Showing archive results for 2006

There are some basic ground rules that apply to all system programming, so obvious that most documentation does not bother explaining them because these rules should have been internalized by practitioners of the art to the point where they need not be expressed. In the same way that when plotting driving directions you wouldn't even consider takin...

Speculate all you want about what users expect, what they want, what they care about. There's no substitute for actually running experiments to find out. Those who haven't already been following Jensen Harris really ought to be, because he talks about user interface design in a highly practical way. Consider this entry on deciding how the ribbon...

Methodology explained earlier. Update: As I noted yesterday, the final will be very close, with George Washington University edging out Villanova by two months, 1988.08.01 to 1988.10.05. Other people have come up with their own systems. The person a few doors down from me chose an algorithm that can be captured in three words: "Shorter name...

Many people have noticed that the animation bar control in version 6 of the common controls no longer uses a background thread to draw the animation. Instead, it acts as if the style is always set, even if the caller didn't pass it. Why is that? The first reason is that the background thread didn't actually help any. In order to draw transparent ...

Okay, somebody handed me a NCAA Men's Basketball Bracket to fill out. I don't know squat about college sports, so I decided that I would fill in the bracket based on the following simple principle: The school whose President (or Chancellor) has served longer will win the match-up. (Not counting the first-round games of the top five seeds in each br...

The Annals of Improbable Research tipped me off to Reto Schneider's Das Buch der verrückten Experimente (The Book of Weird Experiments in English), a collection of descriptions of one hundred scientific experiments throughout the course of history. As you might expect from the title, the experiments are all somewhat strange, yet neverthele...

Commenter mpz wondered why the IME cannot detect whether it is sending characters to a Unicode or non-Unicode application and generate the appropriate character accordingly. But what exactly is a Unicode application? Actually, let me turn the question around: What is a non-Unicode application? Suppose you write a program and don't , so you'd thi...

On MSDN, there's a series of articles on the top ten things to do to make your application a Vista application. The series began last December, and just this month, they covered a topic dear to my heart: Application compatibility. [Update 2pm: If you have feedback about these articles, posting that feedback here won't accomplish much since I am...

At the PDC, one person came to talk to me for advice on a resource management problem they were having. To simplify, their system generated dozens of work items, each of which required significant resource consumption. For the sake of illustration, let's say that each of the work items was a single-threaded computationally-intensive operation that ...

I guess I'm living up to my reputation of having the social skills of a thermonuclear device: From: <name withheld> It'd be awful swell of you to add my blog to your blogroll. You don't know me, and I know you only by your superlative writings, but I'm a big fan. http://<link withheld> P.S. Would you like you home remortgaged?...