The Old New Thing

How to tell which end of the Metro platform to stand on, and other survival tips for the Lisbon subway system

The Metropolitano de Lisboa includes an English-language list of tips for riding the Metro. Here are some more tips that all the locals know, but which no guide book tells you. In most subway systems, trains outside of peak hours are not full-length but rather fill only part of the station. In the subway systems I'm familiar with in the ...

What happened to winipcfg and netmon?

Commenter Michael Moulton asks: Back in the Win95 & 98 days, we had winipcfg to manage DHCP leases on the client. Additionally, we had an app (I think it was netmon) to let you view people currently accessing your shares. Now, we have ipconfig on the command line and nothing like netmon. I'd be interested in hearing why those tools ...

21: like 24 but three hours shorter

When I first heard that a new project titled 21 was coming out, I simply assumed it was the same as 24, except that Jack Bauer gets some sleep. Pre-emptive snarky comment: "Somebody was clearly sleeping when they designed Vista...

When a treehouse just isn't good enough

Not satisfied with a patio or treehouse, some people have built a monorail or a roller coaster in their backyard. And then there's this one guy who apparently has not yet run out of strange things to build in his backyard. Former projects include include a domed swimming pool, a garden accessible only from above, a carousel, and a forty-...

How do I force the ECHO command to echo?

The built-in command, how much simpler could it get? It takes whatever you put on the command line and prints it. And yet it's not that simple. For example, the must be careful not to compress whitespace, because people will write and when you execute this, the result had better be and not But what if you want to echo a blank ...

Maybe that's how you do it, but around here, we have a different convention for indicating which things are broken

One of the reactions to my story of investigating a dead computer struck me as rather strange. Commenter Steve wrote, "Usually video cards left on a table don't works well (the one inside a computer have a better probability)." While it's true that the ones inside a computer are more likely to work, it's not the case, at least around here, ...