The Old New Thing

May 2004 - Page 5 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Broadcasting user-defined messages

May 5, 2004 May 5, 2004 05/5/04
Raymond Chen
When you broadcast a message (via HWND_BROADCAST) remember that the message you broadcast must have global meaning. I discussed earlier what the various message ranges mean. Notice that only the system-defined range (0..WM_USER-1) and the registered message range (MAXINTATOM .. MAXWORD) have global meaning. The other two ranges have ...

Dead man running

May 5, 2004 May 5, 2004 05/5/04
Raymond Chen
The plight of the legally dead (but physically alive) in India has been taken up by - of course - a legally dead man. And now he's running for public office. Though apparently this isn't the first time. (People are usually declared dead by conniving relatives who want to claim their inheritance prematurely.) I wish him luck. If...

Is open source the new monoculture?

May 4, 2004 May 4, 2004 05/4/04
Raymond Chen
Okay I know I'm going to get into a lot of trouble for even bringing up this topic... This past weekend, Ulf Harnhammar discovered two buffer overflow and two directory traversal vulnerabilities in LHA, a library of data compression functions. Since the code for this is public, it has been copied all over the place. At least one ...

Truckers block highway to protest high gas prices

May 4, 2004 May 4, 2004 05/4/04
Raymond Chen
To protest rising gasoline prices, a group of truckers abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the highway. It struck me as odd that a country that brims with anti-French rhetoric would adopt one of their protest techniques. Presumably they don't want French gasoline prices either...

Why does my hard drive light flash every few second?

May 3, 2004 May 3, 2004 05/3/04
Raymond Chen
Back in Windows 95, people would notice that their hard drive light would blink every few seconds. What's that all about? Actually, it wasn't the hard drive light after all. Windows 95 was polling your CD-ROM drive to see whether you had inserted a new CD. Some computers wired up the "hard drive light" not to the hard drive ...

Today is Swedish tax day

May 3, 2004 May 3, 2004 05/3/04
Raymond Chen
Of course, in Sweden, every day is tax day. By now, it's too late to fill out your tax form, which the Swedish tax agency permits you to file on paper, via Internet, over the phone, or even via SMS. They even have what I wish the US tax agency had: An online tax form calculator...

You wanted Extreme Crochet?

May 1, 2004 May 1, 2004 05/1/04
Raymond Chen
Keith Moore thought I was writing about Extreme Crochet in my previous post about Extreme Croquet. No, Keith, if I had wanted to write about Extreme Crochet, I would have used this link...