Showing archive results for 2007

On the drive property sheet for an NTFS volume, there is a checkbox called "Compress drive to save disk space." If you check that box, the shell marks the drive as "compress all newly-created files" and also goes through and compresses all the existing files on the drive. Well, almost all the file. Some files are exempted by default. Examples of...

Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only. Why are INI files deprecated in favor of the registry? There were many problems with INI files. The registry tried to address these concerns. You might argue whether these were valid concerns to begin with, but the Windows NT folks sure thought they w...

Welcome to Black Friday, the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season. I suspect there will be a bunch of people who are hoping Santa will get them an iPhone. Here's one story of what lies in store. One of my friends stood in line on the first day of iPhone availability and got one of the highly-anticipated gadgets. We happened to ge...

The function is another one in the category of functions that everybody tries to pretend doesn't exist. It's not as bad as , but it's still pretty awful. The idea behind the function is that you have a frame window with a bunch of optional gadgets, such as a status bar or toolbar. The important thing is that these optional gadgets all reside at...

On our team's web site, buried among the other debugging documents, was a page titled simply "Magic 8 Ball"®¹. If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle, on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message. The messages were things like It was fun to give the 8-ball a shake, but the real purpose ...

Everybody has their own pet theory on how Vladimir Putin can retain power after the end of his second official term. I earlier wrote of one such theory: Change the constitution to permit a third term. In the intervening months, other theories have been put forth. Each one chips away at a different part of the statement that "the president can be e...

If you type at a command prompt, the command processor will spit out pages upon pages of strange geeky text. I'm not sure why the command processor folks decided to write documentation this way rather than the more traditional manner of putting it into MSDN or the online help. Maybe because that way they don't have to deal with annoying people li...

Okay, we have Dreyer's Berry Rainbow Sherbet. Our Berry Rainbow Sherbet combines the tangy fruit taste of blackberry, raspberry and orange sherbets to create a delicious, refreshing treat. Orange is a berry?

During the betas of Windows Vista, the final set of sample logon pictures had yet to be determined, so a bunch of placeholder bitmaps were created. These placeholders consisted of the letters FPO in a box. FPO is a standard term in desktop publishing; it stands for For Position Only. In order to permit designers to perform page layout before ...

My friend ::Wendy:: has many circles of friends, and several of them converged at the Elephant and Castle Pub in Seattle last week for her send-off party, resulting in a night-long game of Venn Diagram as you tried to work out which groups intersected how. I got to meet in person some of ::Wendy::'s blogger friends, including Jennifer (aka "P...