Showing archive results for 2010

Commenter Robert May asks via the Suggestion Box whether there is a penalty to pay for using when the sibling windows are not overlapping. When you use the style, the window manager clips out the portion of the client rectangle that is covered by sibling windows. This is usually desirable behavior; otherwise you end up with two windows trying t...

The structure contains a number of fields which record the last time a particular action occurred. Two of the fields seem to describe the same thing. Last­Write­Time The time the file was last written to. Change­Time The time the file was changed. What's the difference between writing to a file and changing it? I'm told that th...

A customer wanted to know how to configure a Remote Desktop Connection shortcut so that the session appears on the monitor of choice. "I have two RDP shortcuts, and each one displays on a different monitor, but I want them all to display on my 20-inch monitor. How do I tell the bad shortcut, 'Hey, use that monitor over there please'?" Normal shell...

The security team gets all sorts of email to report security issues. Nearly 200,000 each year. And of course the reports vary in quality greatly. The ones I'm fascinated by are the crackpots. IMMEDIATE HELP NEEDED, PHONES  PHONE NUMBERS DELETED, EM XXXXXXXX@ GMAIL,HOTMAIL,LIVE,AOL.YAHOO. IM ALMOST POSITIVE HE IS USING BLUETOOTH.  BUT ...

The person responsible for the floppy disk driver in Windows 95 also was responsible for the low-level CD-ROM drivers. (Not to be confused with the CDFS file system, which was handled by the file system team, not the hardware driver folks.) And I remember a story about one particularly strange CD-ROM drive. This drive was produced by a name-b...

In 2001, Boeing moved their corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. This resulted in much wailing and consternation in Seattle, where Boeing had been since its founding in 1915. But every cloud has a silver lining. Seattle is the home of Boeing's passenger jet division, and the presence of corporate executives had added an extra layer of m...

The college professor who carried on a letter exchange with a kind pensioner who proved that the speed of light could be exceeded told me of another letter exchange, this time with another professional mathematician. The letter came from England, and it accompanied some sort of document or artifact that the correspondent wanted the college profes...

If a shell namespace item has the attribute, then it is a shortcut to another location. The most common type of shortcut is the file, which you can load by creating the object and using , but what if you have some other type of shortcut? How do you know what CLSID to use? Since anybody can create their own shortcut file types, a hard-coded li...

KCRW's The Business reveals how the sausage of the entertainment industry is made. Here are some of my favorites:

A customer reported problems launching the default Web browser with the function: This fails with . If you don't pass the flag and leave , then the function will try to figure out what your refers to, looking at the file extension, looking for the file on the , and if all else fails, trying some autocorrection. In this case, the customer...