October 2008 | The Old New Thing

Stick to the normal candy and nobody gets hurt

Raymond ChenOctober 31, 2008Oct 31, 200810/31/08

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...

Working with ambiguous and invalid points in time in managed code

Raymond ChenOctober 31, 2008Oct 31, 200810/31/08

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...

Dude, the admission bracelet goes around your wrist

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2008Oct 30, 200810/30/08

Short stories from the 2008 PDC: Bonus chatter added 9am...

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

Raymond ChenOctober 30, 2008Oct 30, 200810/30/08

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...

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

Raymond ChenOctober 29, 2008Oct 29, 200810/29/08

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...

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

Raymond ChenOctober 29, 2008Oct 29, 200810/29/08

"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, ...

Typo patrol at the 2008 PDC

Raymond ChenOctober 28, 2008Oct 28, 200810/28/08

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: ...

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

Raymond ChenOctober 28, 2008Oct 28, 200810/28/08

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 ...

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

Raymond ChenOctober 27, 2008Oct 27, 200810/27/08

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...

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