The Old New Thing

April 2004 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Comparing the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish languages.

April 9, 2004 Apr 9, 2004 04/9/04
Raymond Chen
As I got onto the plane for my outbound flight, I grabbed a Norwegian newspaper, having mistaken it for a Swedish paper. Fortunately, the two languages are so similar I was able to fake my way through it without too much difficulty. (And it's definitely an odd sensation reading U.S. cartoons translated into Norwegian...) The on-board ...

Where does the taskbar get grouped button titles from?

April 8, 2004 Apr 8, 2004 04/8/04
Raymond Chen
If the "Group similar taskbar buttons" box is checked (default) and space starts to get tight on the taskbar, then then the taskbar will group together buttons represending windows from the same program and give them a common name. Where does this common name come from? The name for grouped taskbar buttons comes from the version resource...

A very brief anecdote about Windows 3.0

April 7, 2004 Apr 7, 2004 04/7/04
Raymond Chen
In an earlier comment, Larry Osterman described why Windows 3.0 was such a runaway success. He got a little of the timeline wrong, so I'll correct it here. Windows 2.0 did support protected mode. And it was Windows/386, which came out before Windows 3.0, which first used the new virtual-x86 mode of the 80386 processor to support pre-...

Reference counting is hard.

April 6, 2004 Apr 6, 2004 04/6/04
Raymond Chen
One of the big advantages of managed code is that you don't have to worry about managing object lifetimes. Here's an example of some unmanaged code that tries to manage reference counts and doesn't quite get it right. Even a seemingly-simple function has a reference-counting bug. The point of this function is to take a (pointer to) a ...

How can I format my USB drive as NTFS?

April 5, 2004 Apr 5, 2004 04/5/04
Raymond Chen
You have to promise to play friendly. Go to Device Manager and set the policy of the USB Stick device to "Optimize for Performance". The default is to optimize for Quick Removal, which restricts you to the FAT filesystem. If you do this, then you absolutely must go through the the annoying removal dialog to unmount the filesystem ...

Why a really large dictionary is not a good thing

April 2, 2004 Apr 2, 2004 04/2/04
Raymond Chen
Sometimes you'll see somebody brag about how many words are in their spell-checking dictionary. It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker's dictionary is worse than having too few. Suppose you had a spell checker whose dictionary contained every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then you hand it this sentence: ...

The martial arts logon picture

April 1, 2004 Apr 1, 2004 04/1/04
Raymond Chen
Along the lines of Windows as Rorschach test, here's an example of someone attributing malicious behavior to randomness. Among the logon pictures that come with Windows XP is a martial arts kick. I remember one bug we got that went something like this: "Windows XP is racist. It put a picture of a kung fu fighter next to my name - ...