Many people misinterpreted my use of the term "reluctant" to describe the attitude of the designers in changing the way the Date/Time control panel functions. It was a reluctance of shame, not a reluctance of defiance. Your software is there for the users, not vice versa. If you find that your users are using the software in a manner contrary to...

On one of our internal blogging aliases, some people were interested in ways of making their blog look spiffier, and the Max team's blog was pointed out as an example of a "pimped out blog". This in turn led to exchange of tips and tricks and someone even proposed an informal Pimp My Blog contest. What next? Extreme Blog Makeover? Trading M...

I have no idea who this person is, but she's all attitude all the time. Like this entry from October 18, 2005 when Jennifer was recovering from a foot injury: Men love a girl who can't run away quickly I got "wooey!"-ed by a garbage man on my way back to the office from lunch today... Because I'm so HAWT hobbling down the street. He could no...

Earlier versions of Internet Explorer used inline autocomplete, but newer versions use drop-down autocomplete that requires you to press the down-arrow key to select an item from the drop-down. Why the change? Because it interferes with normal keyboard operation. Suppose is in your history, but you want to go to . As you type the desired dest...

I asked four people who commute by bicycle eastbound over the I-90 bridge to Microsoft main campus what route they take, and they gave three different answers. I've given them meaningless names just to tell them apart. The yellow route First half (markers A1 through A5) | Second half (markers B1 through B5). Animated v...

Ballard is the Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle, and they ordered some stone slabs for a new seating area in Bergen Place Park. What they didn't expect was that the Swedish stone would read S∀ERIGE. I mean, yeah, those Swedes do strange things with their A's, like put dots and circles over them, but I'm pretty sure they don't turn them...

Some people believe that the COM rules on interfaces are needlessly strict. But the rules are there for a reason. Suppose you ship some interface in version N of your product. It's an internal interface, not documented to outsiders. Therefore, you are free to change it any time you want without having to worry about breaking compatibility w...

Okay, wrong zombie movie, but I couldn't resist the pun. Knit zombies reenact Dawn of the Dead. Now playing on Flickr.

During the Windows 95 project, the window manager team stayed late one night and redecorated the lobby. They suspended a variety of Hallowe'en-themed objects from fishing lines: spiders, ghosts, witches, jack-o'-lanterns, that sort of thing. The fishing line went up and over pulleys, rigged so that the objects spookily rose and fell seemingly...

When I saw Tim Sneath's description of the root cause for all the Windows Vista product key problems, I was amazed that the reason was something my readers tend to go completely ballistic over: Long file names. It so happens that one of the ISO mounting tools that people were using for installing Windows Vista doesn't support long file names! (A...