August 31, 2006Aug 31, 200608/31/06(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:
How am I contributing to class?
August 31, 2006Aug 31, 200608/31/06An anonymous commenter wanted to know how to create a dialog box with CreateWindow. The window class for dialog boxes is WC_DIALOG. I’m not quite sure why anybody would want to create a dialog box this way, but there you have it.
August 30, 2006Aug 30, 200608/30/06Steve Makofsky wondered, “How do you throw out a garbage can?”. Along similar lines, I always wondered how you washed soap.
August 30, 2006Aug 30, 200608/30/06My 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.
August 29, 2006Aug 29, 200608/29/06I 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,
August 28, 2006Aug 28, 200608/28/06Add 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.
August 28, 2006Aug 28, 200608/28/06Generally speaking, I believe that you should try to avoid giving functions a boolean parameter (BOOL, bool, etc.) unless the meaning of that boolean parameter is blatantly obvious. Examples of obvious meaning would be the second parameter to the EnableWindow function (TRUE obviously means the window is being enabled and FALSE means that it’s being disabled) and the final parameter to ShowScrollBar (TRUE obviously means the scroll bar is being shown and FALSE means that it’s being hidden).
August 25, 2006Aug 25, 200608/25/06I 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.
August 24, 2006Aug 24, 200608/24/06Inherited permissions on an object are established when it is created. Once the object has been created, you can change the permissions of the parent and it won’t have any effect unless you explicitly ask for the inheritable properties to be re-propagated to the child objects.
August 24, 2006Aug 24, 200608/24/06In 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,
