The Old New Thing

Identity theft via repeated name changes

In the United States, it is legal to change your name as many times as you like, and you don't even have to have a reason, as long as you're not doing it with fraudulent intent. The ease with which name changes can be accomplished has been exploited by people who use it to carry out identity theft. Creditors coming after you? Change your name...

Those notification icons, with their clicks, double-clicks, right-clicks… what’s up with that?

(A completely feeble attempt to mimic Michael Kaplan's blog entry titles which carry a much stronger voice.) Jonathan Hardwick made a short table of inconsistencies in how various programs handle clicks on their notification icons. How are these supposed to work? The final decision is up to the application, since it is the one that ...

Qrystal does more research into those spam blogs

Blogger Qrystal got hit with blog trackback spam and did research into the phenomenon, even discovering the author trying to sell the spam blog. And he had to cut the price because Google AdSense has cut him off. Ha, ha, haaahhhhh~! (Read the blog entry for the spammer's for-sale offers and other linkity goodness...

Why is there sometimes a half-second delay between the click and the action?

There are places in the user interface where you may click to perform an action, but the action doesn't actually take place until a half second later. Why is there a half-second delay? Because it's waiting to see if the user is on the way to a double-click. Some users simply double-click everything in sight, and depending on what the ...
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A simple bar chart on letter distribution

I was visiting a colleague's office in another building and I spotted a whiteboard on which the following enigmatic bar chart was drawn. The source data for the analysis was left unspecified. It looks like there's an entire Web site devoted to profound charts like this. For example, a graph of beer bottle distribution as a function of ...

What kind of uncle am I?

Like every language, English has its own collection of words to express family relationships. There are the easy ones like mother, father, brother, and sister. Also comparatively easy are cousin, aunt, uncle, niece and nephew. But most people don't know about this "removal" part, beyond the fact that your "first cousin twice removed" is ...

The Start menu pin list is just a list of items; there’s no magic

Commenter Kevin Dente asks, "Is it possible to put a folder on the Start Menu Pin list and have it cascade?" No. The last time I checked (which was back in Windows XP), the Start menu pin list was a list, not a menu. (Specifically, a list view in tile mode.) When you click on the icon, it launches. There is no code to say "Oh, if this ...

No, we’re not nerds, why do you ask?

Last year, to celebrate successful completion of a project milestone, our group went on a "cultural expedition" to a glass-blowing studio where we were to learn about the craft of glass blowing and even do some of it ourselves. (By the way, it was fun.) One of the glassblowers had been making a lot of little jokes about Frodo and Mount Doom...

Why are there two values for PSH_WIZARD97?

Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only. If you go cruising through the commctrl.h header file, you'll find that there are two different definitions for PSH_WIZARD97: #if (_WIN32_IE >= 0x0400) ... #if (_WIN32_IE < 0x0500) #define PSH_WIZARD97 0x00002000 #else #define ...