Dev Blogs
I have in front of me a small bag of a trail mix type of concoction. On the bag it proudly proclaims, "Award Winning Snack". First of all, there's a missing hyphen. (It should be "Award-Winning Snack" since "Award-Winning" is a phrasal adjective. The snack won an award. The award isn't winning a snack.) But what award is it? There is no mention o...
Commenter Tom Grelinger asks via the Suggestion Box: If I have a modal CDialog that is visible and usable to the user. Let's say I receive an event somewhere else in the program and I call DestroyWindow on the modal CDialog from within the event. I notice that the OnDestroy is called on the CDialog, but DoModal never exits until a WM_QUIT is po...
Back in 2000, a crazy stunt made the front page of the local newspaper, and it still holds a special place in my heart years later. We begin with Man drives pickup onto friend's roof as a stunt. The story opens with the picture of said pick-up on the roof of a house with its proud owner. That picture already tells a story. The run-down house, the...
Remember day trading? All the cool people were doing it. Glamour stories of people who tripled or quadrupled their stake in a single day. With all this money available for the taking, you'd be a fool not to be day-trading! During the era of day trading frenzy, I got a particular chuckle out of one PC manufacturer who produced a Precision Online T...
Store Wars is a propaganda video for the Organic Trade Association, starring vegetables and bad puns. ("Darth Tater" indeed.) Yes, it's a propaganda video, but at least it's an entertaining propaganda video. The same company also created The Meatrix, in conjunction with (deep breath now) the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment. Th...
There were several suggestions as to how I could avoid being tagged as the owner of an issue because I helped route the problem. Many of them involved assigning the bug back to the testers to "teach them a lesson". Punishing the tester doesn't help the product. Remember, we're all in this together. The goal is to fix bugs and ship a quality prod...
I bought myself a wireless mouse and was setting it up. Step 1: Insert the batteries. Check. Step 2: Position the receiver. Make sure the distance between the mouse and receiver is within the wireless range specified on the packaging. I wanted to put the receiver on the floor, off of my desk, so I had to make sure it would still be in ...
Because most fonts don't work in command prompts.
There are lots of flight status sites out there. (My favorite is FlightAware because it's the geekiest of them.) Many of them will send you email alerts when flight information changes, but the one from the Port of Seattle is the only one I know of that will also tell you when the arrival gate and baggage claim carousel number change, which is han...
While it's true that one category of problems comes from failing to quote spaces in command lines, it is a false statement that "path names in the registry should have quotation marks around them for obvious reasons." In fact it's the opposite. Path names should not be quoted. Think about it: Quotation marks are a parsing issue, not a file name i...