July 2009

The guerilla wedding

Raymond Chen July 24, 2009 Jul 24, 2009 07/24/09

When two of my friends were getting married (to each other), there was of course a lot of effort spent on finding the right wedding location. To relieve the tension, when we got together, we would amuse ourselves by coming up with guerilla wedding locations, which was our term for surreptitiously holding a wedding ceremony at a location ...

If you wished a language supported the preprocessor, you know, you can fix that

Raymond Chen July 24, 2009 Jul 24, 2009 07/24/09

A customer had the following question about the message compiler, something that I had noted almost nobody uses. Well how do you do, we found somebody who actually uses it. Anyway, the question went like this (paraphrased, as always): Can I use symbolic constants in my .mc file? For example, I have a message file that goes like this: ...

Changes to the the 2009/2010 Seattle Symphony subscription season, part 2

Raymond Chen July 23, 2009 Jul 23, 2009 07/23/09

The Seattle Symphony made a large number of changes to their 2009/2010 program line-up. I've updated the 2009/2010 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance accordingly. The Brahms Variations on a Theme by Hadyn, the Brahms/Schoenberg Piano Quartet in g minor, and the Shostakovich Symphony #15 moved to different dates, and a large ...

Your debugging code can be a security hole: Contest tickets

Raymond Chen July 23, 2009 Jul 23, 2009 07/23/09

Last year, the Microsoft cafeterias ran a promotion which involved scratch-off tickets and prizes ranging from a free bagel to a new Zune to free airplane tickets. But it turns out that the people who ran the contest left some debugging code behind that became a security hole. As people compared notes on what they did or didn't win, they ...

I saw a fascinating documentary about bugs

Raymond Chen July 22, 2009 Jul 22, 2009 07/22/09

In the September 20, 2007 Dilbert comic, Dilbert says to his date, "I saw a fascinating documentary about bugs." A Year in the Life of Ants...

Microspeak: Whale Boy

Raymond Chen July 22, 2009 Jul 22, 2009 07/22/09

Today is the tenth anniversary of Windows Live Messenger. My colleague Danny Glasser provides some history behind the product, and you can watch a tenth anniversary celebration video created for the occasion. And thus is inspired today's Microspeak: Whale Boy. Whale Boy is the nickname for the pawn-shaped Messenger buddy icon. His normal ...

Proto-Microspeak: Coceptualize

Raymond Chen July 21, 2009 Jul 21, 2009 07/21/09

Many years ago, to see whether anybody was paying attention, a colleague and I slipped the made-up word "coceptualize" into a document. Nobody said a thing. Either nobody read that part of the document, or they did and thought it was a real word...

Why was MoveTo replaced with MoveToEx?

Raymond Chen July 20, 2009 Jul 20, 2009 07/20/09

Commenter Ulric asks, "Where did MoveTo(HDC, int, int) go?" Back in the 16-bit days, the function to move the current point was called MoveTo, and its return value was a DWORD which encoded the previous position, packing two 16-bit coordinates into a single 32-bit value. As part of the transition to 32-bit Windows, GDI switched to using 32-...

The disembodiment of DIBs from the DIB section

Raymond Chen July 17, 2009 Jul 17, 2009 07/17/09

So far this week, we've separated the DIB metadata (BITMAPINFO) from the pixels of a DIB section. But there's really no need for the DIB section at all! As long as you have the pixels and the metadata, you can draw bits. We demonstrate this by drawing a rather stupid-looking bitmap onto the screen, but doing so without the use of HBITMAPs ...

Caption contest: The pinball machine: Results

Raymond Chen July 16, 2009 Jul 16, 2009 07/16/09

It's been quite a while, but a winner in the caption contest has been selected and the prize finally reached its destination. (Mostly due to procrastination on my part. Don't blame the postal service.) The winner is Scott from Australia with his entry Only 5,000 more referrals until MULTIBALL Even though it's kind of low-brow, it made ...

The Old New Thing

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