Showing archive results for 2010

A customer was writing a program that called and used the value. The customer wanted to know whether a reported battery life percentage of 38% really means that the remaining battery life is between 37.5% and 38.5%. Although the value is reported to 1% precision, the accuracy in practice is much worse. Similarly, the is reported in seconds, bu...

One way to convince a child to try out an unfamiliar food is to say that it's an alternate form of pizza. Here are some examples. Feel free to add more in the comments. I had originally listed crêpe as French pizza, then realized it's more like a French pancake. (I wonder what the Italian version of pizza would be...)

A customer was running into problems when accessing the pixels of a DIB section. They used the parameter to and created two bitmaps from the same underlying memory. Those two bitmaps were then selected into corresponding DCs, and the customer found that changes to the pixels performed by writing via one DC were not visible when read from the oth...

The other day, I told my niece that I would be eating a moon cake on Wednesday. She asked, "Why? Is it your birthday?" For the record, my favorite flavor is red bean paste. Bonus chatter: The underground economy of moon cakes, moon cake vouchers, and how moon cakes are like fruitcake.

Nothing. Large-address-awareness is a process property, which comes from the EXE.

In 2009, while hosting the Webcast launch of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (what a mouthful; no wonder they renamed it Lync), Stephen Elop claimed that this was the first time Microsoft had launched a major product via Webcast. Elop's crack team of marketing researchers apparently forgot about the Webcast launch, just three months earlie...

Via the Suggestion Box, commenter Twisted Combo responds to an old blog entry on why the size of a combo box includes the height of the drop-down by asking, But how do I *get* the dropped down height?" By using the deviously-named message, which the header file wraps inside the macro. Start with the scratch program and make these changes:...

During my emergency vacation, we stopped at a German supermarket, and my friend loaded up on all sorts of odd and fascinating products. This is something he does every time he travels abroad. At the register, my friend did the work of unloading the cart onto the conveyor belt while I went ahead to bag and to deal with any questions from the cashie...

The way the function treats quotation marks and backslashes has raised eyebrows at times. Let's look at the problem space, and then see what algorithm would work. Here are some sample command lines and what you presumably want them to be parsed as: In the first example, we want quotation marks to protect spaces. In the second example, we want ...

The function does some basic command line parsing. A customer reported that it was producing strange results when you passed an empty string as the first parameter: Well, okay, yeah, but huh? The first parameter to is supposed to be the value returned by . That's the command line, and that's what was designed to parse. If you pass somethin...