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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Fair Isle: Knitters Wanted

October 24th, 2005
The National Trust of Scotland has two houses to let on the island of Fair Isle, population: 65. The two properties are available at a very reasonable rate of only £300. Per year. Although the National Trust does not promise a job, it points out that there are skill shortages in construction and knitting. The knitting cooperative ...

New device detected: Boeing 747

October 24th, 2005
Once again, airplane manufacturers have been giving serious consideration to offering Internet access in the skies. Back in 1994, Boeing considered equipping each seat with a serial modem. Laptop users could hook up to the modem and dial out. (Dial-up was the primary means of connecting to the Internet back in those days.) We chuckled at ...

Why is it even possible to disable the desktop anyway?

October 21st, 2005
Some time ago, I mentioned the dangers of disabling the desktop window. But why is it even possible to disable the desktop anyway? This is simply an artifact of the history of philosophy of Windows operating system design. Back in the old days, memory was tight, hard drives were luxuries, the most popular CPU for the IBM PC didn't have ...

The things in the PDC 2005 introductory video

October 20th, 2005
I remarked earlier that the creative director for the PDC rummaged through our offices looking for stuff which was to be used in the opening PDC video to decorate a developer's cubicle. It all flashed by really quickly, but if you were paying attention, you might have been able to make out the following: One thing you won't find in the ...

Quick and dirty buzzword bingo cards in Excel

October 20th, 2005
Jensen Harris's brief example of using Excel's random number generator reminded me that I had need for the random number generator recently myself: Generating buzzword bingo cards. At the Battlestar Galactica party, our hosts needed to create some Battlestar Galactica-themed buzzword bingo cards and asked me to help out. Here's how I did ...

Follow-up: Portsmouth Spinnaker Tower now open, but maybe you should take the stairs

October 19th, 2005
Portsmouth's ever-delayed Millennium Tower (since renamed Spinnaker Tower) has finally been completed, five years late and £11 million over budget. But even opening day couldn't escape without its own glitches, for the project manager was trapped in a glass-walled lift for over an hour, requiring abseiling engineers to come and ...

There’s something about Rat Poker

October 19th, 2005
When performing usability tests, one of the standard tasks we give people is to install a game, and the game we usually use is The Puzzle Collection. (Yes, it's an old game, but continually updating the game makes it less valid to compare results from one year to the next.) One of the things that the game's Setup does that always confuses ...

Answering the phone, a classic rookie mistake

October 18th, 2005
I had taken yesterday off from work just to take a breather, but I stopped by the office in the morning to pick up my bicycle helmet. (How I managed to leave my bicycle helmet at the office is not important.) My office telephone rang and I answered it. As my colleague Ken described it later, "Ah, classic rookie mistake." The call was from...

Be careful what you name your product group

October 18th, 2005
They thought they were so clever when they named the Desktop Applications Division. "And the abbreviation is 'DAD', isn't that cute? Complements the Microsoft Office Manager toolbar (MOM)." And then the troubles started. Shortly after the new product group was formed, everybody in the product group started getting email talking about ...

The undeletable Outlook folder

October 17th, 2005
For a while, I've had a few "undeletable Outlook folders". Even after deleting all the messages from them, Outlook just complains when I try to delete them. There was some sort of error message, but of course I didn't read it. The only option was OK, so I clicked it. As I recall, the message said something about "Can't delete because blah ...