Showing results for November 2009 - The Old New Thing

Nov 30, 2009
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Umpires are the lymphatic system of the baseball diamond

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When I go to a baseball game, I try to remember to watch the umpires. They move around in a counter-intuitive way: They don't run toward the ball. They don't run toward the runner. Even when the ball is far away, the umpire runs from what appears to be one irrelevant position on the field to another equally irrelevant position. Yet no matter what e...

Non-Computer
Nov 30, 2009
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Where did WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN come from?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter asdf wonders where came from. The symbol was introduced in the Windows 95 time frame as a way to exclude a bunch of Windows header files when you include . You can take a look at your file to see which ones they are. The symbol was added as part of the transition from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows. The 16-bit header file di...

History
Nov 27, 2009
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How does Raymond get rid of his excess pennies?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Commenter Boris mentions that he uses NJ Transit to get rid of his excess pennies. But what do you do if your area isn't served by NJ Transit? I use the self-checkout line at the grocery store. The machine has a slot for accepting coins, and you can drop pennies in there until your arm falls off. I don't do this when the grocery store is crowded,...

Non-Computer
Nov 27, 2009
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Caches are nice, but they confuse memory leak detection tools

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Knowledge Base article 139071 has the technically correct but easily misinterpreted title FIX: OLE Automation BSTR caching will cause memory leak sources in Windows 2000. The title is misleading because it makes you think that Oh, this is a fix for a memory leak in OLE Automation, but that's not what it is. The is the string type used by OLE Aut...

Tips/Support
Nov 26, 2009
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I want to take all your chocolate milk

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

My older niece visited me at work one day, and I got her a carton of chocolate milk, which she very much enjoyed. Some days later, she told me, "I want to go to your work." "Why?" I asked. "I want to take all your chocolate milk." Missing from the story is that upon returning home after that first visit, she told everybody about her awesome visi...

Non-Computer
Nov 26, 2009
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When you want to copy a file into a folder, make sure you have a folder

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

This story is inspired by an actual customer problem. The program is used for TPS management, and when you want to create a new TPS report, you have to pick a cover sheet. The program shows you the cover sheets that have been defined, which it loads from the directory. The customer found that on one of the machines, the cover sheets weren't...

Tips/Support
Nov 25, 2009
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The magic of chocolate milk

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

While enjoying a meal with my nieces (at the time, ages 3 and 5), I diluted my chocolate milk to cut the sweetness. The nieces then demanded that I dilute their chocolate milk as well, because as far as they could determine, it was a magical way to create more chocolate milk.

Non-Computer
Nov 25, 2009
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How do I get the command line of another process?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Win32 doesn't expose a process's command line to other processes. From Win32's point of view, the command line is just a conveniently initialized parameter to the process's startup code, some data copied from the launching process to the new process and forgotten. We'll get back to the Win32 point of view a little later. If you look around in W...

Code
Nov 24, 2009
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When computer programmers dabble in making change

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

My colleague who dabbled in economics when deciding how many lunch vouchers to buy had a number of other money-related quirks. One of the ones that I remember is that when paying for a purchase, my colleague would double the balance and give the cashier that much money. For example, if the total was $5.20, my colleague would hand over $10.40. Wh...

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