October 30, 2009Oct 30, 200910/30/09Here’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.”
October 30, 2009Oct 30, 200910/30/09Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend.
Windows 98/98/Me recorded the date and time at which Setup was run in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion as a binary value named FirstInstallDateTime. What is the format of this data?
October 29, 2009Oct 29, 200910/29/09(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.
October 28, 2009Oct 28, 200910/28/09Remember, 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”
October 28, 2009Oct 28, 200910/28/09When 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?
October 27, 2009Oct 27, 200910/27/09Everybody 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?
October 27, 2009Oct 27, 200910/27/09Some 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,
October 26, 2009Oct 26, 200910/26/09The powercfg utility has been around for a while, but in Windows 7, it gained a little bit more awesome.
powercfg /energy will analyze your computer’s power consumption and report on things like devices that prevent the computer from sleeping, devices which won’t suspend,
October 26, 2009Oct 26, 200910/26/09Sean 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.
October 23, 2009Oct 23, 200910/23/09A customer reported a crash inside a function we’ll call
XyzConnect:
DWORD XyzConnect(
__in DWORD ConnectionType,
__in PCWSTR Server,
__in PCWSTR Target,
__out void **Handle);
…
// HACK – Create a dummy structure to pass to the XyzConnect
// function to avoid AV within the function.
