Showing results for May 2007 - The Old New Thing

May 31, 2007
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You'd think questions about underwear were understood to be off-limits

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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.

Non-Computer
May 31, 2007
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Visual C++ 2005 will generate manifests for you

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

New in Visual C++ 2005 is the ability to specify a manifest dependency via a 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 means that if ...

Code
May 30, 2007
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The three things you need to know about tsunamis

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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.

Non-Computer
May 30, 2007
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The sad predicament of the unempowered manager

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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-called...

Other
May 29, 2007
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Let's talk like people

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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 one fro...

Non-Computer
May 29, 2007
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Psychic debugging: Why does FormatMessage say the resource couldn't be found?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Solving this next problem should be a snap with your nascent psychic powers: I'm trying use 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 fails, and returns . What am I doing wrong? Hint: Take a closer look at the parameter . Hint&...

Code
May 28, 2007
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Cool, they're using Roman numerals!

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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 upda...

Other
May 25, 2007
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Raymond's SIFF schedule (2007)

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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. ³Swedish ...

Non-Computer
May 25, 2007
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The parameters to PostQueuedCompletionStatus are not interpreted

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Larry Osterman mentioned this almost in passing quite a while ago, that the parameters to 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, , , and are not interpreted at all. Even though they have na...

Code
May 24, 2007
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Being nominated for the Nobel Prize isn't as big a deal as it sounds

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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 the Nob...

Non-Computer