The Old New Thing

March 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Raymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2013 NCAA men’s basketball tournament

March 19, 2013 Mar 19, 2013 03/19/13
Raymond Chen
Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the number of fans of the basketball team's official Facebook page, or one tenth of the number of fans of the school's athletic department, whichever is greater. The fraction 1/10 is completely arbitrary...

Microspeak: Science project

March 19, 2013 Mar 19, 2013 03/19/13
Raymond Chen
A science project is a feature that is really cool and challenging from a technological standpoint but is way overkill for the end-user scenario at hand. Back in the late 1990's, a bunch of us cooked up this idea for a networked screen saver that ran at night after most people had gone home from work. You told it the physical location and ...

It may be your birthday, but why stop at just the day? Think big!

March 18, 2013 Mar 18, 2013 03/18/13
Raymond Chen
I had the pleasure of meeting a friend of a friend who is an odd, quirky sort, in a wholly endearing sort of way. When her birthday comes around, she isn't satisfied to have just one day of celebration. Or even a week. No, she takes the entire month. The entire month of March is open season for taking her to dinner, getting her a gift, or ...

Playing with the Windows Animation Manager: Moving lots of stuff around

March 15, 2013 Mar 15, 2013 03/15/13
Raymond Chen
We saw last time a sample program that moved a circle around. Today I'll try to build the classic demo of animating a lot of objects in a list. This isn't the prettiest code, but I wanted to make as few changes as possible. Start with the Timer-Driven Animation, and make these changes to the Main­Window.h header file. struct Item...
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Playing with the Windows Animation Manager: Fixing a sample

March 14, 2013 Mar 14, 2013 03/14/13
Raymond Chen
Windows 7 provides a component known as the Windows Animation Manager, known to some people by its acronym WAM, pronounced "wham". There are some nice sample programs for WAM on MSDN, but for some reason, the authors of the samples decided to animate the three color components of a resultant color. Because apparently the authors of ...
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Closing holes in the update notification pattern

March 13, 2013 Mar 13, 2013 03/13/13
Raymond Chen
Suppose you have a function that is registered to be called the next time something gets updated, and suppose that the notification is a one-shot notification and needs to be re-armed each time you want to wait for the next notification. (For example, the Reg­Notify­Change­Key­Value function behaves this way.) Consider the ...
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How do I hide Public Libraries on all computers in my organization?

March 12, 2013 Mar 12, 2013 03/12/13
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to know how to hide the libraries named Public (Documents), Public Pictures, and Public Videos on all computers in their organization. It turns out that this is already documented in TechNet under the topic Administrative How-to Guides (I found this page by issuing a Web search for ⟨library-ms⟩.) The customer ...

Redistributing computers among offices for heating purposes

March 12, 2013 Mar 12, 2013 03/12/13
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, I joked about the people who rearrange computers in their house during the winter in order to use them as space heaters. Turns out this happens a lot at Microsoft. One of my friends said that one of his coworkers used a small heater in her office to keep warm. On the other hand, his office always ran warm because of all the ...

Derive the age of the planet Jupiter from the properties of liquid hydrogen and the planet’s surface temperature

March 11, 2013 Mar 11, 2013 03/11/13
Raymond Chen
I dreamed that my homework assignment was to derive the age of the planet Jupiter. The professor hinted that physical properties of liquid hydrogen and the current Jupiter surface temperature would be useful. My classmate Ted, on the other hand, had to extend a C++ base class to record a GUID name. The two of us were taking a class ...