The Old New Thing

June 2004 - Page 3 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Tweaked comment policy

June 18, 2004 Jun 18, 2004 06/18/04
Raymond Chen
Along the navband on the left hand side is a link to the comment policy. The most significant change since its first release is that I introduced the two-week rule. As a general rule, comments posted more than two weeks after the article publication are eligible for summary deletion. It's great that you're all interested n stuff, but...

The evolution of dialog templates – Introduction

June 17, 2004 Jun 17, 2004 06/17/04
Raymond Chen
In the history of Windows, there have been four versions of dialog templates. And despite the changes, you'll see that they're basically all the same. My secret goal in this six-part series is to address questions people have had along the lines of "I'm trying to generate a dialog template in code, and it's not working. What am I ...

Exploding frying pans

June 17, 2004 Jun 17, 2004 06/17/04
Raymond Chen
Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny. "The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement. It explodes when you fry something in it. Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying...

Verifying that your system files are digitally signed

June 16, 2004 Jun 16, 2004 06/16/04
Raymond Chen
If you want to re-check that the files on your system haven't been tampered with, you can run sigverif (by typing its name into the Start.Run dialog) and tell it to start scanning. (UI note: If you go into the Logging page on the Advanced dialog, you can get trapped where it insists on having a valid log file name even if you didn't ...

Anybody remember Blade Squad or MV24?

June 16, 2004 Jun 16, 2004 06/16/04
Raymond Chen
It's often fun to go back and see the kooky ideas for television shows that floated around years ago. Here are some from 1997: Plenty more on the linked web site. What's really scary is that a lot of these kooky ideas turned into actual television programs...

What was the purpose of the hPrevInstance parameter to WinMain?

June 15, 2004 Jun 15, 2004 06/15/04
Raymond Chen
Once your average GUI program picks itself up off the ground, control begins at your WinMain function. The second parameter, hPrevInstance, is always zero in Win32 programs. Certainly it had a meaning at some point? Of course it did. In 16-bit Windows there was a function called GetInstanceData. This function took an HINSTANCE, a ...

Augusto Pinochet's beverage preferences are a matter of national security

June 15, 2004 Jun 15, 2004 06/15/04
Raymond Chen
It appears that Augusto Pinochet's beverage preferences are a matter of national security. The web site offers the original and redacted versions of the same document, so you can see what sorts of information the U.S. government considers to be worthy of redaction. On a related redactorial note, researchers demonstrated last month ...

Norway works to lengthen its lead

June 14, 2004 Jun 14, 2004 06/14/04
Raymond Chen
Norway locks its grip on "Best place to live" status: As I pointed out last month, this then leads to... Shoulda studied Norwegian like I had planned to do originally before I got sidetracked by Swedish...

What is the difference between HINSTANCE and HMODULE?

June 14, 2004 Jun 14, 2004 06/14/04
Raymond Chen
They mean the same thing today, but at one time they were quite different. It all comes from 16-bit Windows. In those days, a "module" represented a file on disk that had been loaded into memory, and the module "handle" was a handle to a data structure that described the parts of the file, where they come from, and where they had been loaded...

Taiwan law requires writing to go left-to-right instead of top-to-bottom

June 11, 2004 Jun 11, 2004 06/11/04
Raymond Chen
The BBC reports that official documents in Taiwan must now be written left-to-right (Western style) instead of the traditional top-to-bottom. I grew up with Chinese-language newspapers that ran their stories vertically and numbered their pages from right to left, in the traditional manner. Books and newspapers which run left-to-...