The Old New Thing

February 2007 - The Old New Thing

More Vista wallpapers from Hamad Darwish

February 28, 2007 Feb 28, 2007 02/28/07
Raymond Chen
Long Zheng does it again. He follows up his interview with Hamad Darwish with a report on what Hamad has been doing lately, as well as links to high resolution versions of the entire Vista wallpaper photo shoot, including photos that didn't make the final cut...

Another retired computer: The Alpha Rawhide

February 28, 2007 Feb 28, 2007 02/28/07
Raymond Chen
This computer didn't die like the previous one; it merely outlived it usefulness. In its prime, the machine was a force to be reckoned with. It was about the size of a small refrigerator and generated about as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. It contained four, count 'em, four Alpha AXP processors, each running at a mind-boggling 400&...

How hard could it be? Must provide own garage.

February 27, 2007 Feb 27, 2007 02/27/07
Raymond Chen
A good friend of mine forwarded me this help-wanted ad on CraigsList: Need a programmer to make a Search Engine like Google I'm looking for some Programmer(s) who can help me create a search engine like Google. Only qualified person(s) encouraged to apply. Compensation: no pay Good luck with that...

What does an NMI error mean? (The infamous "Hardware Malfunction")

February 27, 2007 Feb 27, 2007 02/27/07
Raymond Chen
I promised to talk more about NMI, so here it is. What generates an NMI? What does it mean? The first question is easy to answer but doesn't actually shed much light: Any device can pull the NMI line, and that will generate a non-maskable interrupt. Back in the Windows 95 days, a few really cool people had taken the ball-point pen ...

The politician's fallacy and the politician's apology

February 26, 2007 Feb 26, 2007 02/26/07
Raymond Chen
I learned this from Yes, Minister. They call it the politician's fallacy: As befits its name, you see it most often in politics, where poorly-thought-out solutions are proposed for urgent problems. But be on the lookout for it in other places, too. You might see somebody falling victim to the politician's fallacy at a business meeting, say...

Please feel free to stop using DDE

February 26, 2007 Feb 26, 2007 02/26/07
Raymond Chen
A commenter asked, "As an application programmer, can I really ignore DDE if I need to interact with explorer/shell?" The answer is, "Yes, please!" While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically...

The 2007/2008 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
Raymond Chen
Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but here it is anyway. Notes: This chart doesn't include "one-off" concert series such as the Visiting Orchestras or ...

How to get your laptop to resume from standby in under two seconds

February 22, 2007 Feb 22, 2007 02/22/07
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues recently posted the story of the work he did to get laptops to resume quickly. The fun part was implementing the optimizations in the kernel. The not-fun part was finding all the drivers who did bad things and harassing their owners into fixing the bugs. One some laptops, he could get the resume time down to an ...