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.

The United States government authorized a one-time refund of long-distance excise taxes paid between March 2003 and July 2006, but early returns suggest that many taxpayers are unaware of this refund. (Here's the IRS press release that goes into more detail and includes a list of most common mistakes people have been making.) The easy way to cla...

In Windows 95, if you had a shortcut to a file on the desktop, view the shortcut's properties, and then clicked "Find Target", you got the message "The target you specified is on the desktop". It also selected the item on the desktop to help you find it. But why didn't it just open an Explorer window that viewed the desktop? Because in Windo...

The TechNet Magazine Podcast page has just posted their February 2007 entry, which includes an interview with little old me in the second half. I haven't listened to the whole interview yet, but what struck me immediately is that I was pretty darned punchy and goofy, whereas I think the host was trying to take a more serious tone. Oops.

This upcoming Sunday features an event that means absolutely nothing to people outside the United States: The Super Bowl. I call it an event because it is more than simply a football game. It's an American institution. Even people who think a nose guard is a piece of safety equipment will watch the game, or at least pretend to be interested in it...