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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The subtle usability considerations of conference nametags

June 23rd, 2006
When you go to a conference or some other event where everybody wears a nametag, pay closer attention to the nametag design. There are many subtle usability mistakes that I see far too often. First of all, is your name easy to read? It's called a nametag, after all; the name and affiliation of the wearer should be the most prominent thing ...

The continuing phenomenon of size inflation in fast food

June 22nd, 2006
Wendy's is getting rid of "Biggie" and "Great Biggie" size drinks and fries from their menu. Oh, they're still offering them, just with a different name. What used to be "Biggie" is now "medium" and what used to be "Great Biggie" is now "large". Even the "small" drink is a massive 20 ounces, or two and a half FDA servings...

An auto-reset event is just a stupid semaphore

June 22nd, 2006
When you create an event with the function, you get to specify whether you want an auto-reset event or a manual-reset event. Manual-reset events are easy to understand: If the event is clear, then a wait on the event is not satisfied. If the event is set, then a wait on the event succeeds. Doesn't matter how many people are waiting for the ...

It's still not a democracy, but at least other people have noticed, too

June 21st, 2006
I'm glad I'm not the only person to notice that elections for boards of directors are completely rigged so that the nominees always win and there's nothing you can do about it. It appears that the issue was the hot topic in this year's proxy war skirmishes. This year, one company actually called me at home asking me to send in my proxy. I ...

Psychic debugging: Understanding DDE initiation

June 21st, 2006
You too can use your psychic powers to debug the following problem: We have a problem with opening documents with our application by double-clicking them in Explorer. What's really strange is that if we connect a debugger to Explorer and set a breakpoint on , then wait a moment after returns, then hit '', then the document opens fine. But...

Three-Minute Masterpieces (2006)

June 20th, 2006
The Seattle Times invited its readers to make three-minute movies, and the best were screened at the Seattle International Film Festival. Or you can watch them online...

A single-instance program is its own denial of service

June 20th, 2006
There are many ways a program can establish itself as a single-instance program; I won't go into them here. But once people head down the path of a single-instance program, they bump into another issue in their security review: Denial of service. We are using a named mutex with a fixed name in order to detect whether another copy of the ...

Announcements on the ferry, one self-explanatory, one not

June 19th, 2006
While I was riding the ferry last Saturday, there were two announcements made over the public address system. "All crew please report to the Second Mate's office." What were they all doing in the Second Mate's office? Would the whole crew fit into the office? And while all the crew are in the Second Mate's office, who's steering the ferry? ...

Why can't you programmatically reorder the items on the Start menu?

June 19th, 2006
The classic Start menu and the "All Programs" portion of the Windows XP Start menu permit you to customize the order of the shortcuts that appear there. You can use drag/drop to rearrange them, or force them to be sorted by name. But why is there no programmatic interface to these actions? Because the power would be used for evil far ...

Understanding what significant digits really mean

June 16th, 2006
A double-precision floating point number carries fifteen significant digits. What does this really mean? I multiplied 0.619207 by 10,000,000 and got 6192069.999999991 instead of 6192070. That's only six significant digits; where's my fifteen? Talking about significant digits is really just a shorthand for talking about relative precision. "...