For 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 ...
Laura 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. Whenever I go to Germany I smuggle some Kinder Überraschungen into the States. (Yes, t...
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.
When you are writing a sort comparison function (say, to be passed to or *gasp* to be used as an ), your comparison function needs to follow these rules: Reflexivity: . Anti-Symmetry: has the opposite sign of , where 0 is considered to be its own opposite. Transitivity: If and , then . Here are some logical consequences of these rules (all ...
Set 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: the ".asm" extension on "foo" is...
The IsDialogMessage function works even if you aren't a dialog. As long as your child windows have the WS_TABSTOP and/or WS_GROUP styles, they can be navigated as if they were part of a dialog box. One caveat is that IsDialogMessage will send DM_GETDEFID and DM_SETDEFID messages to your window, which are messag...
What determines the order in which icons appear in the Alt+Tab list? The icons appear in the same order as the window Z-order. When you switch to a window, then it comes to the top of the Z-order. If you minimize a window, it goes to the bottom of the Z-order. The Alt+Esc hotkey (gosh, does anybody s...
It must be really boring in Sweden in the winter. Things to do: Military service in Sweden is compulsory for all males. When your country has not participated in any wars for two hundred years, you have to pass the time somehow. Apparently one of the exercises is ...
The Granite Curling Club is having their annual open house today, October 18th 2003, from 2pm to 8pm. The Seattle facility is the only dedicated curling facility in the United States west of the Rockies. Bring sweatpants, flat-soled shoes, and $5. They'll provide the brooms and duct tape. I became fascinated with curling many years a...
It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard template...
