The Old New Thing

November 4, 2013 - The Old New Thing

The complexity of modern voting, or at least modern dream voting

November 4, 2013 Nov 4, 2013 11/4/13
Raymond Chen
I dreamed that I arrived at my polling station just before it closed, but the ballot was not what I expected. Instead of voting on political candidates or referenda, I was voting on music from the 1980's. I ended up voting for an Anne Murray song because it was the only one I recognized, and it wasn't a bad song...

Manipulating the zone identifier to specify where a file was download from

November 4, 2013 Nov 4, 2013 11/4/13
Raymond Chen
When you download a file via Internet Explorer, the file is tagged with a little bit of information known as a zone identifier which remembers where the file was downloaded from. This is what tells Explorer to put up the "Yo, did you really want to run this program?" prompt and which is taken into account by applications so that they can do ...