The Old New Thing

January 2009 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

If you have full trust, then you can do anything, so don’t be surprised that you can do bad things, too

January 21, 2009 Jan 21, 2009 01/21/09
Raymond Chen
This is another example of the dubious security vulnerability known as wrapping a simple idea inside layers of obfuscation and then thinking that somehow the obfuscation is the source of the problem. First of all, consider this: Suppose a program calls one of its own functions but gets the calling convention wrong and ends up corrupting ...
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If you didn’t like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help

January 20, 2009 Jan 20, 2009 01/20/09
Raymond Chen
I find it surprising how often this happens. A customer liaison will send a question to a mailing list like this: From: X To: Gizmo Discussion Hi, everybody. My customer is using the Gizmo Toolkit and wants to frob a gizmo without first registering as a frobber. They created the gizmo with CreateGizmo, passing all the default flags, and...

Why isn’t the screen resolution a per-user setting?

January 19, 2009 Jan 19, 2009 01/19/09
Raymond Chen
Via the suggestion box, Dominic Self asks why screen resolution is a global setting rather than a per-user setting. Well, first of all, it's not even a global setting. It's a session setting. That it's not a global setting is not readily apparent most of the time since only Windows Terminal Server is set up to support multiple simultaneous ...

You cannot pre-emptively reserve a file extension

January 16, 2009 Jan 16, 2009 01/16/09
Raymond Chen
The following question came in from a customer: If our program isn't installed and users double-click our document, they get sent to a Web site that presents a list of programs, but we want to send the user directly to our download site. How do we claim a file extension for our application? Um, you don't. You cannot pre-emptively ...

If you’re at a Thai restaurant with a Thai person who’s ordering food in Thai, and she asks you if you like your food spicy, think twice before answering

January 15, 2009 Jan 15, 2009 01/15/09
Raymond Chen
I think you see where this is going. I'm at a Thai restaurant with my sister-in-law, who is Thai. She's talking with the waitress in Thai, and she discovers that the restaurant's cook is someone she knows. And since she's from Thailand, she assumes the task of ordering the food, since she knows what's good and what isn't. During their ...

What is this magic setting that synthesizes Unicode from non-Unicode?

January 15, 2009 Jan 15, 2009 01/15/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter dan g. wonders how Windows can treat non-Unicode applications as Unicode via the Regional and Language Options control panel, specifically the part that lets you choose the Language for non-Unicode programs. "Having always believed that the only way to display, say, Chinese characters correctly was to compile with _UNICODE, this ...

The day shell.windows.com went down

January 14, 2009 Jan 14, 2009 01/14/09
Raymond Chen
When the file association Web service was first being developed, the programmer responsible for implementing the feature just scrounged around and found an old unused computer and set it up as a simple Web server under his desk, so there would be something to test the code against. That server happily churned away serving out file extension ...

Excessive speed appeared to be a factor in the crash

January 13, 2009 Jan 13, 2009 01/13/09
Raymond Chen
In February 2007, a serious automobile accident took place in southwest Washington. A twelve-year-old boy was at the wheel of an SUV when he lost control and struck another vehicle. According to the sheriff's office, "Excessive speed appeared to be a factor in the crash." I dunno, I think a major factor is that a twelve-year-old was behind ...