Showing results for October 2009 - The Old New Thing

Here's an excerpt from a conversation on the subject of Hallowe'en which I had with my niece some time ago. Let's call her "Cathy". (This is a different Cathy from last time.) "Cathy, what do you do on Hallowe'en?" "You get all dressed up and people give you candy." "What do you say when people come to the door?" "Chuck-E-Cheese!"

It tries to be DOS date/time format but misses.

(Employing the snowclone "What this X needs is more Y.") Each time you add a parsing pass to the batch processor, you have to add another layer of escaping. This is just a special case of the more general rule of thumb: any problem in quoting can be solved by adding another layer of escaping. (Okay, it's not actually true, nor is it a rule o...

Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only. Sometimes it takes people a little while before they realize this: I apologize for posting the link to the "Old New Thing" blog. [...] I have read a few articles in the "Old New Thing" blog and so far I have not seen much that is useful there.

When you view your pictures with the Photo Gallery program which comes with Windows Vista, and which is also available for download from live.com, you might see a colored tinge. Where is the tinge coming from, and how do you get rid of it? Ironically, what you're actually seeing is the absence of a tinge, but you got so used to seeing the tinge, ...

Everybody should know by now that it is not true that pull tabs from aluminum cans can be redeemed for time on a dialysis machine. Of course, not everybody actually knows this, and then the next question is, well, what happens to all those pull tabs collected by misinformed people? The Snopes article explains that it depends on where you turn in...

Some time ago, I ran across the following Freudian typo in a mail thread discussing plans for the project after Milestone 3, commonly abbreviated M3. I'd like to talk with you about your plans for this area after <3. On the US-English keyboard layout, the M and comma keys are adjacent, and a shifted comma is a less-than sign. A simple of...

The utility has been around for a while, but in Windows 7, it gained a little bit more awesome. will analyze your computer's power consumption and report on things like devices that prevent the computer from sleeping, devices which won't suspend, and processes which are increasing your battery drain. Another neat flag is which will repo...

Sean W. requests, via the suggestion box, "an in-depth discussion of the use of the shell's new Desktop Window Manager (Dwm*) functions in Win32." The desktop window manager is not actually part of the shell. It operates at the window manager level. (Notice that DWM is active even when Explorer isn't running.) You probably should have posted your...

A customer reported a crash inside a function we'll call : The title of today's entry gives the answer away. (The title is also an exaggeration, but it's a pun on the saying If you have to ask, you can't afford it.) The last parameter to the function is declared as a : A pointer to a generic pointer. Note that it is not itself a generic poi...