Fact-checking? What's fact-checking? I found it on the Internet! Wired News has a story on various people and news agencies being fooled by Onion articles. This used to be news, but now it's so common it may end up relegated to just a counter. "Number of people fooled by Onion articles: n+1".
Microsoft Active Accessibilty is the technology that exposes information about objects on the screen to accessibility aids such as screen readers. But that doesn't mean that only screen readers can use it. Here's a program that illustrates the use of Active Accessibility at the most rudimentary level: Reading text. There's much more to Active ...
Just because you can't see the error path doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Here's a snippet from a book on C# programming, taken from the chapter on how great exceptions are. Notice how much cleaner and more elegant [this] solution is. Cleaner, more elegant, and wrong. Suppose an exception is thrown during CreateIndexes(). The GenerateDatab...
The National (US) Football League adopted a 15-yard penalty for pre-planned celebrations, such as last year's "phone call from the end zone" or 2002's "autographed football". Apparently, the existing monetary fines weren't having much of an effect on players with multi-million-dollar contracts. (Surprised?) So now the league is going t...
This weekend I saw Good-Bye, Lenin!, a German movie about a young man who must pretend that East Germany still exists, for the sake of his mother who was in a coma during the fall of the Berlin Wall and therefore remains unaware of the earth-shattering changes the took place while she was unconscious. There is, of course, the comedy of a yo...
People have discovered that the "natural" C# loop construct is fractionally slower than the corresponding manual loop: The first thing that needs to be said here is that The performance difference is almost certainly insignificant. Don't go running around changing all your foreach loops into corresponding for loops thinking that your progra...
Who knew that Beethoven wrote ambient music? The people at NOTAM took Beethoven's 9th Symphony and slowed it down so that the entire performance takes 24 hours. It's actually quite nice to listen to. (I like 2.1 myself.) [Rats, scooped by MetaFilter. Honest, it was in my queue! Nobody will believe me; they'll think I swiped it from Me...
Windows lets you hibernate the entire machine, but why can't it hibernate just one process? Record the state of the process and then resume it later. Because there is state in the system that is not part of the process. For example, suppose your program has taken a mutex, and then it gets process-hibernated. Oops, now that mutex is abandoned...
"I'll do my field validation when I get a WM_KILLFOCUS message." This is wrong for multiple reasons. First, you may not get your focus loss message until it's too late. Consider a dialog box with an edit control and an OK button. The edit control validates its contents on receipt of the WM_KILLFOCUS message. Suppose the user fills in some ...
The New York Times reported on two enormous construction projects of dubious merit: [The first bridge] would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845] to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span an inl...
