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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Some files come up strange in Notepad

March 24th, 2004
David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it's forced to guess. Here's the file "Hello" in various encodings: This is the traditional ANSI encoding. This is the Unicode (little-...

Out of the deep fryer

March 24th, 2004
McDonalds anonunced that it would no longer offer "Super Size" on its menu. The ostensible reason was that the addition of newer healthier options didn't leave room on the menu for "Super Size". This was of course laughable on its face. Now it's even more laughable, because it turns out that the so-called "healthy" options are ...

@-notation was never legal in HTTP URLs anyway

March 23rd, 2004
Some people are in an uproar over IE's dropping of support for @ notation in HTTP URLs. What people fail to note is that The @ notation was never legal for HTTP URLs in the first place. If you go to RFC 1738 section 3.3 (HTTP), it explicitly states: An HTTP URL takes the form: where <host> and <port> are as described...

the qUirKY jaPan HomEPage

March 23rd, 2004
The weird stuff about Japan you were afraid to ask about. The Seldom-Asked Questions are interesting, but what I find the most fascinating is the pictures of various Japanese subcultures. [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded...

A privacy policy that doesn't actively offend me

March 22nd, 2004
I've ranted before about privacy policies and how they don't actually protect your privacy. (All they're required to do is disclose the policy; there is no requirement that the policy must be any good.) Today I read MetLife's privacy policy and found to my surprise that it does not actively offend me. It's written in plain English...

Why an object cannot be its own enumerator

March 22nd, 2004
I've seen people using the following cheat when forced to implement an enumerator: Why create a separate enumerator object when you can just be your own enumerator? It's so much easier. And it's wrong. Consider what happens if two people try to enumerate your formats at the same time: The two enumerators are really the same enumerator...

The only logical conclusion is that he was cloned

March 20th, 2004
Something is wrong with the world when fark finds something "real" news organizations miss. (When I first learned about fark, I confused it with FARC, a different organization entirely. That's right, a terrorist organization has its own official web site. Gotta love the Internet.)Anyway, fark has pointed out that the guy that ...

Catholic baseball fans want to eat meat on opening day

March 19th, 2004
So it happens that Opening Day of the baseball season coincides with Good Friday, a day of "fasting and abstinence" according to Catholic tradition. (Then again, after Vatican II, the definition of "fasting and abstinence" weakened significantly. All that most people remember any more is "no meat".) Catholics in Boston have applied to ...

Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters?

March 19th, 2004
As we learned in a previous entry, string resources group strings into bundles of 16, each Unicode string in the bundle prefixed by a 16-bit length. Why does the Resource Compiler complain about strings longer than 255 characters? This is another leftover from 16-bit Windows. Back in the Win16 days, string resources were also grouped ...

The car with no user-serviceable parts inside

March 18th, 2004
For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "...