May 2007 | The Old New Thing

You'd think questions about underwear were understood to be off-limits

Raymond ChenMay 31, 2007May 31, 200705/31/07

Strange what sorts of things need to be spelled out explicitly nowadays. You know you're in trouble when your employee training includes a discussion of company policy regarding employees making inappropriate comments or questions about underwear.

Visual C++ 2005 will generate manifests for you

Raymond ChenMay 31, 2007May 31, 200705/31/07

New in Visual C++ 2005 is the ability to specify a manifest dependency via a #pragma directive. This greatly simplifies using version 6 of the shell common controls. You just have to drop the line into your program and the linker will do the rest. Note that the processor architecture is hard-coded into the above directive, which me

The three things you need to know about tsunamis

Raymond ChenMay 30, 2007May 30, 200705/30/07

One of my friends is involved with Science on Tap, a free, informal monthly get-together in the Seattle area covering science topics for the general public. (Recent coverage in the Seattle-PI.) The topic for July 30th is "The three things you need to know about tsunamis", and a title like that pretty much sells itself.

The sad predicament of the unempowered manager

Raymond ChenMay 30, 2007May 30, 200705/30/07

I just made up that term now because I needed a word to describe the situation where some manager is put in charge of a feature but is not given a staff to implement that feature. This happens more often than you might think, since there are many features that are "horizontal", i.e., features which affect all teams throughout the project. So-c

Let's talk like people

Raymond ChenMay 29, 2007May 29, 200705/29/07

On Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist web site I found a series of cultural guides named How to tell if you're ‹nationality›. All of the entries are simultaneously funny and insightful, such as this one from Turkey: A company can fire just about anybody it wants. But it will also hire anybody. For some reason, my favorite is this on

Psychic debugging: Why does FormatMessage say the resource couldn't be found?

Raymond ChenMay 29, 2007May 29, 200705/29/07

Solving this next problem should be a snap with your nascent psychic powers: I'm trying use FormatMessage to load a resource string with one insertion in it, and this doesn't work for some reason. The string is "Blah blah blah %1. Blah blah blah." The call to FormatMessage fails, and GetLastError() returns ERROR_RESOURCE_TYPE_NOT_FOUND. Wha

Cool, they're using Roman numerals!

Raymond ChenMay 28, 2007May 28, 200705/28/07

The IT department here will periodically send out notifications regarding changes to the network infrastructure or updates that are being deployed across the company. One of my colleagues sent me email saying, "Cool, they're using Roman numerals!" It was in response to one particular IT notification that included the following sentence: This

Raymond's SIFF schedule (2007)

Raymond ChenMay 25, 2007May 25, 200705/25/07

Nobody asked, but I'm going to post it anyway. These are the movies I'm planning on seeing, along with my twisted take on the plot, based solely on the movie description. ¹These movies were chosen in large part to serve as German lessons. ²I have a weak spot for slightly off-kilter Japanese movies set in the modern day. ³Swe

The parameters to PostQueuedCompletionStatus are not interpreted

Raymond ChenMay 25, 2007May 25, 200705/25/07

Larry Osterman mentioned this almost in passing quite a while ago, that the parameters to PostQueuedCompletionStatus are not interpreted by the operating system. Well, obviously the first parameter, the handle to the completion port, is interpreted as the handle to the completion port. But the other parameters, dwNumberOfBytesTransferred, dw

Being nominated for the Nobel Prize isn't as big a deal as it sounds

Raymond ChenMay 24, 2007May 24, 200705/24/07

Occasionally, somebody will use the fact that they were nominated for the Nobel Prize as some sort of proof that they are a qualified or well-respected person. Except that it proves no such thing. This isn't like the Academy Awards or the Pulizter Prize for which receiving a nomination means that you are one of a handful of finalists. For th

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