There was a morning meeting event at which donuts were provided as an enticement. Someone commented on the food thus: "These donuts failed to meet expectations." Peter Sagal remarked that the phrase "emerging to standard" has entered currency in his family as a euphemism for "substandard". (Opening panel round, final question, time code 1:20.) Ho...

If you look at the documentation for the function, you'll see that it calls out different behavior depending on whether you're running Windows 95 or Windows NT. Commenter Vipin asked why Windows NT doesn't follow Windows 95's lead. Back in the old days, 16-bit Windows did unregister classes automatically when a DLL unloaded. ...

Long Zheng followed up on the story of where the default wallpapers in Windows Vista came from and managed to score an interview with Hamad Darwish, one of those amateur photographers.

During the preparations for the 2005 PDC, I was filling out an application for a corporate credit card. (The rant behind why I was filling out this application in the first place will have to wait for another day.) One of the options was to check a box to request rush processing at an additional charge of $10. There was one key piece of informatio...

You can count on The Annals of Improbable Research to produce groundbreaking results. One of my favorites is Who is most likely to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship?, in which researcher (and AIR editorial board member) Eric Schulman performs a careful statistical analysis of previous winners of the MacArthur Fellowship in order to determine wh...

Occasionally, a customer will ask, "I'm trying to display a property sheet, but when I call the function, the property sheet blinks onto the screen and then immediately disappears. What is wrong?" Recall that displaying a property sheet entails filling out a structure, which in turn contains a pointer to either an array of s, or more often, an a...

They've been nicknamed the sushi police. In response to horror stories from Japanese travelling abroad and being shocked by what passes for Japanese food outside their borders, the Japanese agriculture ministry is developing certification standards for restaurants abroad that want to call themselves Japanese. Their results are supposed to be out ...

Another class of rookie mistake is less obvious from looking at the code. The problem with this code is that we forgot to call to register the listview class. More generally, the problem is that one of the controls on the dialog uses a window class that was not registered. (For example, maybe there's a rich edit control on the dialog, but nobo...

Each dialog box resource is specified either by an integer ordinal or by a string name. But a simple typo will turn one into the other. Do you see the two "classic rookie mistakes"? It may be easier to spot if you take the resource file and send it through the preprocessor first: The first call to passes as the resource name. But notice ...

I've just been informed by my publisher that the bonus chapters from my book are now available for download. Click on "Sample Chapters". Sorry they're late. The source code for the programs in the book can be downloaded from the "Source Code" link. And on a more embarrassing note, there's that "Errata" link, too.