At the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo which coincided with the operating system's launch, I paid a visit to the emulators.com booth, where they were excitedly showing off SoftMac 2000, a Mac emulator that ran on Windows 2000. Emulator trivia: MacOS booted in five seconds under Windows 2000, which was faster than the real Mac, ...

When blitting between color and monochrome DCs, The text foreground and background colors play a role. We saw earlier that when blitting from a monochrome DC to a color DC, the color black in the source turns into the destination's text color, and the color white in the source turns into the destination's background color. This came in handy when...

After a Seattle Symphony concert, it has long been a tradition among my friends to walk the three blocks from Benaroya Hall, up University Street, past Luly Yang Couture to gawk at the jaw-dropping gowns in the window (the pictures on the web site fail to capture their fabulousness), arriving at the W Hotel, home of Earth & Ocean, where we w...

Someday, you're going to pass a raster operation to the function that entails bit manipulation. Something like perhaps, or possibly the dreaded . These bitwise operations make perfect sense for monochrome bitmaps, since those are one bit per pixel anyway. But what does it mean for color bitmaps? What do you get when you "and" together forest gree...

Here's the diagram from How do I convert an HRESULT to a Win32 error code?. If you are offended by VML, cover your ears and hum for a while. The little sliver at the top is the mapping of zero to zero. The big white box at the bottom is the mapping of all negative numbers to corresponding negative numbers. And the rainbow represents the mapp...

In recent years, the issue of steroids in baseball has been the source of much hand-wringing. Some people argue that steroids are ruining the game. Others say that you can't go around trampling the Bill of Rights and punishing people for doing things that are perfectly legal anyway. To resolve this issue, I present this modest proposal. Toda...

An anonymous commenter asked why the Tab key doesn't select items from the auto-complete drop-down list. The answer: Because that key already has some other meaning. The Tab key is used to navigate among controls in a dialog box. Adding auto-complete behavior to an existing dialog would disturb the tab order, which would in turn frustrate people ...

It doesn't matter, as long as you do it.

Many years ago, the local public radio station invited the three candidates for Seattle Port Commissioner to take part in a program on the upcoming election. Each candidate was given some time to address the voters directly. Here's how it went, roughly. Candidate 1: "We need an experienced person to find solutions for our region's transportat...

Last year, I told the story of overclocking being the source of a lot of mysterious crashes and that some of those overclocked machines were overclocked at the store. These machines came from small, independent shops rather than the major manufacturers. Well it looks like that's about to change. Gateway's FX530 Desktop can be ordered overclocke...