Showing results for September 2005 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Sep 16, 2005
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Fiddling with the fonts, part 2: Keeping the English font small

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

We concluded last time that we wanted the custom large font to apply only to the columns containing Chinese characters and leave the original font in place for the English columns. We do this by carrying two fonts around, choosing the appropriate one for each column. class RootWindow : public Window { ... private: HWND m_hwndLV; HWND m_hwndEd...

Code
Sep 15, 2005
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Fiddling with the fonts, part 1: Making the Chinese characters larger

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Let's pay a quick visit to our continuing dictionary project. One of the things you may have noticed is that the Chinese characters are unreadably small. Let's fix that by making them larger. class RootWindow : public Window { public: virtual LPCTSTR ClassName() { return TEXT("Scratch"); } static RootWindow *Create(); RootWindow(); ~RootWind...

Code
Sep 14, 2005
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Typo patrol at the PDC

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

You can find the following typographical errors in the Big Room at the PDC: If you can locate all three of them and catch me at the PDC (say at the Fundamentals Lounge or at the Ask the Experts table), I'll award you a prize of um (rummaging through my bag) how about a retractable network cable? (Or an autographed business card? But then again, ...

Other
Sep 14, 2005
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Like an invention out of Harry Potter, except that Harry’s would use a quill

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When I heard this story from Swedish Radio, it struck me as the sort of object that would exist in the imaginary world of Harry Potter. Raymond's bad translation follows: Pen can help dyslexics With today's cheaper and cheaper microelectronics, it becomes possible for young inventors to produce new products without a lot of resources. A new i...

Non-Computer
Sep 14, 2005
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The double-Ctrl+Alt+Del feature is really a kludge

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Most people who care about such things know that you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice from the Welcome screen and sometimes you will get a classic logon dialog. (Note: "Sometimes". It works only if the last operation was a restart or log-off, for complicated reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion.) The ability to do the double-Ctrl+Alt+Del wa...

Other
Sep 13, 2005
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Sorry I missed you all this morning

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sorry to all you PDCers who stopped by the Fundamentals Lounge to see me. The scheduling software that the PDC organizers cooked up is, um, "suboptimal" and listed me for Tuesday 11.30a–2.30p instead of 2.30p–5.30p. During the early afternoon shift, I was actually in the Hands-On Lab. But I'll be in the Lounge on Thursday after my talk ...

Other
Sep 13, 2005
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Why is there no all-encompassing superset version of Windows?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sometimes, I am asked why there is no single version of Windows that contains everything. Instead, as you move up the ladder, say, from Windows XP Professional to Windows Server 2003, you gain server features and lose workstation features. Why lose features when you add others? Because it turns out no actual customer wants to keep the w...

Other
Sep 13, 2005
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Annoying renditions of the songs of Elvis

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Jim Nayder of The Annoying Music Show pops by NPR studios every so often—hey, guys, if you changed the locks, this might stop him—whereupon he tortures the general public with musical offenses that should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Most recently, he offered a series of reinterpretations of the works of Elvis Presley. What'...

Non-Computer
Sep 12, 2005
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Richard E. Grant as Dr. Who

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

While waiting for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors to reach the States, I was tipped off to some animated Dr. Who episodes on the BBC web site. These are really well done and managed to slake my Doctor cravings for a little while longer. In particular, Richard E. Grant's second turn as the somewhat Earth-obsessed Time Lord in Scream of t...

Non-Computer
Sep 12, 2005
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Understanding the consequences of WAIT_ABANDONED

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of the important distinctions between mutexes and the other synchronization objects is that mutexes have owners. If the thread that owns a mutex exits without releasing the mutex, the mutex is automatically released on the thread's behalf. But if this happens, you're in big trouble. One thing many people gloss over is the WAIT_ABANDONED re...

Code