Showing results for August 2006 - The Old New Thing

(In the continuing sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh grade students.) My friend the seventh grade teacher once had to deal with a class that had gotten out of hand by assigning the students a short essay in which they had to address three questions: One of the more disruptive students answered the questions thus:

An anonymous commenter wanted to know how to create a dialog box with . The window class for dialog boxes is . I'm not quite sure why anybody would want to create a dialog box this way, but there you have it.

Steve Makofsky wondered, "How do you throw out a garbage can?". Along similar lines, I always wondered how you washed soap.

My posting a while back on solving one problem by creating a bigger problem was written from the standpoint of an IT department doing something like tweaking a logon script. I even mentioned that context partway through but clearly didn't highlight it clearly enough. So say you're an IT department and somebody says, "Oh, just install this other p...

I remember reading a news report on a court case wherein the defendant claimed protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. An interesting angle, especially since the case was being tried in Germany under German law. I may be wrong, but it is my impression that Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution. There...

Add this to your trivia pile. Keith Combs links to a pair of articles that that go into the history behind how Start Me Up become the theme for the Windows 95 launch. Part 1, Part 2.

Generally speaking, I believe that you should try to avoid giving functions a boolean parameter (, , etc.) unless the meaning of that boolean parameter is blatantly obvious. Examples of obvious meaning would be the second parameter to the function ( obviously means the window is being enabled and means that it's being disabled) and the final para...

I remember a question from somebody who asked, paraphrasing: We're writing a secure screen saver that the user can interact with. We're going to present the user with various types of information, and if they click on a hot link, we want to launch a web page on their desktop once the user unlocks the workstation. We know it's insecure, but we want...

Inherited permissions are established at creation.

In celebration of their tenth birthday, the Paramount Comedy Channel in the UK commissioned a study on how regional accents affect perceived funniness, and the conclusion was that people from Birmingham have the funniest accents. The Received Pronunciation, which is the only British accent most people in the United States are familiar with, came...