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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A note to headhunters: Check your links

December 15th, 2005
If you're going to try to recruit me, you might want to check that the links in your email actually work. Just sayin'. I'm going to mock you regardless, but you should at least make me have to work for it...

You probably don’t want to run programs directly off your USB memory drive

December 15th, 2005
You probably wouldn't want to run Windows or applications directly off your USB memory drive, even if you could. The reason is that the solid-state memory used by these drives support only a limited number of write cycles per block. (Originally measured in the thousands, though I'm led to believe that it's gone up since then.) Most software ...

Whole lotta cranking going on

December 14th, 2005
Slashdot covered hand-cranked radios and other electronica a while ago. I keep an old-model Freeplay flashlight in the trunk of my car. It sort of fits the whole energy-counter-culture ethos, since I drive an early-model Toyota Prius. Freeplay is a South African company, and one of my South African colleagues pointed out that the Freeplay ...

On the ambiguity of uniqueness

December 14th, 2005
The MSDN documentation for says [T]he implementation of GetHashCode provided by the String class returns unique hash codes for unique string values. This is another case of ambiguous use of the word "unique". The intended meaning is "for each string value, the same hash code is returned". Even though "unique" means "one and only one...

We Microsoft bloggers do talk to each other occasionally, y’know

December 13th, 2005
Every so often, somebody will spam all the Microsoft blogs with a survey or a plea for a job or some other boilerplate message. Don't think you're fooling anyone. It's not like each blogger lives in a separate world and never talks to anyone else. In reality, we exchange information quite freely and even occasionally get together—usually...

Experiencing the world from flight level 210

December 12th, 2005
Here are some airline-related web logs that I follow. Ry Jones recommends FlightAware, a web site for all your planespotting needs...

Your debugging code can be a security hole

December 12th, 2005
When you're developing your debugging code, don't forget that just because it's only for debugging doesn't mean that you can forget about security. I remember one customer who asked (paraphrased) We have a service, and for testing purposes we want to be able to connect to this service and extract the private data that the service is ...

On the inability to support hardware that nobody makes any more

December 9th, 2005
Windows Vista will not have support for really old DVD drives. (The information below was kindly provided to me by the optical storage driver team.) When PC DVD drives first came out in 1998, the drives themselves did not have support for region codes but instead relied on (and in fact the DVD specification required) the operating ...

The not-entirely-unwitting victims of the Daily Show interview

December 8th, 2005
NPR's On the Media covers the world of the fake news interview, the leading example of which in the United States is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Despite what you may think, the people interviewed by the likes of Ed Helms and Samantha Bee actually know that they're being interviewed by a fake news show and go along with it anyway. But ...

Using a physical object as a reminder

December 8th, 2005
On our team, we have a mailing list where people can report problems. Those people could be testers from our team or they could be people from elsewhere in the company. Everybody on the team is expected to keep an eye on the messages and debug problems in their area. The job of monitoring the mailing list to ensure that every issue is ...