The Old New Thing

March 2009 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Sometimes people don’t even read what they’re typing

March 11, 2009 Mar 11, 2009 03/11/09
Raymond Chen
As an even more extreme case of people seeing something, confirming that they see it, but not actually reading it is someone who sees something, types it into an email message, yet still doesn't read it. Subject: "Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created." exception crashes our ...

The house no-electronics zone

March 10, 2009 Mar 10, 2009 03/10/09
Raymond Chen
In my house, I have designated two rooms as the no-electronics zone. No use of electronic gadgets is allowed. No television, laptops, PDAs, cell phones, handheld video games, you get the idea. The purpose of this section of the house is to interact with other people face-to-face. Now, exceptions have been made for extenuating circumstances...

Why don’t the favorites I copy into the common Favorites directory show up in the Favorites menu of all users?

March 10, 2009 Mar 10, 2009 03/10/09
Raymond Chen
The Favorites menu in Internet Explorer shows the user's favorites. And stuff in the is visible to all users. Therefore, Internet shortcuts placed into the directory should show up on the Favorites menu of all users, right? So why doesn't it work? Because features don't exist by default. It's true that there are a few highly-visible ...

Totally Recall: The meal

March 9, 2009 Mar 9, 2009 03/9/09
Raymond Chen
At lunch, we got the crazy idea of putting together a meal menu consisting entirely of foods which had been the subject of highly-publicized product recalls. And of course, we gave it a name consisting of a really bad pun: Totally Recall. Starter Green leaf lettuce with tomatoes, green onions, and jalapeno peppers. Main course ...

Why doesn’t the MoveWindow function generate the WM_GETMINMAXINFO message?

March 9, 2009 Mar 9, 2009 03/9/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Phil Quirk asks why calling does not result in a message being sent to validate the moved window size. Well, because you moved it after all. You're being trusted to respect your own rules. After all, if you didn't want the window to be wider than 200 pixels, you shouldn't have passed , right? The message is for obtaining ...

Why is the Win32 epoch January 1, 1601?

March 6, 2009 Mar 6, 2009 03/6/09
Raymond Chen
Public Service Announcement: This weekend marks the start of Daylight Saving Time in most parts of the United States. The structure records time in the form of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601. Why was that date chosen? The Gregorian calendar operates on a 400-year cycle, and 1601 is the first year of the cycle that was ...

Race you to the top: The Empire State Building Run-Up

March 5, 2009 Mar 5, 2009 03/5/09
Raymond Chen
The winner completes the race in just ten minutes and seven seconds, but the vertical climb is a killer: Straight up the 1576 steps of the Empire State Building to the Observation deck. (When I visit the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, I use the elevator.) And when it's over, everybody goes to work. What else am I going to ...

Fixups are not the same as rewriting code, they’re just fixups

March 5, 2009 Mar 5, 2009 03/5/09
Raymond Chen
Classically speaking, a linker cannot rewrite the code the compiler generated; its job is merely to resolve symbols. Of course, resolving symbols means that references to those symbols in the code generated by the compiler turn from "I don't know" to "Here it is." Somebody named George appeared to be confused by this, believing that all ...

Microspeak: Year-over-year

March 4, 2009 Mar 4, 2009 03/4/09
Raymond Chen
In economics, the attributive adjective year-over-year means compared to the same time last year. Examples: "Year-over-year sales show a marked improvement." "Expenses continue to fall year over year." (The hyphens disappear when the adjective is used predicatively.) I have only one citation, but it appears that the term has broadened its ...