Showing results for January 2012 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Jan 10, 2012
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News flash: Work-at-home job offers are mostly just scams

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

McClatchy Newspapers discovers, to everyone's surprise, that work-at-home job offers are mostly just scams. Of course, this is something Rob Cockerham discovered years ago. (He also has a rundown of all his articles on the subject, in case you haven't gotten enough.)

Non-ComputerNews flash
Jan 10, 2012
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You can use backups for things other than restoring

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer wanted to know the internal file format of Visual SourceSafe databases. (That wasn't the actual question, but I've translated it into something equivalent but which requires less explanation.) They explained why they wanted this information: We are doing some code engineering analysis on our project, so we need to extract data about eve...

Other
Jan 9, 2012
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From the research journal Duh: To lose weight, eat less

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Researchers have determined that the key to losing weight is to consume fewer calories. Okay, it's actually more interesting than the summary suggests. The researchers compared a variety of different popular diets and found that it didn't matter what diet you were on; the weight loss (and regain) was the same. The controlling factor was how many...

Non-ComputerNews flash
Jan 9, 2012
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What were some of the abandoned features of Explorer back in its prototype days?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days. Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet, continuing the folder/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows 3.1 File Manager pro...

History
Jan 6, 2012
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It must totally suck to live near Abbey Road

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I feel sorry for the people who live near Abbey Road or who have to take that road as part of their daily routine, because tourists keep blocking traffic to recreate the cover of the eponymous Beatles album. The recording studio has a webcam on the intersection so you can watch the mayhem as it happens. Update: Just this morning, I checked out ...

Non-Computer
Jan 6, 2012
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Why did HeapFree fail with ERROR_POSSIBLE_DEADLOCK?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer reported that they were receiving some assertion failures because the function was failing with what they believed to be a valid heap block, and the function reported that the reason for failure was . What's going on? One of my colleagues asked the psychic question, "Is the process exiting?" "Why yes, in fact it is. How did you know?...

Code
Jan 5, 2012
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A joke for mathematicians: On the Weyl schism

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In one of my mathematics classes, the professor noted (and freely admitted that the joke was not original with him), "There are essentially two groups of mathematicians: Those that have read Weyl and those that have not. And once you enter the first group, you will never be understood by anyone in the second group." I guess it's only funny to mat...

Non-Computer
Jan 5, 2012
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When DLL_PROCESS_DETACH tells you that the process is exiting, your best bet is just to return without doing anything

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When the function receives a reason code of , the increasingly-inaccurately-named parameter to is used to indicate whether the process is exiting. And if the process is exiting, then you should just return without doing anything. No, really. Don't worry about freeing memory; it will all go away when the process address space is destroyed. Don...

Code
Jan 4, 2012
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Misleading advertisement: Passports or green cards?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I happened to spot an online advertisement for a company that will help you enter the lottery for a United States Permanent Resident Card, commonly known as a Green Card (even though they card isn't green any more). The advertisement was illustrated with a picture of a United States passport. Um, a Green Card is not the same as a passport, nor d...

Non-Computer
Jan 4, 2012
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Creating context menus on menus

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Last week we looked at menu drag/drop. Another little-used menu feature added in Windows 2000 is the ability to show context menus on menus. The message is and the flag is . Let's demonstrate with a simple program. Start with the scratch program, and add the function just so our context menu can do something. When we receive the me...

Code