The Old New Thing

December 2005 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Whimsical embarrassment as a gentle form of reprimand

December 7, 2005 Dec 7, 2005 12/7/05
Raymond Chen
A few months ago, I messed up a cross-component check-in and broke the build. I'm not proud of it. (In my excitement over finally having passed a few weeks' worth of testing requirements, I absently submitted only one of the components for check-in! My change was 99% within one component, and I forgot about the other 1%.) My submission cleared...

Humanity’s greatest invention, according to seventh grade students

December 6, 2005 Dec 6, 2005 12/6/05
Raymond Chen
When I read that Ecologist Magazine is co-sponsoring an essay contest on the topic What is Humanity's worst Invention?, it reminded me of a related essay exercise assigned to seventh-graders by a friend of mine. The students (typically thirteen years of age) were given the topic What is humanity's greatest invention or discovery? Here are ...

When a token changes its meaning mid-stream

December 6, 2005 Dec 6, 2005 12/6/05
Raymond Chen
The project leader for the initial version of Internet Explorer was well-known for wearing Hawaiian shirts. I'm told that the team managers decided to take one of those shirts and use it as an award to the team member who fixed the most bugs or some similar thing. What the team managers failed to take into account that nobody actually liked ...

It’s always a good idea to check your sources

December 5, 2005 Dec 5, 2005 12/5/05
Raymond Chen
For a while, our cafeteria was trying to sell three-packs of bottled water. A sign proudly announced: Drink more water: What you should know about H2O Drink plenty of water throughout the day. Make it easy. Carry a bottle of water when you commute to work or run errands. This is what I should know about H2O? "Drink more water": ...

Using floppy disks as semaphore tokens

December 5, 2005 Dec 5, 2005 12/5/05
Raymond Chen
In the very early days of Windows 95, the distribution servers were not particularly powerful. The load of having the entire team installing the most recent build when it came out put undue strain on the server. The solution (until better hardware could be obtained) was to have a stack of floppy disks in the office of the "build shepherd...

Derren Brown’s tips on being a psychic

December 2, 2005 Dec 2, 2005 12/2/05
Raymond Chen
Magician and mentalist Derren Brown teaches us how we can all exercise our psychic powers, or at least use psychology to make people think we're psychic. The Video Clips page collects all the examples into one place for your viewing pleasure...

Psychic debugging: Why your CPU usage is hovering at 50%

December 2, 2005 Dec 2, 2005 12/2/05
Raymond Chen
Sometimes psychic debugging consists merely of seeing the bigger picture. On one of our internal bug-reporting mailing lists, someone asked, "How come when I do XYZ, my CPU usage goes to 50%?" My psychic answer: "Because you have two processors." The response was genuine surprise and amazement. How did I know they had two processors? ...

What one Windows XP feature am I most proud of?

December 1, 2005 Dec 1, 2005 12/1/05
Raymond Chen
Of all the things I did for Windows XP, if I had to choose the one feature that I'm most proud of, it's fixing Pinball so it doesn't consume 100% CPU. The program was originally written for Windows 95 and had a render loop that simply painted frames as fast as possible. In the checked build, you could tell the program to display ...