The Old New Thing

September 2007 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Astrologers struggling with reclassification of Pluto

September 12, 2007 Sep 12, 2007 09/12/07
Raymond Chen
One of the consequences of the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet is being felt by astrologers, who now have to decide what role the body plays in the lives of mere humans. I remember reading an article many years ago wherein the writer asked several astrologers what impact the discovery of a new planet would have on their craft ...

Making some statements and asking for advice isn't a question

September 12, 2007 Sep 12, 2007 09/12/07
Raymond Chen
This is a corollary to Don't forget to ask your question: Making some statements and asking for advice isn't a question. When we do X, and then select Y, and then click the Q button, we get an error message saying that Q can't be performed because "The computer Z that Y refers to cannot be contacted." Can you provide ...

The wisdom of seventh graders: A Wrinkle in Time

September 11, 2007 Sep 11, 2007 09/11/07
Raymond Chen
The recent passing of Madeleine L'Engle reminded me of a quiz seventh grade students were given in order to see whether they were at least paying attention during a reading of a chapter from A Wrinkle in Time. I forget the question exactly, but it asked the students about the mechanism that Mrs Who, Which and Whatsit use to travel through the...

What's the difference between EM_UNDO and WM_UNDO?

September 11, 2007 Sep 11, 2007 09/11/07
Raymond Chen
Daniel Chait wonders why we have both EM_UNDO and WM_UNDO. You know, I wonder the same thing. But I'm going to make an educated guess. Actually, most of what I write is just a lot of educated guessing. Like my explanation of why GetWindowText has such complicated rules? A guess. Why address space granularity is 64KB? A guess. Why most EM_...
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The Minimalist Jukebox Festival

September 10, 2007 Sep 10, 2007 09/10/07
Raymond Chen
Last year, NPR covered The Minimalist Jukebox Festival, a week-long exploration of the school of minimalist music. The NPR story includes a clip of my favorite minimalist work: Music for 18 Musicians, as well as a telling of the classic minimalism knock-knock joke. I remember reading somewhere that the world premiere of Music for 18 ...

If control-specific messages belong to the WM_USER range, why are messages like BM_SETCHECK in the system message range?

September 10, 2007 Sep 10, 2007 09/10/07
Raymond Chen
When I discussed which message numbers belong to whom, you may have noticed that the messages for edit boxes, buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, scroll bars, and static controls go into the system range even though they are control-specific. How did those messages end up there? They didn't start out there. In 16-bit windows, these control...
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Wayback machine: The Fake Job

September 7, 2007 Sep 7, 2007 09/7/07
Raymond Chen
Digging through my pile of junk, I found a reference to a fake article in The New Yorker magazine titled My Fake Job that turned out to be (partly) fake itself. Unfortunately, I missed the article the first time around so I didn't get to see what all the excitement was about, but it sure sounded like a funny article. (Fractionally more ...

Sometimes it feels like the effort isn't even appreciated

September 7, 2007 Sep 7, 2007 09/7/07
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, the application compatibility folks found a program that was corrupting the heap, and they applied a fix that worked around the specific type of corruption that the program performed. And then a bug came on that same program. It was a heap corruption failure during the program's processing of global destructors. The authors of...

It's that season again: The 2007 Microsoft Company Meeting

September 6, 2007 Sep 6, 2007 09/6/07
Raymond Chen
Yes, it's that time of year again, time for the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, and therefore time for another of Raymond's reminiscences about meetings past. (If you want a report on the meeting itself, I'm sure Mini-Microsoft will oblige. Here's the company meeting preview.) Over a decade ago, one of my colleagues informally organized ...

If your theory is "build it and they will come", you have to make sure there is a "they"

September 6, 2007 Sep 6, 2007 09/6/07
Raymond Chen
Creating an infrastructure for managing the content you wish you had doesn't actually create that content. Another possible response to the crisis management issue I considered yesterday is to say "Okay, we need to have an official Company X Breaking News site so that people who are looking for an official response to some hot topic can...