Showing archive results for 2006

In 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. To resolve this issue, I present this modest proposal. Toda...

An 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, which would in turn frustrate people ...

It doesn't matter, as long as you do it.

Many years ago, the local public radio station invited the three candidates for Seattle Port Commissioner to take part in a program on the upcoming election. Each candidate was given some time to address the voters directly. Here's how it went, roughly. Candidate 1: "We need an experienced person to find solutions for our region's transportat...

Last year, I told the story of overclocking being the source of a lot of mysterious crashes and that some of those overclocked machines were overclocked at the store. These machines came from small, independent shops rather than the major manufacturers. Well it looks like that's about to change. Gateway's FX530 Desktop can be ordered overclocke...

No, really, it's not a joke. There really is an opera written about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. And Only a Game is there. The work was composed as a master's thesis at Tufts University by Abigail Al-Doory and, as is the nature of said productions, it was performed exactly twice and then packed away. Abigail Al-Doory: We've got our openin...

Representatives from the IT department of a major worldwide corporation came to Redmond and took time out of their busy schedule to give a talk on how their operations are set up. I was phenomenally impressed. These people know their stuff. Definitely a world-class operation. One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some numbers ab...

Everybody knows that you can use the macro to convert a Win32 error code to an , but how do you do the reverse? Let's look at the definition of : If the value is less than or equal to zero, then the macro returns the value unchanged. Otherwise, it takes the lower sixteen bits and combines them with and . How do you reverse this process? H...

Some time ago, I was asked to look at two independent problems with people trying to do modal UI manually. Well, actually, when the issues were presented to me, they weren't described in quite that way. They were more along the lines of, "Something strange is happening in our UI. Can you help?" Only in the discussion of the scenarios did it become...

I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature." "That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but ...