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

Comparing the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish languages.

Raymond ChenApril 9, 2004Apr 9, 200404/9/04

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 ...

A story about USB floppy drives

Raymond ChenApril 9, 2004Apr 9, 200404/9/04

A friend of mine used to work on the development of the USB specification and subsequent implementation. One of the things that happens at these meetings is that hardware companies would show off the great USB hardware they were working on. It also gave them a chance to try out their hardware with various USB host manufacturers and ...

Where does the taskbar get grouped button titles from?

Raymond ChenApril 8, 2004Apr 8, 200404/8/04

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

Raymond ChenApril 7, 2004Apr 7, 200404/7/04

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.

Raymond ChenApril 6, 2004Apr 6, 200404/6/04

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?

Raymond ChenApril 5, 2004Apr 5, 200404/5/04

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

Raymond ChenApril 2, 2004Apr 2, 200404/2/04

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

Raymond ChenApril 1, 2004Apr 1, 200404/1/04

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 - ...

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