Showing archive results for 2005

When I saw Tim Sneath's description of the root cause for all the Windows Vista product key problems, I was amazed that the reason was something my readers tend to go completely ballistic over: Long file names. It so happens that one of the ISO mounting tools that people were using for installing Windows Vista doesn't support long file names! (A...

Some time ago, I discussed several timestamp formats you might run into. Today we'll take a logical step from that information and develop a list of special values you might encounter. Note that if you apply time zone adjustments, the actual timestamp may shift by up to a day. All of these special values have one thing in common: If you see them...

Lesson 3: Schomething schtranger (mp3) is part three of a series of four (so far) horrifically bad Swedish lessons. (Warning: Off-color content and copious swearing, but nevertheless very funny.) Boz has been living in Sweden since June, and two of his so-called friends have been putting together Swedish language tapes for him. Listen along as he...

More laziness.

PC Magazine interviewed "the team behind Windows" in commemoration of Windows' twentieth birthday. The article's author talked with Bill Gates, Charles Simonyi, Jeff Raikes, Ray Ozzie (huh? He didn't even work at Microsoft until April 2005! How could he have been part of "the team behind Windows"?), Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, David Cole, Yusuf...

An example, all too frequent, of ways programs assume that the user interface will never change is reaching into system binaries and sucking out undocumented resources. In the shell, we have fallen into the reluctant position of carrying "dead" icons around for the benefit of programs that assumed that they would always be available. However, we of...

Michael Swanson announced last night that the arduous process of assembling the PDC 2005 DVD content is now complete and the results are now online. For free. For six months. You can choose a session and watch it via streaming video, or you can download the video itself for offline enjoyment (!). Michael also has links to the order form if...

A regular restaurant promotion in the Seattle area is called Twenty-Five for $25 (The "$" is silent). Other cities have their own versions of this. New York's is called Restaurant Week, for example, and Toronto's is called (I am not making this up) Winterlicious. The common theme is that participating restaurants offer a prix fixe menu for a r...

When I discussed the behavior of Windows XP SP2's autoplay dialog, one person suggested making the CD autoplay configuration dialog more discoverable to solve the problem of people not knowing how to get back to the dialog to change the settings later. But what is the boundary between discoverability and annoying behavior? Windows&n...

The National Trust of Scotland has two houses to let on the island of Fair Isle, population: 65. The two properties are available at a very reasonable rate of only £300. Per year. Although the National Trust does not promise a job, it points out that there are skill shortages in construction and knitting. The knitting cooperative apparentl...