Showing archive results for September 2013

You have in your hands an , and you want to know whether this is an that represents My Computer. There are a few ideas that may occur to you. One is to ask the folder for its current location and compare it to . Okay, we have a lot of moving parts here. Let's look at them one at a time. The function takes an object and asks what folder it r...

Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's what...

Although you are more than welcome to stop using DDE (please oh please stop using it), there are still many applications which still use it (cough), and as a result, customers still have questions about it. One customer wanted to know why, if multiple copies of a DDE-based application are running, Windows 7 will send the command to the earli...

The function takes a source rectangle and subtracts out the portion which intersects a second rectangle, returning the result in a third rectangle. But wait a second, the result of subtracting one rectangle from another need not be another rectangle. It might be an L-shape, or it might be a rectangle with a rectangular hole. How does this map bac...

Over in the product engineering groups, we aren't often exposed to the jargon employed by our Facilities group. But once in a while, it leaks through and then we get to puzzle it out. Emergency Electrical Outage and Restoral Due to a transformer failure, power to building NNN was shut down from 6:00am to 6:30am on MMMM-DD. Occupants may need ...

I dreamed that a friend and I were in line at some sort of summer camp to get into the cafeteria. We noticed a glass cabinet with food out in the dining area and asked about it. Turns out that it was available for people to eat, as an alternative to standing in line. We decided to go for it. (Another example of how being lucky is observing what yo...

Today's Little Program closes a file handle that was opened remotely. It builds on previous discussion on how to use the functions. Forcing a network file handle closed does not actually close the handle. This makes it very different from the various "force handle closed" utilities out there. Rather, forcing a network file handle closed is a...

The Interlocked family of functions perform atomic operations on memory. How do they do it? It depends on the underlying CPU architecture. For some CPUs, it's easy: The x86, for example, has direct support for many interlocked operations by means of the prefix (with the bonus feature that is implied for the opcode.) The ia64 and x64 also ha...

You have to get there first.

When you embed a TAB character (U+0009) in a <PRE> block (or more precisely, an element whose CSS property is computed to be or ), Internet Explorer will move the current position to the next multiple of eight characters. Many people prefer four. (Some insist that only four is the correct value and anybody who disagrees with them is simply ...