Showing archive results for 2004

Just a little tip: If you're going to be adding a lot of items to a listbox or combobox, there are a few little things you can do to improve the performance significantly. (Note: The improvements work only if you have a lot of items, like hundreds. Of course, the usability of a listbox with a hundred items is questionable, but I'm assuming you h...

A little-known department in the city of Baltimore is the Rumor Control Center, whose purpose is to squash rumors before they get out of hand. Scott Simon talked with supervisor Tom Saunders on cash rewards for blue-eyed cicadas and other rumors he's had to handle in the past.

A simple experiment, and you can eat the results! Via The Annals of Improbable Research.

A reader asked, I was wondering why it's common for some Microsoft products to have a directory called "1033" within it's program directory installation location? What does it mean? This reader was probably from the United States, because 1033 is the locale identifier for "English (United States)", whose hexadecimal value is 0x0409. You...

Kenny Mayne is one of the regular anchors for ESPN SportsCenter and for some reason I find this particular home run call hilarious: I am king of the diamond! Let there be a grand clubhouse feast! [WAV] Bring me the finest meats and cheeses throughout the land! — From The SportsCenter Altar multimedia download center. Here's ...

Everybody who has messed with window messaging knows that GetMessage and PeekMessage retrieve queued messages, which are dispatched to windows via DispatchMessage. Most people also know that GetMessage and PeekMessage will also dispatch nonqueued messages. (All pending nonqueued messages are dispatched, then the first queued message is retur...

What happens when you delete a file while it is open?

Two legs good - four wheels bad. (With apologies to George Orwell.) Researchers link increase car use with obesity. Each hour spent in a car was associated with a 6 percent increase in the likelihood of obesity and each half-mile walked per day reduced those odds by nearly 5 percent, the researchers found. A study last year cam...

During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed. The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run. Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta.

Sometimes you might want to determine whether you can do something without actually doing it. For example, you might want to know whether you have a particular permission in a directory, say permission to delete files from it. One way is to retrieve the ACL and then check whether the current user has the desired permission. The AccessCheck functio...