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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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 ...

Rory Blyth explains the difference between 720p and 1080i

December 7th, 2005
720p vs. 1080i - The Great HD TV Debate EXPLAINED and SOLVED. So now you know...

Whimsical embarrassment as a gentle form of reprimand

December 7th, 2005
A few months ago, I messed up a cross-component check-in and broke the build. I'm not proud of it. (In my excitement over finally having passed a few weeks' worth of testing requirements, I absently submitted only one of the components for check-in! My change was 99% within one component, and I forgot about the other 1%.) My submission cleared...

Humanity’s greatest invention, according to seventh grade students

December 6th, 2005
When I read that Ecologist Magazine is co-sponsoring an essay contest on the topic What is Humanity's worst Invention?, it reminded me of a related essay exercise assigned to seventh-graders by a friend of mine. The students (typically thirteen years of age) were given the topic What is humanity's greatest invention or discovery? Here are ...

When a token changes its meaning mid-stream

December 6th, 2005
The project leader for the initial version of Internet Explorer was well-known for wearing Hawaiian shirts. I'm told that the team managers decided to take one of those shirts and use it as an award to the team member who fixed the most bugs or some similar thing. What the team managers failed to take into account that nobody actually liked ...

It’s always a good idea to check your sources

December 5th, 2005
For a while, our cafeteria was trying to sell three-packs of bottled water. A sign proudly announced: Drink more water: What you should know about H2O Drink plenty of water throughout the day. Make it easy. Carry a bottle of water when you commute to work or run errands. This is what I should know about H2O? "Drink more water": ...

Using floppy disks as semaphore tokens

December 5th, 2005
In the very early days of Windows 95, the distribution servers were not particularly powerful. The load of having the entire team installing the most recent build when it came out put undue strain on the server. The solution (until better hardware could be obtained) was to have a stack of floppy disks in the office of the "build shepherd...