Showing archive results for 2009

Commenter 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... don't do it. It's just not worth the effort, and there will almost always be little...

A 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, each time you moved the mouse or pressed a ...

Commenter 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! If you take a close look, you'...

To 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.

What happens when you log on too quickly.

If 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, Crazy Eddie CFO, and nephew of company namesake Eddie Antar, talks us through the entire operatio...

When 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, then the first such is autoselected. Otherwise, the def...

I 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. If the door is closed, she pounds on the bedroom door and shouts, "Wake up! Wake up!" If I fail to open the door, she opens it herself. If the ...

Adrian 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, check color depth, dpi, etc...

You have a house for sale. You hold an open house. But not everybody who attends is there because they're interested in buying the house. The first wave are neighbors who are curious about the house they've seen for years only from the outside. Then there are the people who just enjoy looking at other people's houses. And occasionally, people dro...