The Old New Thing

January 2005 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Why doesn't \ autocomplete to all the computers on the network?

January 11, 2005 Jan 11, 2005 01/11/05
Raymond Chen
Wes Haggard wishes that \ would autocomplete to all the computers on the network. [Link fixed 10am.] An early beta of Windows 95 actually did something similar to this, showing all the computers on the network when you opened the Network Neighborhood folder. And the feature was quickly killed. Why? Corporations with large ...

Seattle Snowstorm 2005 (insert swooshy sound effect)

January 10, 2005 Jan 10, 2005 01/10/05
Raymond Chen
As others have reported, it snowed here in the Seattle area yesterday. One whopping inch. You'd think that Seattle, which gets snow a few times a year, wouldn't go completely apoplectic the moment the flakes starts falling from the sky. Especially since it all melts away in a few hours anyway. I didn't watch the local news last night, but ...

A rant against flow control macros

January 6, 2005 Jan 6, 2005 01/6/05
Raymond Chen
I try not to rant, but it happens sometimes. This time, I'm ranting on purpose: to complain about macro-izing flow control. No two people use the same macros, and when you see code that uses them you have to go dig through header files to figure out what they do. This is particularly gruesome when you're trying to debug a problem with ...

You don’t need to run away from home to join the circus

January 5, 2005 Jan 5, 2005 01/5/05
Raymond Chen
Last week, I saw a performance of Circus Contraption at The Seattle Center with some friends. We were all left agape by the aerialists as they climbed ropes, hoisted, hung, and balanced themselves high above the ground. I thought back to seeing acrobats as a child at the circus and realized how much more impressive they are as you get older...

PulseEvent is fundamentally flawed

January 5, 2005 Jan 5, 2005 01/5/05
Raymond Chen
The function releases one thread (or all threads, if manual-reset) which is/are waiting for the pulsed event, then returns the event to the unset state. If no threads happen to be waiting, then the event goes to the unset state without anything happening. And there's the flaw. How do you know whether the thread that you think is waiting...

You don't need to run away from home to join the circus

January 5, 2005 Jan 5, 2005 01/5/05
Raymond Chen
Last week, I saw a performance of Circus Contraption at The Seattle Center with some friends. We were all left agape by the aerialists as they climbed ropes, hoisted, hung, and balanced themselves high above the ground. I thought back to seeing acrobats as a child at the circus and realized how much more impressive they are as you get older...

Using fibers to simplify enumerators, part 5: Composition

January 4, 2005 Jan 4, 2005 01/4/05
Raymond Chen
Another type of higher-order enumeration is composition, where one enumerator actually combines the results of multiple enumerators. (Everybody knows about derivation, but composition is another powerful concept in object-oriented programming. We've seen it before when building context menus.) In a producer-driven enumerator, you would ...