Showing archive results for 2013

When we looked at the process by which the cursor is set, we neglected to discuss the case where nobody bothers to set the cursor. What is the ultimate default cursor? Let's write a program that refuses to set the cursor. Take the scratch program and add these lines: What we did was make the window explicitly refuse to set the cursor by mak...

Some eye candy for you: Stunning pictures of London from above at night, more of London from above at night. Tokyo at night, though from ground level, one of a series of photo walks.

Back in the old days, if an application did not provide information like its Estimated Size or Install Date, then the Add/Remove Programs control panel tried to guess the values by searching your hard drives for files and directories that bore a superficial resemblance to the application. (Note that I use the word drives in the plural. It actually...

Some years ago, a colleague of mine received a message from our IT department. It began like this: You are receiving this notification because our records show that the machines below are still running a pre-release version of Office 2010. All pre-release versions of Office 2010 will expire on Office 31, 2010. Either the Office team managed to ...

I dreamed that I was on a business trip with two colleagues. We discussed Canadian science broadcaster David Suzuki and how in photos of him as a teenager, he looked like Elvis Presley. (Note: Not actually true as far as I know. Remember, this is a dream.) Fortunately, the hotel room we booked had three beds. But if Michael Jackson hadn't cancele...

One problem I discovered when my nieces ran my initial ABC program was that they had a habit of holding down a key, thereby triggering autorepeat. I had instructed them not to mash the keyboard but rather to press only one key at a time, and while they were good at adhering to the "one key at a time" rule, they also interpreted it as "type really...

You might think that if you want to get read/write access, you could pass . You would be wrong. You have to pass . The three flags , , and are mutually exclusive. If you try to combine them, you get a weird mess. In particular, since the numerical value of is zero, passing is numerically equivalent to passing , which grants write-only access. ...

A customer observed that the parameters passed to were not being interpreted correctly. The process is created successfully, but it prints the message ERROR: The system was unable to find the specified registry key or value.. Why aren't the parameters being parsed correctly by ? They work fine if I paste them into a command prompt. This is a...

For formatting time spans, you can use the format string, but the result is a dorky format. Why isn't there a format that is fancier like ? You have the complexities of natural language to thank. In the general case, there is not enough information to provide the appropriate grammatical context in order to know the correct format. This isn't a...

Work on Windows occurs in several different branches of the source code, and changes in one branch propagate to other branches. When talking about a feature or other task becoming visible in a branch, the preferred jargon word at Microsoft is landing. In its purest form: We expect the feature to land in the trunk early next week. The term land...