The Old New Thing

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

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

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

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

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

March 14, 2014 Mar 14, 2014 03/14/14
Raymond Chen
The interface accepts bulk operations in the form of an . So how do you take a list of file names and convert them into an ? There is no function, but there is a , and we know how to convert a path to an ID list, namely via . So lets snap two blocks together. The template function takes an array of paths and starts by creating a ...

Operations jargon: Internet egress

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

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

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

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