Showing archive results for 2006

To connect to the Microsoft corporate network from home, employees need to use smartcard authentication. But, somewhat paradoxically, you do better if you remove the smart card. A colleague of mine tipped me off to this. To initiate the connection, you have to insert the smart card and provide the smart card password. Then the system connects to ...

"Worst software ever." That was Aaron Zupancic's cousin's reaction to the fact that Windows XP was incompatible with one program originally designed for Windows 98. Then again, commenter Aargh! says "The bad code should be fixed, period. If it can't be fixed, it breaks, too bad." Perhaps Aargh! can send a message to Aaron's cousin sa...

You 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. The mouse hardware notifies the window manager, "Hey, I moved left twenty units." The window manager takes this value, ac...

When 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 A common technique for this is to precompute the nearest palette index ...

If 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. Although displays that use 8bpp or lower are conside...

At 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, which was faster than the real Mac, ...

When 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, and the color white in the source turns into the destination's background color. This came in handy when...

After 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), arriving at the W Hotel, home of Earth & Ocean, where we w...

Someday, you're going to pass a raster operation to the function that entails bit manipulation. Something like perhaps, or possibly the dreaded . These bitwise operations make perfect sense for monochrome bitmaps, since those are one bit per pixel anyway. But what does it mean for color bitmaps? What do you get when you "and" together forest gree...

Here'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. The little sliver at the top is the mapping of zero to zero. The big white box at the bottom is the mapping of all negative numbers to corresponding negative numbers. And the rainbow represents the mapp...