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August 31, 2009Aug 31, 200908/31/09A conversation between two friends of mine.
Friend 1: Here’s the fifteen dollars I owe you. Oh wait, I only have a twenty. Do you have a five?
Friend 2: I don’t carry cash. Everybody takes credit cards.
Friend 1: I don’t take credit cards.
August 31, 2009Aug 31, 200908/31/09Commenter David wonders
why new controls tend to use COM instead of window messages.
“It seems
that there must have been a decision to only
develop COM controls after the invention of COM.”
There have been plenty of Win32 controls invented after the invention
of COM.
August 28, 2009Aug 28, 200908/28/09On the weekend of November 10 during the 2007–2008 Seattle Symphony season, the symphony performed both Brahms piano concerti and two of his symphonies in consecutive concerts. My subscription included one of them, and I bought a separate ticket to the other one,
August 28, 2009Aug 28, 200908/28/09The naming convention for HRESULT is «facility»_«severity»_«name», where the facility portion (and the underscore) is omitted if the facility is FACILITY_NULL or FACILITY_WIN32.
Good luck finding anybody who follows this naming convention.
Okay, fine, if you look closely you might be able to find some people who do.
August 27, 2009Aug 27, 200908/27/09I’m always amused when somebody announces that they’re having a geek dinner at a technology conference. I mean, at a conference like that, every dinner is a geek dinner. The geek density is so high, +4 enchanted vorpal swords quiver in fear.
August 27, 2009Aug 27, 200908/27/09As MSDN correctly notes, “Timers are a limited global resource.” How limited are they? (We’re talking about timers created by SetTimer.)
Not as limited as they once were.
Originally, there were eight timers total for the entire system. When there are only eight timers,
August 26, 2009Aug 26, 200908/26/09A customer wanted to prevent users from copying files to certain locations, and they did it by hooking functions like SHFileOperation and failing the operation if the parameters were not to its liking. The customer found that the hooks stopped working in Windows Vista because Explorer in Windows Vista uses the new IFileOperation COM interface instead of using the old SHFileOperation function.
August 26, 2009Aug 26, 200908/26/09In 1987, The Flying Karamazov Brothers performed their interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors. When I watched this show (part 1, part 2) when it first aired, it was my introduction both to the juggling team and to the play. It also reinforced my impression that Shakespeare was meant to be performed and not merely read.
August 25, 2009Aug 25, 200908/25/09Yesterday, I finished composing the last entry taken from an item in Suggestion Box 3. My prediction that the backlog would clear in early 2010 was off by exactly one year: The last Suggestion Box 3 entry is scheduled to be posted on January 3,
August 25, 2009Aug 25, 200908/25/09The other day I was working in my office minding my own business when I suddenly lost network connectivity. I couldn’t contact any machines other than the ones in my office.
When this happens, I go through some basic troubleshooting steps.
