The Old New Thing

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

Separating the metadata from the DIB pixels: Changing the raster operation

July 16, 2009 Jul 16, 2009 07/16/09
Raymond Chen
For a few days now, we've used the SetDIBitsToDevice function in conjunction with a precomputed BITMAPINFO to draw a DIB with an alternate color table without modifying the HBITMAP. The SetDIBitsToDevice function operates like a BitBlt with raster operation SRCCOPY. If you want another raster operation, you can use StretchDIBits, which has...
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On gender differences in expectations of thinness, and the impact on guys who live in their parents' basement

July 15, 2009 Jul 15, 2009 07/15/09
Raymond Chen
At dinner a few years ago, one of my friends brought up a study (which I can't find, so who knows if it's actually true, but let's assume it's true for the sake of the story) that examined the effect of gender differences in expectations of thinness. One of the factors that the study considered was sexual orientation, and they found that ...

Separating the metadata from the DIB pixels: Precalculating the BITMAPINFO

July 15, 2009 Jul 15, 2009 07/15/09
Raymond Chen
Last time, we saw that you can use the SetDIBitsToDevice function to draw a DIB with an alternate color table without having to modify the HBITMAP. In that version of the function, we selected the HBITMAP into a device context in preparation for drawing from it, but in fact that step isn't necessary for drawing. It was merely necessary to ...
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What happens to your restaurant tip?

July 14, 2009 Jul 14, 2009 07/14/09
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, the Seattle Times ran an article on how your restaurant tip gets divided up among the staff. A week later, they ran an entire article of responses to the original article, some from customers, but many from restaurant staff (both cooks and servers). And, now on a roll, the next week's food section looked at the sociology of...

The fun and profit of manipulating the DIB color table can be done without having to modify it

July 14, 2009 Jul 14, 2009 07/14/09
Raymond Chen
If I were Michael Kaplan, I'd have a more clever title like I'm not touching you! or Look but don't touch or maybe Looking at a DIB through BITMAPINFO-colored glasses. We saw some time ago that you can manipulate the DIB color table to perform wholesale color remapping. But in fact you can do this even without modifying the DIB color ...
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Failed follow-up: The case of the dubious dental work

July 13, 2009 Jul 13, 2009 07/13/09
Raymond Chen
I've been waiting for an opportunity to do a follow-up on this story, but the trail appears to have gone cold. Here's the story as we know it so far: In 2004, a woman (who had previously run unsuccessfully for a city council position) files a $6,370 claim for dental work against McDonald's, claiming that she injured her teeth biting into a ...

Speculation on how a mishandled 13-character string can result in a blue screen

July 13, 2009 Jul 13, 2009 07/13/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter nolan reminisces about an old Windows 95 bug in the networking layer that crashed if a string was exactly 13 characters long. "So for the past 10 years or so, I've been wondering exactly how one could write code with that bug. Any bug that weird has to have a great story behind it." I don't know what the story behind it is, ...

The world reaction to the unexpected death of Michael Jackson extends to young children

July 10, 2009 Jul 10, 2009 07/10/09
Raymond Chen
I had occasion to meet up with the same family whose two-year-old was learning to lie in an earlier story. It was only a day or two after the death of Michael Jackson, and the older sister (five years old) told me, "Did you know? Michael Jackson, he went to sleep and he is never going to wake up." Her younger sister (now three), corrected ...

If dynamic DLL dependencies were tracked, they'd be all backwards

July 10, 2009 Jul 10, 2009 07/10/09
Raymond Chen
Whenever the issue of DLL dependencies arises, I can count on somebody arguing that these dynamic dependencies should be tracked, even if doing so cannot be proven to be reliable. Even if one could walk the call stack reliably, you would still get it wrong. The example I gave originally was the common helper library, where A.DLL loads B.DLL ...
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Film students and The Bicycle Thief

July 9, 2009 Jul 9, 2009 07/9/09
Raymond Chen
The current generation of young people grew up in a very different world from us older folks. There has always been an Internet. Everybody is accessible by mobile phone. Cars have always had power windows. (Which reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who has an older-model car and was giving a ride to an eight-year-old relative. The ...