Showing archive results for 2008

Commenter Peter Kankowski asks why Windows doesn't send and messages when the user logs off. That's what is for. To tell the program that the Windows session is ending, and that you should get done whatever last things you want to get done before the world comes to an end. Windows doesn't send the message because sending becomes complicated...

In response to Perhaps the movies made too literal a translation, Steve Sinofsky reminded me that everybody at Microsoft got a special advance screening of the movie True Lies, or at least five seconds' worth. The computer that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character infiltrates runs the Arabic version of Windows 3.1, and the Arabic version of Wo...

I have only one citation, so it may not be proper Microspeak. With all of these features covering the scenario end to end, we wanted to create a new center of value. I still don't know what it means.

While waiting in the check-out line at the local grocery store, I saw a book titled Baby Names For Dummies and amused myself for wondering what its goal was. Bonus chatter: One of my colleagues proposed a fourth interpretation: Maybe you are a store employee who dresses mannequins and you want help coming up with cute names for them. (On a rela...

You don't need a whole 260KB program to do it. This batch file does the trick just fine: I call it . This is the long-forgotten follow-up to Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch. We're using the same technique as in that article, but pumping the result through "" to reverse the order of the enumeration...

I have a strange tendency to misread newspaper headlines. This week, I read the headline Rogan Sets 200 Back World Record, and I thought, "There's a world record for running 200 meters backward?" Well, actually there is, but this article was actually about the 200 meter backstroke (swimming). Once I figured that out, I was not confused by the ...

Required reading.

One of my friends works at the help desk of a university library, and a while back she told two stories of people who asked for help without first engaging the part of the brain responsible for logic and reason.

This is another special case of Don't forget to ask your question, indeed an even more extreme case of Making some statements and asking for advice isn't a question. I remember in version X, we used to be able to accomplish Task Q by clicking on W and then selecting X. Now you have to click on Y and select Z. Nost...

So I didn't win the shopautodotca seocontest search engine optimization contest, so I decided to check on how the actual winners were faring. After all, one of the winners was supposed to become the company's SEO manager. The top prize winners in the Google category and in the MSN category have both complained that they haven't received their p...