Many people like to simulate user actions programmatically. I'm not going to comment here on whether that's a good idea to begin with; what I want to point out is that if you're going to do it, you have to make sure you're simulating things the user can actually do. For example, if you want to act as if the user clicked the "close" button in the ...

From the reactions to my entry on driving in Taiwan, it appears that driving is pretty messed up all over Asia. Here's a video of driving in India that was popular a while back. This comment comparing Taiwan driving to the Philippines reminded me of a conversation I had with some Filipino tourists when I was in Taiwan. We were on a bus as it wa...

The pager control was introduced with the common controls library that came with Internet Explorer 4.0 in order to assist in implementing scrolling menus on the Start menu and Favorites menu. (The Start menu and Favorites menu aren't really menus in the Win32 sense. They are custom controls written to act like menus; the fakemenu sample prov...

Because it ends the script block, of course. Duh, what's so hard about that? Because if you have script that generates script, you'll find yourself caught out if you're not careful. For example, you can't say in a script block because the HTML parser will see the and conclude that your script block is over. In other words, the script block ...

Last time, I talked about the historical background for the class style and why it starts out sounding like a good idea but when you think about it some more turns out to be an awful idea. The class style is the same thing, but worse, for it takes all the problems of and magnifies them. Recall that the class style instructs the window manage...

Recall that window DCs are most commonly used only temporarily. If you need to draw into a window, you call or, if outside of a paint cycle, , although painting outside of a paint cycle is generally to be avoided. The window manager produces a DC for the window and returns it. You use the DC, then restore it to its original state and return it to...

A story in honor of Katie Couric's final day at the Today show. Last month I happened to run into a former member of the shell team who worked on the Windows XP Welcome screen. He told me a story from CES 2001, where Windows XP's interface (code-named Luna) was unveiled. There was going to be a segment on the Today show, and the We...

I first heard Ofeibea Quist-Arcton when she reported for the BBC. Now she's on NPR (you can listen to her discuss corruption in Nigeria in this recent report), thereby wresting the title of "most mellifluous NPR reporter name" from its previous holder, Sylvia Poggioli. (Sylvia Poggioli's dirty secret: She was born and grew up in the United State...

Windows XP shipped with new icons for many common items in the shell, and Windows Vista will have even more and newer icons. One of the things the designers have to be careful about with drawing these icons is to make sure they don't actually look like anything. Let me clarify. The folder icon, for example, is not based on any actual phy...

The letters that mathematics departments get...