The Old New Thing

Char.IsDigit() matches more than just "0" through "9"

Warning: .NET content ahead! Yesterday, Brad Abrams noted that Char.IsLetter() matches more than just "A" through "Z". What people might not realize is that Char.IsDigit() matches more than just "0" through "9". Valid digits are members of the following category in UnicodeCategory: DecimalDigitNumber. But what exactly is a ...

Can you pass "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball"?

From ESPN: If you were enrolled in Jim Harrick Jr.'s Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball course at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2001, you were drilled on such subjects as basketball, basketball and even basketball. How many points for a field goal? What league does Georgia compete in? What color are ...

Defrauding the WHQL driver certification process

In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of ...

Where do those customized web site icons come from?

In a comment to yesterday's entry, someone asked about the customized icon that appears in the address bar... sometimes. There's actually method to the madness. I was going to write about it later, but the comment (and misinformed answers) prompted me to move it up the schedule a bit. (The originally-scheduled topic for today - the ...

Sorry, my kitchen is on fire

The other night my phone rang just as I discovered that I overheated my pan and the oil was starting to burn. I rushed to the phone, thinking it's the people I had invited to dinner, but no, it was some telemarketer. "Hello, is this Mr. Chen?" "Sorry, can't talk now, my kitchen is on fire." "Oh my God, sorry!" <click> I'll ...

Blow the dust out of the connector

Okay, I'm about to reveal one of the tricks of Product Support. Sometimes you're on the phone with somebody and you suspect that the problem is something as simple as forgetting to plug it in, or that the cable was plugged into the wrong port. This is easy to do with those PS/2 connectors that fit both a keyboard and a mouse plug, or ...

Calling the irony patrol

I don't speak Dutch, so I went of course to a Dutch search engine, www.vinden.nl. And upon my arrival I was greeted with a pop-up ad offering me a pop-up blocker. There's something wrong about that...