Showing results for December 2009 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

At 10am on November 30, I received a telephone call at work with "Anonymous" as the caller ID. Strange. But maybe it's the same person who called my office phone from New York at 1am on the day after Thanksgiving and didn't leave a message, and they're just following up on the first business day after the holiday weekend. "Hello?" — Hello, ...

Commenter asdf wonders what the deal is with that header file. Let's set some context. That header file was written back in the time when Windows 98 was still under development. Windows 98 was the first version of Windows to support multiple monitors. At the time, most application authors had Windows 95 as their target platform. ...

Every so often, someone posts a really funny comment, and I feel stupid just posting the remark "Haha, that was funny" or even worse "LOL". So I'm going to try giving them a star instead. Chris Blackwell wins the first star. Hopefully people won't post comments just fishing for a star. (I realize that this is a vain hope and that I will probably...

If you see a long line of people waiting for a phone booth (note: this analogy assumes you remember how phone booths work), and you want to understand the reason for the long line, do you Go to a person waiting in line and begin your investigation there? Go to the phone booth (and the person inside) and begin your investigation there? If t...

Occasionally, when an article in Swedish needs to count off three items, they are not labelled "1, 2, 3" but rather "1, X, 2". Why is that? I asked Jesper Holmberg, and he was kind enough to explain. (The entire exchange naturally was conducted in Swedish. Here's my translation.) As with most of the good things in life, it h...

Nothing.

The only actual citation was a joke, yet it's a trend?

A customer was running into this problem with a shell extension: I am writing a shell namespace extension. I need to get data from a COM server, which requires impersonation via with . As I am just writing an extension into , I am not able to call , anymore from my extension. Is there a way I can start by setting in its COM initialization? I w...

A few years ago, I wrote about a new cell phone directory that charges $15 to give you incorrect information, and from which you have to renew your opt-out every three months. Well, apparently, less than a year later, due to "complaints from consumers and Verizon Wireless," Intelius decided to discontinue the service. Intelius is back in the new...

Now nobody else can have it.