Showing archive results for 2008

In a presentation a few years ago, there was a pie chart, but not just any pie chart, but a pie chart that appeared to be specifically designed to convey no information whatsoever. (The presenter didn't realize this, of course, and probably thought it was awesomely cool.) The pie chart consisted of five wedges, each of which was a slightly differ...

September 15 is the date on which annual raises take effect. This means that on the 15th, the payroll servers are swamped with people eyeballing their new paycheck breakdown to see what has changed. And every year, on September 15th, the servers would become overloaded and people would be unable to connect. Instead they'd get a message ...

I had a few hours to kill at the airport a few years ago before my flight was ready for boarding, so I turned on my laptop and connected to the airport's wireless network. Like most pay services, they way you sign up is to fire up a web browser and go to any web site. Regardless of what site you go to, you are redirected to the "Here's how to buy a...

The message tells a control which font you would like the control to use for its text. This message is a convention, not a rule. For example, our scratch program doesn't pay attention to the message. If somebody sends it a , nothing happens. The scratch program just ignores the caller and uses whatever font it wants. Although supporting the m...

Anthony Edwards is returning for a guest spot on his old series ER. I don't watch ER, but when I happen to stumble across it, the thing that strikes me most is that for a where most of the characters are supposed to be doctors, they sure don't look like doctors. They look like models who have been forced to wear scrubs and white lab coats. Excep...

Another round of short answers to questions in the suggestion box. How does Windows choose the monitor a window maximizes to? The window maximizes to the monitor selected by . The algorithm the uses to select the monitor is documented in MSDN. How do you make your Win32 application safe from keyloggers? You can't. In th...

Master storyteller Ira Glass teaches us how to tell a story, and the importance of the moment of reflection. (In the third video he explains why when you are trying to do something creative you always suck, and that's okay.) And once you've soaked up Ira's advice, you can admire Kasper Hauser's parodies: Going Postal and Phantom High School.

Windows 95 introduced (and Windows Vista removed) the concept of ShellExecute hooks. These are objects which implemented the interface. That interface had just one method: , which took a structure and returned to indicate that the item was executed, to allow processing to continue, and an error code to halt processing. The intended ...

Despite my previous rant, absurdly elaborate email signatures are still common at Microsoft, and I'm not just talking about the ones that contain information that may be required by department policy. I'm talking about signatures that use bright colors, large fonts, maybe a bitmap or two, sometimes even a photo of the sender! I will sometimes men...

(It was September last time.) I've been asked to step in as a replacement speaker for the 2008 PDC. The details of the talk are not yet publically available, but what I can say is that the topic will be in the category of Win32 programming. Disclaimers: Information was believed to be accurate at press time. Speakers subject to change. Talk may...