September 21, 2009Sep 21, 200909/21/09One of the restaurants that opened at the new Microsoft Commons is Spitfire, which opened under its own name instead of one of the many wonderful alternatives proposed. At The Commons, the dining establishments operate in a variety of ways (cafeteria,
September 21, 2009Sep 21, 200909/21/09Commenter sarathc asks, “How do we implement a custom scroll bar as Windows does? What is the logic behind the thumb size and position calculation? How we could dynamically manage it?”
Let’s look at the three questions in turn.
To implement a custom scroll bar…
September 18, 2009Sep 18, 200909/18/09A few years ago, Larry Osterman explained the famous beeping death. Windows 95 had its own noise-related death, what nobody has called ticking death, but that’s what I’m going to call it. (Let’s see how long before somebody decide to add it to Wikipedia.)
When your machine fell into ticking death,
September 17, 2009Sep 17, 200909/17/09Commenter Dave jokingly remarked, “I’ve grown used to handling characters with ASCII. (If it was good enough to represent every character in the US Constitution, it’s good enough for me.)”
But there’s a double-joke in there. You see, not every character in the United States Constitution can be represented in ASCII!
September 16, 2009Sep 16, 200909/16/09To support my claim that Renton has a reputation for being a working-class town, I submit this article from last week’s news: Hooters too pretentious for us, some Renton, South Park locals say.
September 16, 2009Sep 16, 200909/16/09Occasionally, a customer will run into a problem that manifests itself only when Autologon is enabled. Here are some examples:
If we log on manually, everything works just fine. But if we log on using Autologon with the same userid and password,
September 15, 2009Sep 15, 200909/15/09If you lived in the New York metropolitan area in the 1980’s, you couldn’t avoid the advertisements for electronics store Crazy Eddie. What I didn’t realize until now was that the retail establishment was a criminal operation from day one. Sam Antar,
September 15, 2009Sep 15, 200909/15/09When you open the Start menu and type into the search box, sometimes the first search result is autoselected (so you just have to hit Enter), whereas sometimes See more results is autoselected. Is there a method to this madness?
If an item is found in the Programs and Control Panel sections,
September 14, 2009Sep 14, 200909/14/09I spent the other night at a relative’s house, and I was woken the next morning by my young niece who politely asked me to make her breakfast. (Her technique for waking me up is to come in and call my name.
September 14, 2009Sep 14, 200909/14/09Adrian McCarthy asks, “Can you create an information context for the display? … I can call CreateDC(“DISPLAY”), but perhaps that wouldn’t generalize for a multiple-monitor display with different settings on each screen. I’m trying to avoid constantly creating and destroying DCs when all I need to do is measure strings,
