Showing archive results for 2011

Many years ago, I called the home of my Chinese-speaking nieces. This was before they started learning English and before I started learning their dialect of Chinese. After the call was over, the eldest niece asked, "Who was that on the phone?" "That was Uncle Raymond." "Oh, I want to talk to Uncle Raymond!" Her mother replied, "That'd be like ...

One of the audio features added to Windows 7 goes by the formal name stream attenuation, but it is more commonly known to people in the audio world as ducking. Ducking is the process of lowering the volume of background sounds in order to draw more attention to the foreground sound. For example, when you're watching a big battle scene in a s...

What if Jersey Shore were actually a play written by Oscar Wilde? Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing from Broadway's current production of The Importance of Being Earnest explore that premise in a five-part series titled "Jersey Shore" Gone Wilde, drawing its dialogue from things actually said on "Jersey Shore". The dialogue and delivery are ...

One of the "obvious" solutions to the issue of how much work you're willing to do to save 68KB of disk space was to replace one of the copies with a stub that launches the other copy. If you try this obvious solution, you may run into some compatibility issues. First of all, there are programs which launch Notepad and then wait on the process ...

My niece wanted to play my piano, and I asked her to wash her hands. She said, "I don't need that, I have Magic Soap," and she produced a bottle of hand sanitizer. Um, the purpose of washing your hands isn't so the piano doesn't get sick. My piano-instructor cousin-in-law tells me that her young students often say, "My hands are not dirty. They ...

Matt Pietrek noticed that and do exactly the same thing and wondered why there's a separate function for it. It's to assist in debugging and diagnostics. Say you're debugging a problem and when you call you get . It would really help a lot if you could figure out who set the error code to . If you set a breakpoint on , you find that people...

A friend of mind was asked out of the blue, "What does hypo mean?" She started to flash back to high school English class and Greek word roots. "I've started to hear it everywhere. Like Everyone in that meeting is a hypo or We need to reach out to hypos." My friend realized that she had mis-heard the question. It was not about the Greek root hyp...

Anonymous bemoans the fact that pinning programs to the Start menu (in Windows XP) actually pins the shortcut rather than the program itself. This means that if you right-click on a shortcut to pin it, then delete the shortcut, the pinned item stops working. How do you pin the program directly? You pin the program directly by right-clicking ...

A customer asked what started out as a simple question, but by now you know that this sort of simple question only raises new questions: Is there a way that we can detect that the user has hidden our notification icon? No, there is no way to ask whether your notification icon is hidden or visible. Users decide which icons they want to see, and y...

Commenter KiwiBlue asks whether Captcha-style tests were considered to prevent unsigned drivers from programmatically clicking the 'Install anyway' button. I'm sure somebody considered it, but Captcha has its own problems. "Type the (distorted) letters below"-type Captcha cannot be used by people with visual impairments, people who are dyslexic,...