Showing archive results for 2007

In the discussion last year regarding retail companies allegedly not collecting personal information as aggressively, a few people mentioned tactics for confusing salesdroids. For a while, I would intentionally confuse salesdroids by using my passport as identification. But far more frustrating is when I manage to confuse salesdroids completely ...

A tour of Redmond campus cafeterias back in the old days took much less time than it would require nowadays. Back then, the cafeterias were tiny affairs, the size of maybe three offices not counting the prep area, with a seating capacity of maybe a dozen tables. Each cafeteria had a theme, so going to lunch back in the day was not "Let's go to the...

My fancy new office phone has an option to change the language of its user interface, so naturally I chose Swedish. Once I did that, I saw some obvious translation errors. The first example above is just sloppiness, but the second one illustrates how a simple LocalizeString("some text") algorithm doesn't work. As Lance Fisher's teacher put it, ...

Tracey Ullman joins the roster of celebrity knitters with her book Knit 2 Together: Patterns and Stories for Serious Knitting Fun. (She also gets to add to the pile of books whose titles are of the form Catchy title: Long boring subtitle.)

"The most important choice in writing is not what you say. It's what you don't say." Eric Gunnerson gave me that advice when I was writing my book. It's sort of the writing version of "You don't know what you do until you know what you don't do." That's why I'll write Of course, you probably wonder this magical comes from. It comes from the...

For the story of how WiX got its name, I defer to its author, Rob Mensching.

One "optimization" I've seen from some programs is to defer a bunch of system configuration work to the first time the program is run or the first time a feature is requested instead of doing it at install time. The problem with this is that the first person to run your program is not guaranteed to be an administrator. For example, there is one po...

Some suggestion box topics turn into daily entries. Others deserve just a sentence or two. Here are the short answers. Can you shed some light on RPC_E_CANTCALLOUT_ININPUTSYNCCALL? This one is kind of bizarre, because the person who asked the question linked to the answer! What form do application hacks usually take in...

A few random links that I've collected from other Microsoft bloggers.

It's the end of September, which means that once again, it's time for Smithsonian Magazine's annual Museum Day, so search for a participating museum near you and get your free admission card. One of the participating museums is the Museum of History & Industry, known to locals by its initials, MOHAI. Whenever I go past the museum and see...