep 29, 2003
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In case people got the wrong impression

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." Though ...

Non-Computer
Sep 29, 2003
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Why you can’t rotate text

Raymond Chen

Answering a comment from an earlier entry.

History
Sep 29, 2003
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Back from Europe

Raymond Chen

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

Non-Computer
Sep 20, 2003
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When I dock my taskbar vertically, why does the word "Start" disappear?

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 partia...

History
Sep 19, 2003
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Pre-travel insomnia

Raymond Chen

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

Non-Computer
Sep 19, 2003
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How much is that gigabyte in the window?

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 as to...

Other
Sep 18, 2003
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Improving the world one bad analogy at a time

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 develo...

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