The Old New Thing

September 2006 - The Old New Thing

Eating Belgian food at Brouwer's Cafe in Fremont

September 29, 2006 Sep 29, 2006 09/29/06
Raymond Chen
Last year, some friends and I went for dinner at Brouwer's Café, a Belgian pub/restaurant in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The menu is pub food, which means that everything comes with frites and a choice of several dipping sauces, none of which is ketchup. One of my friends spent some formative years of her life in the ...

Quotation marks around spaces aren't necessary in the PATH environment variable

September 29, 2006 Sep 29, 2006 09/29/06
Raymond Chen
The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the ...

When you crash, make sure you crash in the right place

September 28, 2006 Sep 28, 2006 09/28/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, I recommended that functions should just crash when given invalid pointers. There's a subtlety to this advice, however, and that's making sure you crash in the right place. If your function and your function's caller both reside on the same side of a security boundary, then go ahead and crash inside your function. If the caller is ...
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Saturday is Museum Day, courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine

September 28, 2006 Sep 28, 2006 09/28/06
Raymond Chen
September 30, 2006 is the first Museum Day open to the general public. (Apparently, previous Museum Days were limited to subscribers of Smithsonian Magazine.) You will have to print out the Museum Day Admissions Coupon to get in. Some restrictions apply. Read the fine print. Even the Institute for Creation Research (an actual ...

News flash: The heart produces urine

September 26, 2006 Sep 26, 2006 09/26/06
Raymond Chen
In an attempt to explain why astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper fainted during a welcome ceremony, ABC News reported The heart of an average person on Earth pumps blood throughout the body. But when an astronaut is in space, Levine explained, the blood remains predominantly in their chest cavity. Because of this, he said, the heart ...

Isn't DDE all asynchronous anyway?

September 26, 2006 Sep 26, 2006 09/26/06
Raymond Chen
"Isn't DDE all asynchronous anyway?" asks commenter KaiArnold. It's mostly asynchronous, but not entirely. You can read about how DDE works in MSDN, but since it seems people are reluctant to read the formal documentation, I'll repeat here the points relevant to the discussion. The DDE process begins with a search for a service provider. ...
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Waiting until the dialog box is displayed before doing something

September 25, 2006 Sep 25, 2006 09/25/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, I left you with a few questions. Part of the answer to the first question was given in the comments, so I'll just link to that. The problem is more than just typeahead, though. The dialog box doesn't show itself until all message traffic has gone idle. If you actually ran the code presented in the original message, you'd find ...
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Hand gestures for numbers

September 22, 2006 Sep 22, 2006 09/22/06
Raymond Chen
When I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, I began noticing the hand gestures that accompanied numbers. When people said "six", they often punctuated it by holding out their hand with the thumb and pinky extended, palm towards the speaker. That's because they were using Chinese number gestures. (It so happens that the gesture for "six" is ...