The Old New Thing

June 2009 - Page 2 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Oh great, and my phone even has a CPU meter

June 23, 2009 Jun 23, 2009 06/23/09
Raymond Chen
These fancy-dancy IP phones never cease to make me wonder what our world has come to. I remember when a telephone was a bucket of carbon granules and a momentary switch, and the rotary dial was just a mechanism for going on and off hook at a precise frequency. (Indeed, sometimes for fun, I'll pulse-dial a phone by tapping on the hook.) The ...

High school students guess what happens to money deposited into checking accounts

June 22, 2009 Jun 22, 2009 06/22/09
Raymond Chen
In August 2007, the results of the first nationwide high school economics graduation tests were released. (Download the report [pdf].) It appears that the results were better than expected, but let's not celebrate too quickly: The results were that 42% of students rated "Proficient" and 3% "Advanced". And only 52% of the students could answer...

Why does a flashing taskbar result in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode?

June 22, 2009 Jun 22, 2009 06/22/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn't know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so I went spelunking ...

The butter and the money for the butter

June 19, 2009 Jun 19, 2009 06/19/09
Raymond Chen
In a discussion a few years ago, I saw the phrase, "Now you have the butter and the money." This was new to me, and a little Web searching (guided in part by a guess at the author's nationality) revealed it to be a French proverb, the full version of which is On ne peut pas avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre: "You can't have the butter and...

You can’t leave a critical section you never entered

June 19, 2009 Jun 19, 2009 06/19/09
Raymond Chen
If you call on a critical section you never entered, the behavior is undefined. Critical sections are an extremly high-traffic code path. Intense work goes into making them as fast as possible. Customers like to ask questions like "Exactly how many cycles does it take to enter a critical section? We're not going to use them if they're too ...
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The dangers of mixing synchronous and asynchronous state

June 18, 2009 Jun 18, 2009 06/18/09
Raymond Chen
The window manager distinguishes between synchronous state (the state of the world based on what messages your program has received) and asynchronous state (the actual state of the world this very instant). We saw this earlier when discussing the difference between GetKeyState and GetAsyncKeyState. Here are some other functions and their ...
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Welcome to Leavenworth, Washington’s faux-Bavarian village

June 17, 2009 Jun 17, 2009 06/17/09
Raymond Chen
The dying logging town of Leavenworth, Washington reinvented itself in the 1960's as a faux-Bavarian village. Today, over a million tourists visit annually to enjoy the scenic mountain views, soak in the fake Bavarian atmosphere, and revel in events like the Leavenworth International Accordion Celebration which starts tomorrow, or the three-...

Sure, I can get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages, but why do they keep streaming in?

June 17, 2009 Jun 17, 2009 06/17/09
Raymond Chen
I wrote some time ago that the window manager generates spurious messages in order to let programs know that the mouse has entered the window even if the reason was a window hierarchy reshuffle rather than a physical motion of the pointing device. But some people have noticed that that explanation fails to account for all the messages that...

Management-speak: Upping the sats and stimulating the ecosystem

June 16, 2009 Jun 16, 2009 06/16/09
Raymond Chen
Here's another sentence that's so loaded with buzzwords and buzzphrases I'm not sure what language it's written in. I just want to have creative control over how my audience can interact with me without resorting to complex hacking in a way that is easy to explain but ups our blogging audiences sats to a new level that may also stimulate a ...