Showing archive results for 2007

Last year, one of the fancy-dancy iCup devices (yes that's its name, I kid you not) in the kitchen of my building went on the fritz. Things break, that's to be expected. The screen which normally guides you through the selection process instead displayed an error message. The problem was not that it was out of coffee; when that happens, a much m...

The Evergreen Philharmonic Orchestra is a student orchestra consisting of the best high school musicians in the Issaquah School District.† Last weekend I attended their annual Baroque Festival, although there was only one Baroque piece on the program. (False advertising, maybe, but I'll let it slide.) Why was I at a high school student conc...

To execute a command in each subdirectory of a directory tree from a batch file, you can adapt the following: (If you want to play with this command from the command prompt, then undouble the percent signs.) The option enables various special behaviors of the command. The most important change is that a string in single-quotation marks caus...

If you have a question and you want to ask multiple people or groups, do not send the question individually to each group. Just send the question once with your recipient list on the To line. If you send it individually, then each recipient will not know that you asked the question to other groups as well. This in turn creates wasted effort becaus...

Literary detective Paul Collins stumbled upon a precursor to today's Mad Libs known as Revelations of My Friends. Listen to the NPR story to hear Scott Simon play, and go to Paul Collins' web site to see some of the drawing that Scott laughed at.

Sometimes I see people ask a question and get an answer, but the answer doesn't quite work. But instead of trying to understand the answer in order to see why it doesn't work and develop a better solution, they just play stupid. Here's an example. The names have been changed but the story's the same. How do I get a handle to a bright pink elepha...

One of the major changes to services in Windows Vista is session 0 isolation. After reading the summary, you can follow that first supplementary link, Impact of Session 0 Isolation on Services and Drivers in Windows Vista, to dig deeper and receive guidance on how you need to modify your service. Then again, some of the questions I see regar...

Nearly all computer administrators are idiots. That's not because the personnel department is incompetent or because it's impossible to train competent administrators. It's because, for a consumer operating system, the computer administrator didn't ask to be one. In nearly all cases, the computer administrator is dad or grandma.† They didn'...

Some friends gave me a bottle of spearmint Metromint as a gift. And as it turns out, it was a mean-spirited gift. Let's look at that bottle. It calls itself "pure, simple mintwater®". What the heck is pure mintwater? Do you go to the local mintwater stream and collect it? Oh, wait, sorry. That should be mintwater®. With some trepidation, ...

If you've designed your program so that it assumes that the the only thing a user can use drag/drop for is dropping your object into a file system directory, then you've already lost. piers wants to be able to determine the destination of a drag/drop operation. From the description, it appears that what piers really wants is the destination path,...