Showing archive results for 2014

Today's Little Program uploads a file to an FTP site in binary mode with the assistance of the Wininet library. This program has sat in my bag of tools for years. The program accepts five command line arguments: site (no "ftp://" in front) userid password path for the file to upload location to place the uploaded file For example, I might s...

Last year, I presented this commutative diagram A 2-by-2 grid of boxes. The top row is labeled FILE­TIME; the bottom row is labeled SYSTEM­TIME. The first column is labeled UTC; the second column is labeled Local. The upper left box is labeled Get­System­Time­As­File­Time. There is an outgoing arrow to th...

Actually, those flags make it go slower.

Our scratch program sets the background color to by setting the class background brush as follows: What's with the ? Okay, first of all, let's backtrack a bit. The real first question is, "What's the deal with taking an integer () and casting it to a and expecting anything sane to happen?" The window manager wants to provide multiple w...

Whatever order it likes.

My niece (two years old at the time) was put in the corner as punishment for some sort of misdeed. At the expiration of her punishment, her grandfather returned and asked her, "你乖唔乖?" (Are you going to be nice?) She cheerfully replied, "仲未乖!" (Still naughty!) In an unrelated incident, one of my ho...

Suppose you have a program that is part of your workflow, and it has the annoying habit of showing a message box when it is finished. You want to automate this workflow, and part of that automation is dismissing the message box. Let's start by writing the annoying program: This annoying program pretends to do work for a little while, and then...

Suppose you want your program to behave differently depending on whether it is launched from the Start menu, or by clicking the pinned icon on the taskbar, or by Scheduled Task, or from a service, or whatever. How can a program detect and distinguish these scenarios? The answer is you don't. And you shouldn't try. Instead of trying to guess how y...

Somebody with a rude name wonders what the flag does. It does nothing. The flag was introduced when porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT. It happened further back in history than I have permission to access the Windows source code history database, but I can guess how it got introduced. One of the things that the porting team ...

If you have a string like , and you render it on an Arabic system, you might get ٠١٢٣٤ABCDE67890. The leading digits are rendered as Arabic-Indic digits, but the trailing digits are rendered as European digits. What's going on here? This is a feature known as contextual digit substitution. You can specify whether Euro...