Showing archive results for January 2008

Here are some subject lines I've seen over the past few years (suitably redacted): Sure, using exclamation points, all capital letters, or strange eye-catching punctuation marks makes it easier for you to spot replies to your message in your inbox, but it's also rude to your readers, who almost certainly do not consider your message as important...

The movie This Is Spinal Tap introduced the world to the phrase going to eleven. The people over at Windows Media Player were not immune to its charms, alluding to the catchphrase in their advertising campaign. Back in Windows 95, I know that there was at least one person who lobbied the multimedia team to give the Volume Control program e...

In response to the recent passing of chess celebrity Bobby Fischer, the Associated Press published an article titled Excerpts from Fischer-Spassky Games. The article consists of excerpts from the organization's coverage of the so-called Match of the Century in 1972. But given the title, I wondered whether the article had merely gone like this: ...

One of my colleagues has a degree in economics, and sometimes it manifests itself in strange ways. My colleague moved to a new apartment building and rented a parking space in the building's garage. After a month of noticing that there was usually an empty parking space or two on the street, my colleague made the economic calculation that the risk...

Writer Shannon Dunn can't sing, can't act, can't even dance a little, but she was determined to perform in the opera. And being rejected at the audition didn't stop her. It's a fascinating story.

In addition to all the named values you can create underneath a registry key with the function, there is also the so-called default value which you obtain by passing or a pointer to a null string as the . This default value is also the value set and retrieved when you call and . What's the deal with this default value? The original 16-bit regis...

Back in 16-bit Windows, the registry was a very different beast. Originally, the only registry hive was , and the only things it was used for were COM object registration and file type registration. (Prior to the registry, file type registration was done in , and the only verb you could register for was "open".) The registry was stored in a singl...

Back in 2002, I noted with some fascination the opening of Jerry Springer: The Opera in London. (Here's coverage in the New York Times. If you're going to skim the article, at least skim all the way to the end, wherein the real Jerry Springer is asked for his opinion.) Opening with the onstage studio audience chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!", a parade...

The message is sent early in the window state changing process, unlike , which tells you about what already happened. A crucial difference (aside from the timing) is that you can influence the state change by handling the message and modifying the structure. Here's an example that prevents the window from being resized. Before the message...

The documentation for the message points out that the message is not sent under certain circumstances. But what if you want to know when the window is shown, including in the cases where you don't get ? The message is sent at the end of the window state change process. It sort of combines the other state change notifications, , , and . But it ...