April 2006 | The Old New Thing

Grace period for Swedish currency conversion extended to the end of the year

Raymond ChenApril 28, 2006Apr 28, 200604/28/06

Like the United States, Sweden is in the process of upgrading their paper currency to incorporate new security measures. Unlike the United States, Sweden is declaring the old bills no longer valid. The original plan was that the old 20-kronor, 100-kronor and 500-kronor notes would expire today, but due to the enormous number of outstanding old...

What does CS_SAVEBITS do?

Raymond ChenApril 28, 2006Apr 28, 200604/28/06

If you specify the CS_SAVEBITS class style, then the window manager will try to save the bits covered by the window. But the real question is why, because that is your guide to using this power only for good, not for evil. When a window whose class specifies the CS_SAVEBITS class style is displayed, the window manager takes a snapshot of the ...

A new scripting language doesn't solve everything

Raymond ChenApril 27, 2006Apr 27, 200604/27/06

Yes, there are plenty of scripting languages that are much better than boring old batch. Batch files were definitely a huge improvement over SUBMIT back in 1981, but they've been showing their age for quite some time. The advanced age of boring old batch, on the other hand, means that you have millions of batch files out there that you had ...

No good deed goes unpunished: Bug assignment

Raymond ChenApril 26, 2006Apr 26, 200604/26/06

Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which ...

Correctly spell xerophthalmia and the crowd goes wild

Raymond ChenApril 25, 2006Apr 25, 200604/25/06

One of the things I did in San Francisco was attend a performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I went into the show with some trepidation, fearing that it would recall painful memories from my own career on the spelling bee circuit as a middle-schooler. Fortunately, my experience as a spelling bee participant only served to...

No, really, you need to pass all unhandled messages to DefWindowProc

Raymond ChenApril 25, 2006Apr 25, 200604/25/06

Earlier I had discussed that you have to return the special value BROADCAST_QUERY_DENY if you want to deny a device removal query because too many programs thought that they had covered "all" the Windows messages and just returned zero for the others. Since then, there have been lots of other window messages added to the system, many of which...

Ich habe meinen Computer zu Deutsch gewechselt

Raymond ChenApril 24, 2006Apr 24, 200604/24/06

This weekend, I changed my computer's user interface language from Swedish (where it had been since November 2003) to German. Germany is the country I'm most likely to vacation to next, and I figured I should start pseudo-immersing myself. Of course, all it really means is that I'm going to be learning a lot of computer-related German words ...

Troubleshooting tips are not formal product documentation

Raymond ChenApril 24, 2006Apr 24, 200604/24/06

The Microsoft Knowledge Base is filled with product support tips, but be careful to understand the scope of those tips. Generally speaking, information provided in the Knowledge Base exists for troubleshooting purposes, not for program design. That's why each article lists specifically which operating system it applies to: There is no ...

Then again, it might not be overclocking after all

Raymond ChenApril 21, 2006Apr 21, 200604/21/06

While it's true that there's an awful lot of overclocking out there, it's also true that not everything that looks like overclocking actually is. Last Thanksgiving, I helped one of my relatives upgrade their computer by scavenging parts from another unused computer (installing more memory and replacing a broken CD drive). When I took the ...

More about the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus

Raymond ChenApril 20, 2006Apr 20, 200604/20/06

After I mentioned that house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus, I received an e-mail message from Mike Daly which corrects some of my mistakes and provides additional details: Actually, there were two houses in the strip in front of RedWest. The one you show has not been moved. The other ended up on blocks and parked opposite the ...

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