June 30th, 2022

2022 mid-year link clearance

Raymond Chen

The semi-annual link clearance commences.

Who marries whom?: Based on data collected in 2014 from 3.5 million households in the United States, look up which pairs of occupations marry each other most often. Male computer programmers are most likely to marry female elementary and middle school teachers, for example. Though to be fair, if you look at most of the male-dominated occupations, nearly all of them have a high rate of marriage to female elementary and middle school teachers, registered nurses, and secretaries and administrative assistants. That’s because those are the top three occupations for women overall.
I have no idea who these people are, but their photo journal of a trip to Newfoundland and adjacent territories was quite delightful to read. If you’re in a hurry, skip to Part 3 where they try to find the northernmost point in the continental United States.
Scanno, L’Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy, by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is mesmerizing. It’s like an Escher drawing, but in a photograph.
Is it safe to use __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED? Gee, I wonder.
I recorded a few more short videos for WindowsDocs. This resulted in a mini-reunion with Larry, Ross, and John.

The semi-annual link clearance has concluded.

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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Paul Zagieboylo July 12, 2022 0

Estcourt Station, ME is nowhere close to the northermost point in the continental US, just the northernmost point in New England at 47.45N. It certainly feels that way if you look at the weather, but in fact this latitude goes straight through the middle of Sea-Tac Airport, so if you live "somewhere in the Seattle area" it's almost certainly north of this. The actual northernmost point in the continental US is of course the northwest...
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Estcourt Station, ME is nowhere close to the northermost point in the continental US, just the northernmost point in New England at 47.45N. It certainly feels that way if you look at the weather, but in fact this latitude goes straight through the middle of Sea-Tac Airport, so if you live “somewhere in the Seattle area” it’s almost certainly north of this. The actual northernmost point in the continental US is of course the northwest tip of Angle Inlet in Minnesota at 49.38N, caused by another surveying error (19th century surveyors having got a little lost and not knowing how far north the Lake of the Woods actually extended).

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Jeff Howe June 30, 2022 0

Well, how cool. Day 1 of the photo journal, features Eartha, the giant spinning -- and revolving -- globe at the old DeLorme headquarters in Maine, since taken over by Garmin. I worked at DeLorme three separate times over 16 or so years, writing software for their mapping products, in particular Street Atlas USA, Topo USA, and XMap. I wasn't there for the building of the globe, but I inherited the code that made it...
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Well, how cool. Day 1 of the photo journal, features Eartha, the giant spinning — and revolving — globe at the old DeLorme headquarters in Maine, since taken over by Garmin. I worked at DeLorme three separate times over 16 or so years, writing software for their mapping products, in particular Street Atlas USA, Topo USA, and XMap. I wasn’t there for the building of the globe, but I inherited the code that made it run, and gave control over its positioning when maintenance was needed. The combination of rotation on a polar axis, and revolving on a horizontal arm was interesting to watch, and gave off a kind of slight sensation of continual falling. It’s still there, as are a lot of folks I worked with. Rumor has it that the centers of each panel are slightly bowed out using a CD mounted on a springy curtain rod. Oh, and Quoddy Head is cool, too.

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- Ron Parker July 1, 2022 0
  
  Some years ago, I spent many hours reverse-engineering the .an1 and .anr file formats for various only-mildly-nefarious purposes, so it’s quite likely that you and I were nemeses of a sort.
  - Jeff Howe July 2, 2022 0
    
    I never dealt with those file types directly in my work there, and you would never have been my nemesis in that endeavor. The company's, perhaps, but those formats don't, or didn't, really carry much in the way of proprietary information that I can recall. Curiously, though, the company I work for now recently got a customer request to support, or at least be able to read, a different old DeLorme format. I may reach...
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    I never dealt with those file types directly in my work there, and you would never have been my nemesis in that endeavor. The company’s, perhaps, but those formats don’t, or didn’t, really carry much in the way of proprietary information that I can recall. Curiously, though, the company I work for now recently got a customer request to support, or at least be able to read, a different old DeLorme format. I may reach out to some of my old pals to see if that’s possible.
    
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Ron Parker June 30, 2022 0

You probably knew this, but there’s a reason that photo looks like an Escher drawing – Escher based a lot of his work on his sketches of the Italian coast.