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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An easy way to determine whether you have a particular file permission

June 4th, 2004
Sometimes you might want to determine whether you can do something without actually doing it. For example, you might want to know whether you have a particular permission in a directory, say permission to delete files from it. One way is to retrieve the ACL and then check whether the current user has the desired permission. The AccessCheck ...

My first death threat

June 3rd, 2004
Actual feedback submitted to the microsoft.com web site many years ago. id: 13726 Date: 1996-07-29 17:27:41.997 Name: *********** Email: ************* Area: Windows 95 Comments: PLEASE read this entire email as it is quite serious. I just discovered today that in the Windows 95 operating system, there are no switches, command line...

Need to add 1.5kg and 350g?

June 3rd, 2004
Need to add 1.5kg and 350g? Don't take any chances. Go to a Certified Metrication Specialist...

The dreaded "main" threading model

June 2nd, 2004
A relic from the days before multi-threading...

Letter carriers rebel

June 2nd, 2004
Letter carriers in both Sweden and Scotland have taken to refusing to deliver political advertisements from parties they personally find offensive. This isn't quite the stunning synchronicity as it may appear at first glance: Europe is gearing up for a continent-wide election...

What does SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES mean?

June 1st, 2004
One of the flags you can pass to the SHGetFileInfo function is SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES. What does this flag mean? It means, "Do not access the disk. Pretend that the file/directory exists, and that its file attributes are what I passed as the dwFileAttributes parameter. Do this regardless of whether it actually exists or not." You...

French schoolchildren invited to draw their impressions of the United States

June 1st, 2004
They choose fast food, fat people, and Bush in a tank. In January, a cartoon festival was held in the town of Carquefou, just outside of Nantes in the northwest corner of France. Students of all ages competed in a contest to illustrate their vision of the United States. They drew obese Americans devouring Coca-Cola and McDonald's ...

Chewing gum legalized in Singapore

May 31st, 2004
After twelve years, Singapore has relaxed its ban on chewing gum. But not so fast. Before Singaporeans think about unwrapping a pack of Wrigley's Orbit gum that's just started selling here -- and only in pharmacies -- they must submit their names and ID card numbers. If they don't, pharmacists who sell them gum could be jailed up ...

Why is the default 8-bit codepage called "ANSI"?

May 31st, 2004
Reader Ben Hutchings wanted to know why the 8-bit codepage is called "ANSI" when it isn't actually ANSI. But instead of saying, "Oh well, some things mortals were never meant to know," he went and dug up the answer himself. A quick Google for Windows ANSI misnomer found me exactly what I was looking for [pdf]: "The term...

Kipping

May 28th, 2004
Apparently that's the term for knitting in public. The New York Times covered the online knitting community. I wasn't aware of the Yahoo knitlist group; I may have to go check it out. (The NYT article also mentions the yarn Fizz, which I have used, but I much prefer Splash, a totally knock-your-socks-off novelty yarn. ...