November 17, 2006Nov 17, 200611/17/06You can sometimes narrow down the source of a problem just by looking at the screen and moving the mouse.
When you move the mouse, the cursor on the screen moves to match. This work is done in the window manager in kernel mode.
November 16, 2006Nov 16, 200611/16/06When doing dithering, one operation you have to do for every
pixel is map it (more accurately, map a modified version of it)
to the nearest color in your available palette.
Since this is part of the dithering inner loop, you need this operation
to be as fast as possible.¹
November 15, 2006Nov 15, 200611/15/06If you create a DIB section at 8bpp or lower,
then it will come with a color table.
Pixels in the bitmap are represented not by their red/blue/green
component values, but are instead indices into the color table.
For example, a 4bpp DIB section can have up to sixteen colors in
its color table.
November 14, 2006Nov 14, 200611/14/06At the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo which coincided with the operating system’s launch, I paid a visit to the emulators.com booth, where they were excitedly showing off SoftMac 2000, a Mac emulator that ran on Windows 2000. Emulator trivia: MacOS booted in five seconds under Windows 2000,
November 14, 2006Nov 14, 200611/14/06When blitting between color and monochrome DCs,
The text foreground and background colors play a role.
We saw earlier that
when blitting from a monochrome DC to a color DC,
the color black in the source turns into the destination’s text color,
November 13, 2006Nov 13, 200611/13/06After a Seattle Symphony concert, it has long been a tradition among my friends to walk the three blocks from Benaroya Hall, up University Street, past Luly Yang Couture to gawk at the jaw-dropping gowns in the window (the pictures on the web site fail to capture their fabulousness),
November 13, 2006Nov 13, 200611/13/06Someday, you’re going to pass a raster operation to the BitBlt function that entails bit manipulation. Something like SRCAND perhaps, or possibly the dreaded SRCINVERT. These bitwise operations make perfect sense for monochrome bitmaps, since those are one bit per pixel anyway.
November 10, 2006Nov 10, 200611/10/06Here’s the diagram from
How do I convert an HRESULT to a Win32 error code?.
If you are offended by VML, cover your ears and hum for a while.
Win32
HRESULT
The little sliver at the top is the mapping of zero to zero.
November 9, 2006Nov 9, 200611/9/06In recent years, the issue of steroids in baseball has been the source of much hand-wringing. Some people argue that steroids are ruining the game. Others say that you can’t go around trampling the Bill of Rights and punishing people for doing things that are perfectly legal anyway.
November 9, 2006Nov 9, 200611/9/06An anonymous commenter asked why the Tab key doesn’t select items from the auto-complete drop-down list. The answer: Because that key already has some other meaning.
The Tab key is used to navigate among controls in a dialog box. Adding auto-complete behavior to an existing dialog would disturb the tab order,
