The Old New Thing

An unexpected application of negative numbers to gift-giving

October 4, 2012 Oct 4, 2012 10/4/12

Raymond Chen

A college classmate of mine informed me that one of his colleagues had planned his wedding so far in advance that on his negative-first anniversary (i.e., precisely one year before his anticipated wedding date), he gave paper to all of his friends. Said my classmate, "It's too bad that neither of us had been born on his −50th ...

Why does RegOpenKey sometimes (but not always) fail if I use two backslashes instead of one?

October 4, 2012 Oct 4, 2012 10/4/12

Raymond Chen

A customer reported that on Windows XP, they observed that their program would very rarely get the error when they passed two backslashes instead of one to the function: After removing C++ escapes, the resulting string passed to is The failure was very sporadic and not reproducible under controlled conditions. Well, first of ...

How do I suppress the default animation that occurs when I hide or show a window?

October 3, 2012 Oct 3, 2012 10/3/12

Raymond Chen

A customer wanted to know how they can disable the default fade-in/fade-out animation that occurs when a window is hidden or shown. "I don't want to use because that causes my window to disappear from the taskbar. I tried but that affects the entire desktop and is too jarring. We want to suppress the effect because our program replaces one ...

Microspeak: Granular

October 2, 2012 Oct 2, 2012 10/2/12

Raymond Chen

Today's Microspeak word is granular. Here are some citations. Please bring your cost estimates at the granularity of 3, 5 or 10 days. The archive function archives all data older than the date specified. Is there a way to get the archive to be more granular than just a date? Our database covers multiple accounts, and we'd like to choose a ...

What's the difference between F5 and F8 at the boot screen?

October 1, 2012 Oct 1, 2012 10/1/12

Raymond Chen

Ian B wondered what the difference is between pressing F5 and F8 while Windows is booting. I have no idea either. My strategy was to just mash on the function keys, space bar, DEL key, anything else I can think of. Keep pressing them all through the boot process, and maybe a boot menu will show up. The F5 hotkey was introduced in Windows&...

The Old New Thing

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