October 2006 | Page 3 of 4 | The Old New Thing

What does the letter "T" in LPTSTR stand for?

Raymond ChenOctober 17, 2006Oct 17, 200610/17/06

The "T" in LPTSTR comes from the "T" in TCHAR. I don't know for certain, but it seems pretty likely that it stands for "text". By comparison, the "W" in WCHAR probably comes from the C language standard, where it stands for "wide...

Raymond's excursions into East Asian pop music, episode 4: Yuki

Raymond ChenOctober 16, 2006Oct 16, 200610/16/06

When my story left off, a colleague of mine had dedicated himself to finding some good Japanese pop music, and what he found was this music video of the song JOY by Japanese pop star Yuki Isoya, who performs under the stage name YUKI. The video was mesmerizing. The Flash Gordon extras. The dance steps. The blinking. The hyperventilating...

640 x 480 is still not dead

Raymond ChenOctober 16, 2006Oct 16, 200610/16/06

Windows still has to worry about displays running at 640×480 resolution. Even though the default minimum resolution was bumped up to 800×600 for Windows XP, there are still 640×480 devices out there, typically tiny monitors on servers. One common set-up is to have a bank of tiny little monitors, each corresponding to one...

Why do I see the same fake names in Microsoft samples over and over?

Raymond ChenOctober 13, 2006Oct 13, 200610/13/06

There is a stock collection of fake names.

Shifting fortunes at Airbus over the A380

Raymond ChenOctober 12, 2006Oct 12, 200610/12/06

The Airbus A380 will be the largest-capacity commercial passenger plane, once they get around to making them. Now two years behind schedule, the A380 is not making life any easier for their parent company EADS. And in this two-player world, bad news for Airbus means good news for Boeing. As a Seattleite, I naturally root for Boeing over ...

How do I prevent multi-line edit controls from eating the Enter key?

Raymond ChenOctober 12, 2006Oct 12, 200610/12/06

You might decide to put a multi-line edit control in a dialog box, not because you want the user to input multi-line data, but because it's a convenient way to display multi-line text. When you do that, you may notice that the Enter key does not invoke the default dialog button, as you might normally expect. That's because the multi-line edit ...

Proto-Microspeak: The goat rodeo

Raymond ChenOctober 11, 2006Oct 11, 200610/11/06

Somebody at a meeting two years ago used the term "goat rodeo" to describe a completely confused situation. The term stuck with me as a really funny folksy analogy. It's not official Microspeak, but who knows, it may someday gain currency. I certainly enjoy saying it. "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." (Some earlier Microspeak ...

When something is available for the user, which user are we talking about?

Raymond ChenOctober 10, 2006Oct 10, 200610/10/06

Some people have taken issue with the term WM_USER for the name of the base of the message range that is the province of the window class implementor. (Refresher for those who forget which messages belong to whom.) The complaint is that the user can't use them since they belong to the window class. Aha, but the real question is, "Who is the ...

How Raymond learns languages (and why it's not working)

Raymond ChenOctober 9, 2006Oct 9, 200610/9/06

Whenever I wander into the subject of languages here, a commenter will ask me what my language-acquisition technique is. I have refrained from describing it since it is very peculiar to my way of learning, and I doubt it will work for most people. But since people seem to be interested, here it is. I like to learn a language by learning its ...

A very brief return to part 6 of Loading the Chinese/English dictionary

Raymond ChenOctober 6, 2006Oct 6, 200610/6/06

Back in Part 6 of the first phase of the "Chinese/English dictionary" series (a series which I intend to get back to someday but somehow that day never arrives), I left an exercise related to the alignment member of the HEADER union. Alignment is one of those issues that people who grew up with a forgiving processor architecture tend to ...

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