As if there aren't enough things in the world to worry about. Now you have to watch out for exploding knitting needles.

One shows things that might be, the other shows things that were. Both of them try to help you type something, but they operate differently (and look confusingly similar). Let's take the second case first. Dropdown history, like you see in the Run dialog, common file dialogs, and the Internet Explorer address bar. The cue for dropdown history is a...

I arrived home yesterday to find a letter from the IRS in my mailbox. Dare I open it? The only other interaction with the IRS I'd had previously was several years ago where they told me I had overpaid my taxes and sent me a refund check of a few hundred dollars. I went back and reviewed my return and concluded that my original return was correct a...

Some people have noticed that NTFS automatically sorts filenames, but does so in a manner different from Explorer. Why is that? For illustration purposes, I created files with the following names: And here's the sort order for various scenarios, at least on my machine. (You'll later see why it's important whose machine you test on.) First, not...

The list of programs on the left hand side of the Start menu is really two lists. (You can see the separator line between them.) The top list is the so-called "pin list". This is the list of programs you picked to be "locked" to the top of the Start menu. You can "pin" a program by right-clicking it and selecting "Pin to Start menu", or you can j...

Owner-data listviews let you take over data management from the listview. This is useful in our case since we have over twenty thousand dictionary entries, and creating even that many blank listview items takes an unacceptably long amount of time. Let's convert our listview to an owner-data listview. Believe it or not, this is quite easy to do o...

As we noted last time, adding items to the listview takes an absurd amount of time. Today, we'll make a failed attempt at improving this because it lets me illustrate a listview technique and it lays the groundwork for the real fix next time. Instead of creating the items in their entirety, let's set their text to . This is a placeholder value ...

In Seattle this weekend, you will have the opportunity to see people throwing things more things into the air than they have hands for, and even learn how to do it yourself: [T]he primary goal of this festival will be to teach as many people to juggle as possible. The Big Show is Saturday at 7pm. The events are free but donations are accepted...

We return briefly to the ongoing Chinese/English dictionary series and write some code to display all the definitions we had worked so hard to collect. (I figure you're anxious to see something on the screen, so I am going to handle the Traditional Chinese/Simplified Chinese issue later. For now, the "Simplified" column will be blank.) Take th...

The quintennial International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition will be held later this year, and I was reminded that the awards for "Best performance of a mazurka" and "Best performance of a concerto" have not been awarded since 1985. Simply put: Nobody since 1985 has been good enough to deserve it. The year 1995 was a particularly bad year ...