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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Why did InterlockedIncrement/Decrement only return the sign of the result?

May 6th, 2004
It's a limitation of the 80386 instruction set.

Dead man running

May 5th, 2004
The plight of the legally dead (but physically alive) in India has been taken up by - of course - a legally dead man. And now he's running for public office. Though apparently this isn't the first time. (People are usually declared dead by conniving relatives who want to claim their inheritance prematurely.) I wish him luck. If...

Broadcasting user-defined messages

May 5th, 2004
When you broadcast a message (via HWND_BROADCAST) remember that the message you broadcast must have global meaning. I discussed earlier what the various message ranges mean. Notice that only the system-defined range (0..WM_USER-1) and the registered message range (MAXINTATOM .. MAXWORD) have global meaning. The other two ranges have ...

Truckers block highway to protest high gas prices

May 4th, 2004
To protest rising gasoline prices, a group of truckers abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the highway. It struck me as odd that a country that brims with anti-French rhetoric would adopt one of their protest techniques. Presumably they don't want French gasoline prices either...

Is open source the new monoculture?

May 4th, 2004
Okay I know I'm going to get into a lot of trouble for even bringing up this topic... This past weekend, Ulf Harnhammar discovered two buffer overflow and two directory traversal vulnerabilities in LHA, a library of data compression functions. Since the code for this is public, it has been copied all over the place. At least one ...

Today is Swedish tax day

May 3rd, 2004
Of course, in Sweden, every day is tax day. By now, it's too late to fill out your tax form, which the Swedish tax agency permits you to file on paper, via Internet, over the phone, or even via SMS. They even have what I wish the US tax agency had: An online tax form calculator...

Why does my hard drive light flash every few second?

May 3rd, 2004
Back in Windows 95, people would notice that their hard drive light would blink every few seconds. What's that all about? Actually, it wasn't the hard drive light after all. Windows 95 was polling your CD-ROM drive to see whether you had inserted a new CD. Some computers wired up the "hard drive light" not to the hard drive ...

You wanted Extreme Crochet?

May 1st, 2004
Keith Moore thought I was writing about Extreme Crochet in my previous post about Extreme Croquet. No, Keith, if I had wanted to write about Extreme Crochet, I would have used this link...

Where does the taskbar get grouped button icons from?

April 30th, 2004
Follow-up question to Where does the taskbar get grouped button titles from?: Where does the taskbar get grouped button icons from? The icon for grouped taskbar buttons comes from the icon for the underlying EXE, the same icon that appears when you open the folder that the EXE resides in and scroll down to the EXE. For example, if ...

Extreme croquet

April 30th, 2004
This week, Only a Game covered the sport of Extreme Croquet. Still doesn't hold a candle to Extreme Ironing, though...