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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Retail companies allegedly not collecting personal information as aggressively

Several months ago, The Washington Post reported that retail companies were no longer collecting personal information as aggressively. The poster child for this sort of thing was RadioShack, which demanded your name and address even if you just stopped in to buy a pack of AA batteries. I didn't shop there often, and when I did, I merely ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 2

Go figure.

How do you use the bike rack on a Metro bus?

While it's true that I often ride the bus and often ride my bicycle, I do not often ride my bicycle onto a bus. This means that I forget how it's done and have to refresh my memory. Fortunately, Arlington Transit uses the same bike rack design as we do here in Metro King County, so I can refer to their detailed pictures instead of our ...

Security: Don't forget to initialize the stuff you don't care about

Lost in excitement of privilege escalation vulnerabilities is the simple information disclosure through missing garbage initialization. Everybody should by now be familiar with the use of the function to ensure that buffers that used to contain sensitive information are erased, but you also have to zero out buffers before you write their ...

Congratulations, Montréal, on finally paying for the 1976 Olympic Games

Assuming everything went according to plan, Montréal today made the final payment on Olympic Stadium (or Le Stade Olympique), originally built for the 1976 Olympic Games, and nicknamed "The Big O" (or "The Big Owe", if you prefer). Before you snicker, at least you have to give them credit for keeping the stadium until it was paid off...

2006 mid-year link clearance

A few random links that I've collected...

Generating tooltip text dynamically

Our multiplexed tooltip right now is displaying the same string for all items. Let's make it display something a bit more interesting so it's more obvious that what we're doing is actually working. Instead of providing fixed tooltip text, we generate it on the fly by setting the text to and producing the text in response to the ...

Multiplexing multiple tools into one in a tooltip

The tooltip control lets you set multiple "tools" (regions of the owner window) for it to monitor. This is very convenient when the number of tools is manageably small and they don't move around much. For example, the toolbar control creates a tool for each button. But if you have hundreds or thousands of screen elements with tooltips, ...

… so it doesn't poop all over your office

The other day I caught a fragment of a conversation, namely somebody concluding a sentence with the clause "... so it doesn't poop all over your office". I don't know what they were talking about and I'm not sure I want to find out. (Ry Jones thinks I was the victim a game of tomato funeral. I'm not convinced; it was a conversation that I ...

Using custom-draw in tooltips to adjust the font

Last time, we looked at in-place tooltips. In that example, we finessed the font problem by simply setting the destination font into the tooltip control. We got away with that since we had only one tool. But if you have multiple tools with different fonts, then you can't set a font into the tooltip control and expect it to work for every ...