Showing results for October 2008 - The Old New Thing

Oct 31, 2008
0
0

Stick to the normal candy and nobody gets hurt

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Hallowe'en is a family affair at Microsoft. It typically starts at around 3 or 4 o'clock, with costumed kids roaming the hallways collecting treats from offices. One year, one of my colleagues decided that the kids deserved more than the usual candy bars and chocolates. Even though he is Caucasian, he went to the local Asian foods market and stoc...

Non-Computer
Oct 31, 2008
0
0

Working with ambiguous and invalid points in time in managed code

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. I pointed out some time ago that Win32 and .NET deal with daylight saving time differently. Specifically, Win32 always deals with the time zone you are currently in (even if it's not the time zone that corresponds to the timestamp you are mani...

CodeTime
Oct 30, 2008
0
0

If you’re going to reformat source code, please don’t do anything else at the same time

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I spend a good amount of my time doing source code archaeology, and one thing that really muddles the historical record is people who start with a small source code change which turns into large-scale source code reformatting. I don't care how you format your source code. It's your source code. And your team might decide to change styles at some...

Other
Oct 29, 2008
0
0

PDC 2008 notes: How to get to room 406A, and other notes

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Today is the day of my talk. I'm always a bit nervous before these things, because I'm never sure if what I'm going to present matches up with what people are expecting. Most people who come to my PDC talk don't know who I am, so they aren't expecting me to toss out a few catch phrases, use my psychic powers, and tell stories about how a bug in a...

Other
Oct 29, 2008
0
0

Why does my Run dialog say that tasks will created with administrative privileges?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

"I don't know what happened, but now when I open the Run dialog on my Windows Vista machine by typing Windows+R, there is a shield under the edit box that says This task will be created with administrative privileges. What's going on?" One my colleagues used psychic powers to solve this problem: "I imagine that you manually killed Explorer, and t...

Tips/Support
Oct 28, 2008
0
0

Typo patrol at the 2008 PDC

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Typo patrol got off to a very quick start. One of the flyers in the attendee goodie bag is from a company which offers two free months of service to PDC attendees. The first step in obtaining the service is "Just signup and mention the PDC by January 31, 2008." Okay, just hang on while I fire up my time machine. Bonus grammar typo: signup is ...

Other
Oct 28, 2008
0
0

To climb the corporate ladder you’ll need some rope, but rope has many purposes

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When KC told me about a trick she learned to get an area expert to respond to her email, I cautioned her that the trick might backfire: A friend of mine (let's call him Bob) happens also to work in the technology industry, and the manager for the part of the project he worked on was, to put it nicely, "in the wrong line of work." No matter how m...

Other
Oct 27, 2008
0
0

Ah, local Los Angeles television news, how I miss thee

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Sitting in my hotel room the night before the 2008 PDC, I'm watching the Los Angeles local news, and the field reporter just said, "The police say this is an isolated incident, but it could happen anywhere."

Non-Computer
Oct 27, 2008
0
0

If you don’t want to try to repair the data, then don’t, but you should at least know that you have corrupted data

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When I wrote about understanding the consequences of , I mentioned that one of the possible responses was to try to repair the damage, but some people are suspicious of this approach. Mind you, I'm suspicious of it, too. Repairing corruption is hard. You have to anticipate the possibility, create enough of a trail to be able to reconstruct the ...

Code