January 2004 | Page 2 of 5 | The Old New Thing

David Hasselhoff's daughters normal in every way

Raymond Chen January 26, 2004 Jan 26, 2004 01/26/04

(Forwarded to me my a friend who is apparently fascinated with David Hasselhoff.) David Hasselhoff says his daughters hate his music and change the channel whenever Knight Rider comes on the TV. Okay, I defended the Germans last week, but this one baffles even me. Do the Germans not realize that David Hasselhoff is a joke? Er war ein ...

The hollow brush

Raymond Chen January 26, 2004 Jan 26, 2004 01/26/04

What is the hollow brush for? The hollow brush is a brush that doesn't do anything. You can use it when you're forced to use a brush but you don't want to. As one example, you can use it as your class brush. Then when your program stops responding and Windows decide to do the "white flash" (see yesterday's entry), it grabs the hollow brush ...

German as RPN

Raymond Chen January 25, 2004 Jan 25, 2004 01/25/04

It should be noted that "Reverse Polish Notation" is named in honor of the Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz, who developed prefix notation, wherein the operator comes before the operands. Postfix notation proved more useful for stack-based arithmetic computations, and so the opposite of prefix notation came to be known as "Reverse Polish ...

In defense of the German language

Raymond Chen January 24, 2004 Jan 24, 2004 01/24/04

What we lose in inflectional complexity we gain in word order uniformity.

German, the language of love?

Raymond Chen January 23, 2004 Jan 23, 2004 01/23/04

Love lures French kids to German: Come and learn German - a language of love! Hundreds of advertisements in France this week will promote the unusual message to try to woo teenagers to a language they often consider difficult and ugly. "Language is the key to understand a partner, his culture, working manners and lifestyle," [...

The white flash

Raymond Chen January 23, 2004 Jan 23, 2004 01/23/04

If you had a program that didn't process messages for a while, but it needed to be painted for whatever reason (say, somebody uncovered it), Windows would eventually lose patience with you and paint your window white. Or at least, that's what people would claim. Actually, Windows is painting your window with your class background brush. Since...

Cell phones: Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, but maybe can ban 'em

Raymond Chen January 22, 2004 Jan 22, 2004 01/22/04

Cell phones top the latest Lemelson-MIT Invention Index survey, asking people to name the invention that you hate the most yet cannot live without. [Link fixed 8:22am...

What happened to DirectX 4?

Raymond Chen January 22, 2004 Jan 22, 2004 01/22/04

Disappeared into the cracks.

What tools should I assume everybody has?

Raymond Chen January 21, 2004 Jan 21, 2004 01/21/04

My code samples assume you are using the latest header files from the Platform SDK (free download), the one that includes support for Win64. If you have an older SDK then you won't have various new data types like UINT_PTR and INT_PTR and should just use UINT and INT. I write code that is Win64-compliant as a matter of course since all code ...

Fixing security holes in other programs