The Old New Thing

June 2006 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Pitfalls of transparent rendering of anti-aliased fonts

June 14, 2006 Jun 14, 2006 06/14/06
Raymond Chen
Windows provides a variety of technologies for rendering monochrome text on color displays, taking advantage of display characteristics to provide smoother results. These include grayscale anti-aliasing as well as the more advanced ClearType technique. Both of these methods read from the background pixels to decide what pixels to draw in the...

Lies and statistics: 600,000 Chinese engineers

June 13, 2006 Jun 13, 2006 06/13/06
Raymond Chen
Everybody "knows" that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this "fact" was indeed true. It wasn't. NPR interviewed a Duke professor whose class ...

Fumbling around in the dark and stumbling across the wrong solution

June 13, 2006 Jun 13, 2006 06/13/06
Raymond Chen
I don't mean to pick on this series of entries, but it illustrates an interesting pattern of stumbling across the wrong "solution". The series begins by attempting to trigger the system's monitor blank timeout by posting a message to the desktop window. As we saw earlier, the desktop window is a very special window and as a rule should be...

Remember what happens when you broadcast a message

June 12, 2006 Jun 12, 2006 06/12/06
Raymond Chen
Occasionally I catch people doing things like broadcasting a message to all top-level windows. This is one of those things that is so obviously wrong I don't see how people even thought to try it in the first place. Suppose you broadcast the message What happens? Every top-level window receives the message with the same parameters, ...

The forgotten common controls: The MenuHelp function

June 8, 2006 Jun 8, 2006 06/8/06
Raymond Chen
The function is one of the more confusing ones in the common controls library. Fortunately, you will almost certainly never had need to use it, and once you learn the history of the function, you won't want to use it anyway. Our story begins with 16-bit Windows. The message is sent to notify a window of changes in the selection state of ...

Disaster averted, thanks to undisclosed government action, no really

June 7, 2006 Jun 7, 2006 06/7/06
Raymond Chen
On his web site, http://www.savelivesinmay.com, Eric Julien predicted that (and I hope I got this right) on May 25, 2006, comet fragments generated in 1995 by a hostile extraterrestrial civilization would impact the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores, followed by volcanic eruptions which would create a giant tsunami that would wipe out the ...

Apparently driving is messed up in a lot of countries

June 6, 2006 Jun 6, 2006 06/6/06
Raymond Chen
From the reactions to my entry on driving in Taiwan, it appears that driving is pretty messed up all over Asia. Here's a video of driving in India that was popular a while back. This comment comparing Taiwan driving to the Philippines reminded me of a conversation I had with some Filipino tourists when I was in Taiwan. We were on a bus as ...