The Old New Thing

August 2009 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

City noises and their effects on songbirds

August 24, 2009 Aug 24, 2009 08/24/09
Raymond Chen
Robins in Sheffield sing at night because it's too noisy in the daytime. That reminds me that when I was in Antigua, Guatemala, I was told that the songbirds in the city have started mimicking car alarms. Apparently this is also happening in Oregon with birds mimicking car alarms and cell phone ring tones...

The operating system doesn't know which language programs are written in – by the time the code hits the CPU, they all look the same

August 24, 2009 Aug 24, 2009 08/24/09
Raymond Chen
Reader Will Rayer asks about "the degree to which 'plain vanilla' C Windows API code works under Vista with the native look and feel." It works just as well as code written in any other language. The operating system doesn't know which language programs are written in. By the time the code reaches the CPU, they all look the same. It's just ...

Restating the obvious about the WM_NOTIFY message

August 21, 2009 Aug 21, 2009 08/21/09
Raymond Chen
It appears that people seemed to appreciate restating the obvious about the message, so I'll try it again with the message. The message is typically used by a control to communicate with its parent, either to provide information, request it, or both. Although that is the typical use, there are exceptions. For example, property sheets ...

Why does Windows wait longer than my screen saver idle timeout before starting the screen saver?

August 20, 2009 Aug 20, 2009 08/20/09
Raymond Chen
You may find yourself in a situation where Windows takes longer than your specified screen saver idle timeout to start the screen saver. First of all, there are ways for programs to block the screen saver entirely. Calling , is how a program says, "Even though there is no mouse or keyboard input, the screen is indeed in use, so don't blank it...

There's no law that says a meeting can't end early

August 19, 2009 Aug 19, 2009 08/19/09
Raymond Chen
Meetings run over all the time. In fact, you might say that that's their natural state. Meetings think gases are lazy. Whereas a gas expands to fill its container, a meeting expands to exceed the size of its container. It requires good management skills to keep all your meetings on schedule. And it takes great management skills to get them ...

Microspeak: Action on

August 18, 2009 Aug 18, 2009 08/18/09
Raymond Chen
I have been fortunate to have been spared exposure to this particular corner of Microspeak, but others have not been so lucky. Have you actioned on this ask? It's not clear whether actioning on something means that you've started it or you've finished it. As a result, this is another case of using jargon to impede communication. The ...

Why can't I declare a type that derives from a generic type parameter?

August 14, 2009 Aug 14, 2009 08/14/09
Raymond Chen
A lot of questions about C# generics come from the starting point that they are just a cutesy C# name for C++ templates. But while the two may look similar in the source code, they are actually quite different. C++ templates are macros on steroids. No code gets generated when a template is "compiled"; the compiler merely hangs onto the ...

Landing the Space Shuttle is hard enough as it is

August 13, 2009 Aug 13, 2009 08/13/09
Raymond Chen
I was at The Museum of Flight and was waiting my turn at the Space Shuttle landing simulator. A six-year-old settled into the control seat, and as the simulation began I heard him ask his father, "Where are the bad guys?" I'm pretty sure the Space Shuttle doesn't come with onboard missiles. That didn't stop the kid from pressing the ...