The Old New Thing

June 2009 - Page 3 of 5 - The Old New Thing

Happening to be at the same post-concert restaurant as symphony performers

June 15, 2009 Jun 15, 2009 06/15/09
Raymond Chen
Getting out of the parking garage immediately after the symphony ends is usually a bit of an ordeal, so my symphony group tends to linger downtown for some coffee or dessert, allowing time for the post-symphony traffic jams to clear out. The other night, we went to the Union restaurant just a block from Benaroya Hall. (Verdict: Not a good ...

Why do some file operations take file names and others take handles?

June 15, 2009 Jun 15, 2009 06/15/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter Brian Friesen asks why some functions (like SetFileAttributes) take a file name, while others (like SetFileTime) take a handle and why we can't have two versions of every API, one for each pattern. Second question first: No need to wait for the kernel folks to write such a function; you can already do it yourself! // Following...

Fortune cookie fortunes are getting less and less interesting all the time

June 12, 2009 Jun 12, 2009 06/12/09
Raymond Chen
I remember reading a story about the history of fortune cookie fortunes, and how the pool of fortunes has been getting smaller because people keep complaining about them. In the article, they gave as an example that the fortune "You will meet a stranger" was removed from the fortune library because somebody complained that it was too scary. ...

Spam trackback attack week 2 statistics

June 11, 2009 Jun 11, 2009 06/11/09
Raymond Chen
The trackback spam attack is well into its second week now. The people who run blogs.msdn.com blocked all access from the IP address block, which not only blocks trackbacks but also prevents them from reading the content (and therefore prevents them from scraping). Undaunted, the sites just moved to a new IP address...

Why does Explorer use the term KB instead of KiB?

June 11, 2009 Jun 11, 2009 06/11/09
Raymond Chen
Although the International Electronic Commission established the term kibibyte for 1024 bytes, with the abbreviation KiB, Windows Explorer continues to use the abbreviation KB. Why doesn't Explorer get with the program? Because nobody else is on the program either. If you look around you, you'll find that nobody (to within experimental ...

Foreign languages can be used as a secret code, but it’s not always a good secret code

June 10, 2009 Jun 10, 2009 06/10/09
Raymond Chen
Some years ago, I went out to dinner with a group of friends to a Chinese restaurant, and when the check was delivered to the table, one of my friends looked at it and handed it to me. "It appears to be written in some sort of secret code." It was written in Chinese. I pointed out that they probably chose the worst possible code in the ...

Why does MS-DOS use 8.3 filenames instead of, say, 11.2 or 16.16?

June 10, 2009 Jun 10, 2009 06/10/09
Raymond Chen
When I discussed years ago why operating system files tend to follow the old 8.3 file name convention, I neglected to mention why the old MS-DOS filename convention was 8.3 and not, say, 11.2 or 16.16. It's a holdover from CP/M. As I noted when I discussed the old MS-DOS wildcard matching rules, MS-DOS worked hard at being compatible ...

Mixed messages from the IT department regarding email safety

June 9, 2009 Jun 9, 2009 06/9/09
Raymond Chen
TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the "read all standard mail in plain text" setting. And that reminded me of a story. Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased ...

On the importance of sanity-checking values where money is involved

June 8, 2009 Jun 8, 2009 06/8/09
Raymond Chen
Last year, one of my colleagues noticed that one particular company's stock, which normally trades in the mid- to upper-$20 range, showed one day of extremely unusual results, very similar to the last example in this series of funny screenshots. Closer inspection revealed that there was an order to buy 28 shares at $100,000. Obviously...