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The Old New Thing
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    The Old New Thing

    April 2013 - The Old New Thing

    The most expensive notepads in Microsoft history
    The most expensive notepads in Microsoft history
    April 30, 2013 Apr 30, 2013 04/30/13
    Raymond Chen
    Many years ago, I visited the office of a colleague who worked on Internet Explorer in order to work on some problem or other. As we investigated the issue, we took notes on a 5"×7" tear-off notepad which bore the logo Forms³. My colleague then pointed out to me that we were taking notes on the most expensive notepads in Microsoft...

    Comments are closed.0History
    Dentistry in the Brazil-like future
    Dentistry in the Brazil-like future
    April 29, 2013 Apr 29, 2013 04/29/13
    Raymond Chen
    I dreamed that I was living in a nursing home in some Brazil-like dystopic future. In this future, people had become so horribly disfigured that they wore flesh-colored suits under their clothes all the time just so they would look good "naked". This vanity extended only to people under the age of around 40. The old people in the home were ...

    Comments are closed.0DreamNon-Computer
    Getting the display name for a shell property
    Getting the display name for a shell property
    April 29, 2013 Apr 29, 2013 04/29/13
    Raymond Chen
    Today's Little Program takes the symbolic name for a shell property and returns a string suitable for display to the end-user, translated into the user's specified display language. #include <windows.h> #include <ole2.h> #include <propsys.h> #include <propkey.h> #include <atlbase.h> #include <atlalloc.h>...

    Comments are closed.0Code
    Fake film project tries to create real film to hide fakeness (and fails)
    Fake film project tries to create real film to hide fakeness (and fails)
    April 26, 2013 Apr 26, 2013 04/26/13
    Raymond Chen
    In 2010, a group of scam artists pretended that they were making a film, appropriately titled A Landscape of Lies. They did this so that they could claim over £2.7 million in tax credits intended to boost the British film industry. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs began to suspect something was up when no apparent progress was being ...

    Comments are closed.0Non-Computer
    Another way to create a process with attributes, maybe worse maybe better
    Another way to create a process with attributes, maybe worse maybe better
    April 26, 2013 Apr 26, 2013 04/26/13
    Raymond Chen
    Adam Rosenfield noted that "those sure are a lot of hoops you have to jump through to solve this unusual problem" of specifying which handles are inherited by a new process. Well, first of all, what's so wrong with that? You have to jump through a lot of hoops when you are in an unusual situation. But by definition, most people are not in an...

    Comments are closed.0Code
    If you’re going to use an interlocked operation to generate a unique value, you need to use it before it’s gone
    If you’re going to use an interlocked operation to generate a unique value, you need to use it before it’s gone
    April 25, 2013 Apr 25, 2013 04/25/13
    Raymond Chen
    Is the Interlocked­Increment function broken? One person seemed to think so. We're finding that the Interlocked­Increment is producing duplicate values. Are there are any know bugs in Interlocked­Increment? Because of course when something doesn't work, it's because you are the victim of a vast conspiracy. There is a ...

    Comments are closed.0Code
    Dark corners of C/C++: The typedef keyword doesn’t need to be the first word on the line
    Dark corners of C/C++: The typedef keyword doesn’t need to be the first word on the line
    April 24, 2013 Apr 24, 2013 04/24/13
    Raymond Chen
    Here are some strange but legal declarations in C/C++: int typedef a; short unsigned typedef b; By convention, the typedef keyword comes at the beginning of the line, but this is not actually required by the language. The above declarations are equivalent to typedef int a; typedef short unsigned b; The C language (but not C++) also ...

    Comments are closed.0Code
    Microspeak: Tenet
    Microspeak: Tenet
    April 23, 2013 Apr 23, 2013 04/23/13
    Raymond Chen
    In standard English, a tenet is a fundamental belief held by a group of people. At Microsoft, the term tenet is used as a generalization of what we previously called taxes: Things that everybody has to do in order to be a good software citizen. While taxes are typically very low-level and specific, like supporting roaming user profiles or...

    Comments are closed.0MicrospeakOther
    Dreaming about games based on Unicode
    Dreaming about games based on Unicode
    April 22, 2013 Apr 22, 2013 04/22/13
    Raymond Chen
    I dreamed that two of my colleagues were playing a game based on pantomiming Unicode code points. One of them got LOW QUOTATION MARK, and the other got a variety of ARROW POINTING NORTHEAST, ARROW POINTING EAST, ARROW POINTING SOUTHWEST. I wonder how you would pantomime ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER...

    Comments are closed.0DreamNon-Computer
    Getting the current selection from an Explorer window
    Getting the current selection from an Explorer window
    April 22, 2013 Apr 22, 2013 04/22/13
    Raymond Chen
    Today's Little Program prints the current selection in all open Explorer windows. (This is an alternative to the C++ version that involves a ridiculous amount of typing.) var shellWindows = new ActiveXObject("Shell.Application").Windows(); for (var i = 0; i < shellWindows.Count; i++) { var w = shellWindows.Item(i); WScript.StdOut....

    Comments are closed.0Code
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