When my story left off, a colleague of mine had dedicated himself to finding some good Japanese pop music, and what he found was this music video of the song JOY by Japanese pop star Yuki Isoya, who performs under the stage name YUKI. The video was mesmerizing. The Flash Gordon extras. The dance steps. The blinking. The hyperventilating. (Thou...

Windows still has to worry about displays running at 640×480 resolution. Even though the default minimum resolution was bumped up to 800×600 for Windows XP, there are still 640×480 devices out there, typically tiny monitors on servers. One common set-up is to have a bank of tiny little monitors, each corresponding to one serv...

There is a stock collection of fake names.

The Airbus A380 will be the largest-capacity commercial passenger plane, once they get around to making them. Now two years behind schedule, the A380 is not making life any easier for their parent company EADS. And in this two-player world, bad news for Airbus means good news for Boeing. As a Seattleite, I naturally root for Boeing over Airbus....

You might decide to put a multi-line edit control in a dialog box, not because you want the user to input multi-line data, but because it's a convenient way to display multi-line text. When you do that, you may notice that the Enter key does not invoke the default dialog button, as you might normally expect. That's because the multi-line edit contr...

Somebody at a meeting two years ago used the term "goat rodeo" to describe a completely confused situation. The term stuck with me as a really funny folksy analogy. It's not official Microspeak, but who knows, it may someday gain currency. I certainly enjoy saying it. "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." (Some earlier Microspeak entries: ...

Some people have taken issue with the term for the name of the base of the message range that is the province of the window class implementor. (Refresher for those who forget which messages belong to whom.) The complaint is that the user can't use them since they belong to the window class. Aha, but the real question is, "Who is the user?" In oth...

Whenever I wander into the subject of languages here, a commenter will ask me what my language-acquisition technique is. I have refrained from describing it since it is very peculiar to my way of learning, and I doubt it will work for most people. But since people seem to be interested, here it is. I like to learn a language by learning its rules ...

Back in Part 6 of the first phase of the "Chinese/English dictionary" series (a series which I intend to get back to someday but somehow that day never arrives), I left an exercise related to the member of the union. Alignment is one of those issues that people who grew up with a forgiving processor architecture tend to ignore. In this case,...

The release of Windows 2000 introduced a new setting: "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key," which defaults on for most Western languages. What's the story behind this setting? I still have the rationale from the user interface designer who introduced this feature. Here's a redacted copy: To support o...