Showing archive results for April 2007

Design for readability. Even if you don't intend anybody else to read your code, there's still a very good chance that somebody will have to stare at your code and figure out what it does: That person is probably going to be you, twelve months from now. When I advised against the use of function parameters, one commenter pointed out that Intel...

Conan O'Brien airs clips from Walker, Texas Ranger. The putative excuse for this is that, as a result of the merger of NBC with Universal Studios, he can air clips from the show without paying royalties. The real excuse, of course, is that the clips are just so unintentionally funny. This appears to be a recurring sketch on Conan, so a little hun...

Here's a question that floated past my field of view some time ago: When the mouse hovers over a disabled window, the tooltip associated with that window does not appear. Why is this? Why isn't this documented in MSDN? Actually, you already know the answer, and it is documented. You just have to connect the dots. When a window is disabled, it d...

There's been a slight change in plans. I will be in Palo Alto on April 23rd rather than April 20th. Not that anybody is affected by this beyond the folks at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus, since nobody else took me up on my offer. I guess I'm not as popular as I thought. Update 13-Apr-2007: Here's my schedule for April 23rd when I'm down San J...

Q: How do you know when a lawyer is lying? A: His lips are moving. This is of course a completely unfair and discriminatory joke. Many lawyers are women. Anyway, today I'm going to rant about the phrase "In order to serve you better." Whenever you hear this phrase, you are pretty much guaranteed that whatever follows will in fact not serve you ...

Because one thread is all it needs.

The Russian constitution limits the president to two consecutive four-year terms, and Vladimir Putin is coming up on the end of his third. When he ran for his third term, he explained that his first term didn't count since it was served under the old constitution. This explanation appears to have been widely accepted because everybody reports that ...

Commenter Brian Reiter asks a duplicate of a question that was already submitted to the Suggestion Box: Darren asks why operating system† files still (for the most part) adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention. There are a few reasons I can think of. I'm not saying that these are the reasons; I'm just brainstorming. First, of course, ...