Showing results for December 2007 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

One of my colleagues on a previous team was stationed in Alaska as part of his military service. He said that one of the things people did for a cheap thrill was to take a cup of hot water outside when it was like a bazillion degrees below zero and throw it up into the air. (Things must be really boring in Alaska in the dead of winter.) But you h...

I have no idea why the window manager team added this feature to Windows NT. It basically says, "Hi, use this key to violate all the rules known to mankind about what can legitimately be done in a function. Oh, and be an attractive malware attack vector, too." I've debugged a few crashes that were traced back to the key. What makes them p...

If you come to New York City in December, you'll find the festive Christmas season throughout the town. Skaters wobble beneath the giant tree in Rockefeller Center. Giant snowflakes adorn the upper floors of the Saks Fifth Avenue store while animated Christmas-themed window displays entertain visitors on the ground floor of Saks, as well as Macy'...

Here's a question that came in from a customer: Is there a way to view all the Windows color schemes at once? We want to display text in the color against a background of , and we want to check that this looks good in all of the themes. A mistake I see from some programs is mixing system colors that are not meant to be mixed. The colors I'm tal...

In early 1997, the movie Fly Away Home, a film about a teenage girl and her father rescuing a family of geese (inspired by Operation Migration), was released on DVD. the movie was well-reviewed and even earned an Academy Award nomination. The very same weekend, the movie with the very similar name Follow Me Home was released in theaters. Its cr...

Take a shortcut to the command prompt or some other Windows component, right-click it, and select "Run as Administrator." The "Start in" directory from the shortcut is ignored and you are always dropped into the system directory. Why is the starting directory ignored? To avoid a category of attacks (current directory attacks). According to the d...

In the discussion of the environment variable problem, BryanK posits that the real mistake was allowing batch files to modify their parent environment in the first place. Instead, they should have run in a sub-process. Try saying that when your computer has only 16KB of memory, which is how much memory the original IBM PC came with. Heck, try sa...

Last night, I had dinner and went bhangra dancing with Larry Page's fiancée's brother's co-worker. He's a nice guy.

The "Oh no it's all messed up please fix it" mode

I've been informed that the Redmond branch of the Microsoft Company Store has begun stocking the dead tree edition of my book. "But wait, your program isn't printed by Microsoft Press; it's published by Addison-Wesley Professional. I thought the company store only stocked Microsoft Press titles." I'm told that this is a pilot program. (And no, I...