March 2014 | Page 2 of 3 | The Old New Thing

I think this person's monitor is broken: It doesn't know how to render text in capital letters

Raymond Chen March 19, 2014 Mar 19, 2014 03/19/14

Some time ago, somebody asked a question about why, when they do 1 and 2, they get extra thing 3. "The extra 3 is there because of the 456 feature. BUT DO NOT DISABLE THE 456 FEATURE JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE 3. The 456 feature is important, because it ensures that 2 runs to completion. Otherwise, you risk data loss." The person ...

Raymond's highly scientific predictions for the 2014 NCAA men's basketball tournament

Raymond Chen March 18, 2014 Mar 18, 2014 03/18/14

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 followers of of the basketball team's official Twitter account, or one tenth of the number of followers of the school's athletic department if the school's basketball team does not have its ...

Why do I have to hit an arrow key before a keyboard-initiated Move operation will follow the mouse?

Raymond Chen March 18, 2014 Mar 18, 2014 03/18/14

TehShrike wonders why you have to hit an arrow key before a keyboard-initiated Move operation will follow the mouse. I don't know, but I think it's just a bug. Mind you, it's a bug with extraordinary seniority (probably going as far back as Windows 1.0). The Move and Size commands from the system menu are operated by the same common ...

How do I show the contents of a directory while respecting the user's preferences for hidden and super-hidden files as well as the user's language preferences?

Raymond Chen March 17, 2014 Mar 17, 2014 03/17/14

A customer was writing a program in (and this is what they said) "32 bit C++ .Net 4.0" which displayed the contents of a directory, and they wanted to filter out items such as hidden files and protected operating system files (also known as super-hidden files) based on the user's current Explorer preferences. Furthermore, they wanted to show ...

How do I create an IShellItemArray from a bunch of file paths?

Raymond Chen March 14, 2014 Mar 14, 2014 03/14/14

The IFileOperation interface accepts bulk operations in the form of an IShellItemArray. So how do you take a list of file names and convert them into an IShellItemArray? There is no SHCreateShellItemArrayFromPaths function, but there is a SHCreateShellItemArrayFromID...

Why does the Directory.GetFiles method sometimes ignore .html files when I ask for .htm?

Raymond Chen March 13, 2014 Mar 13, 2014 03/13/14

The documentation for the Directory.GetFiles method says When using the asterisk wildcard character in a searchPattern, such as "*.txt", the matching behavior when the extension is exactly three characters long is different than when the extension is more or less than three characters long. A searchPattern with a file ...

Operations jargon: Internet egress

Raymond Chen March 12, 2014 Mar 12, 2014 03/12/14

As I've noted before, the operations team has their own jargon which superficially resembles English. Some time ago, they sent out a message with the subject A New Internet Egress Path Is Coming. Translation: We're changing the way computers access the Internet. Bonus jargon: traffic on the edge. This does not refer to traffic that is on ...

On live performances of Star Trek

Raymond Chen March 11, 2014 Mar 11, 2014 03/11/14

Spock's Brain is generally considered to be the worst episode of Star Trek. That may be why in 2009 Mike Carano decided to perform it as a theatrical production. Here is the opening scene, and here's Carano talking about the show's genesis. In the second video, skip ahead to 2:40 to see more clips from the show, or go to 4:35 for the fight ...

How do I disable zone markers for downloaded files, so that Explorer stops being a nag about running downloaded files and just trusts me to do the right thing?

Raymond Chen March 11, 2014 Mar 11, 2014 03/11/14

My Little Program about manipulating the zone identifier for downloaded files appears to have struck a nerve with commenter Tess, who launched into some sort of diatribe about how Microsoft should stop being a busybody and warning users about opening files that they downloaded. You are welcome to disable the feature if it offends you so. In...

Why Johnny can't read music

Raymond Chen March 10, 2014 Mar 10, 2014 03/10/14

In the book He Bear, She Bear, the musical instrument identified as a tuba is clearly a sousaphone. (For those who are wondering what the title has to do with the topic of musical instrument identification: It's a reference to the classic book Why Johnny Can't Read...

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