The Old New Thing

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

You can’t globally reserve screen space; you can put up signs, but if somebody ignores the sign you’ll have to decide how to respond

March 18, 2009 Mar 18, 2009 03/18/09
Raymond Chen
A customer sent the following question with the rather unhelpful subject line Need Help. They're not just looking for help; they're looking for Help with a capital H. We want to make something like an appbar, but without some of the limitations of appbars. For example, like an appbar, we want applications to avoid using the edge of the ...

Raymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball tournament

March 18, 2009 Mar 18, 2009 03/18/09
Raymond Chen
Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, the criterion is the school's graduation rate for basketball players. Lower graduation rate wins. However, if the teams are seeded 11 or more positions apart, I'll give the win to the favorite (just to get rid of ...

Overheard conversation fragment: Shrimp is not vegetables

March 16, 2009 Mar 16, 2009 03/16/09
Raymond Chen
I walked past a woman in the grocery store who was talking on her mobile phone. I only caught one sentence. She said, in an annoyed voice, "Shrimp is not vegetables." (Then again, purple is a fruit, so anything's possible.) Update: manicmarc correctly deduced that the tone and body language of the person on the phone indicated that her ...

Why does the MoveWindow function let you suppress repainting?

March 16, 2009 Mar 16, 2009 03/16/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Phil Quirk asks via the suggestion box why the function lets you suppress repainting. "Shouldn't the OS be able to figure out if the window needs to be repainted?" Indeed the window manager does do a very nice job of figuring it out if you pass , which is the expected value of the parameter. But if you think you're smarter than ...

Raymond rewrites newspaper headlines, episode 2

March 13, 2009 Mar 13, 2009 03/13/09
Raymond Chen
The local community newspaper featured a color photograph of a twelve-year-old student holding a bright orange safety flag while another student crosses the street in front of him. The caption reads as follows: XYZ School 6th-grader John Doe, at right, will be honored Friday night at Safeco Field as one of the state's top safety patrol ...

The perilous quandary of including external drivers on the Windows CD

March 13, 2009 Mar 13, 2009 03/13/09
Raymond Chen
(Technically, it's probably more a dilemma than a quandary, but I like the phrase perilous quandary.) Driver coverage is always a sticking point for Windows deployments. If the Windows CD doesn't include a driver for your particular hardware, you're probably going to say, "Windows sucks. I installed the latest version on my machine and ...

Et tu, Fargo

March 11, 2009 Mar 11, 2009 03/11/09
Raymond Chen
Last year, our friends over in the Fargo campus mocked us wusses for shutting down the campus over something as weenie as a touch of snow. Yesterday, there was a safety alert on the internal company home page: Alert The Fargo Campus is closed effective immediately due to inclement weather. The City of Fargo is pulling the plows from the ...