Raymond Chen, Author at The Old New Thing

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In case people got the wrong impression

September 29th, 2003

I really did enjoy my trip. I just like talking about the goofy things. I intend to go back to Sweden in the spring. I'm currently enrolled in Swedish lessons but this trip came far too soon for me to have learned anything useful aside from "tack", "ursäkta" and "Jag taler inte svenska." ...

Why you can’t rotate text

September 29th, 2003

Answering a comment from an earlier entry.

Back from Europe

September 29th, 2003

Here are some things I learned in Sweden, Germany and Denmark...

When I dock my taskbar vertically, why does the word "Start" disappear?

September 20th, 2003

Because the alternative is even worse. If the taskbar is not wide enough to display the entire word "Start", then the word "Start" is hidden. To get it back, resize the taskbar wider until the word "Start" reappears. This behavior is by design. From a design point of view, a ...

Pre-travel insomnia

September 19th, 2003

I can't sleep the night before an airplane flight. Certainly I'm not the only person with this problem, right...

How much is that gigabyte in the window?

September 19th, 2003

Slashdot is in an uproar over a lawsuit charging computer manufacturers for misleading consumers over hard drive capacity. The manufacturers use the ISO definition, wherein a "gigabyte" is one billion bytes, even though most people consider a gigabyte to be 1024 megabytes. This is a tricky one. The computer industry is itself inconsistent ...

Improving the world one bad analogy at a time

September 18th, 2003

One thing I am known for at Microsoft is my frequent use of bad analogies. Everybody else at work has had to suffer; now it's your turn. Why are there so many copies of svchost.exe running? What is svchost.exe anyway? Traditionally, each service runs in its own process. When you are ...

Emergency vacation

September 18th, 2003

Hurricane Isabel made a mess of my weekend travel plans, so I decided, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." My outbound flight was cancelled, and even with the best possible substitution - a flight out the very next day - losing a day on a weekend trip pretty much kills it. So I extended it to a weeklong ...

The end of the scrollbar series

September 17th, 2003

Okay, that's basically the end of the scrollbar series. Do people actually like the idea of a coding series? It gets very few comments, and it's a lot of work to write, so if nobody actually cares I can just write about quick little things and not try to be coherent from day to day. I guess that's what most blogs are like anyway. If you ...

Answers to exercise from Scrollbars Part 11

September 17th, 2003

Exercise: Why do we use the formula c = a + (b-a)/2 instead of the simpler c = (a+b)/2? Answer: To avoid integer overflow in the computation of a+b. Here, a and b are window coordinates, and the window can be anywhere. If the window were placed at extreme coordinates like (...