Sometimes people ask for features that are such blatant security holes I don't know what they were thinking. Is there a way to get the current user's password? I have a program that does some stuff, then reboots the system, and I want to have the current user's password so I can log that user back in when I'm done, then my program can resume its o...

The three UI state messages: WM_CHANGEUISTATE, WM_QUERYUISTATE and WM_UPDATEUISTATE.

I'm kind of surprised at how much people reacted to my previous dead computer story. I guess there's an audience for stories about dead computers. Today's dead computer is my Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LE laptop, with a 600MHz processor and 192MB of RAM. Certainly a big step up from that 486/50 with 12MB of RAM. Laptop computers have a comparatively shor...

We've spent quite a bit of time over the past year learning about dialog templates and the dialog manager. Now we're going to put the pieces together to do something interesting: Building a dialog template on the fly. What we're going to write is an extremely lame version of the function. Why bother writing a bad version of something that Wind...

The WH_MSGFILTER hook lets you snoop on messages as they travel through modal loops.

A sample program that loses thread messages.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer is a fascinating source of information. He appeared again on my local public radio station to discuss issues related to garbage floating in the ocean. For example, at the 5:05 mark, he reminds us that, if you pull a 1920's fire extinguisher out of the ocean, you shouldn't drink it. Other fascinating facts:

Thread messages (as generated by the function) do not go anywhere when passed to the function. This is obvious if you think about it, because there is no window handle associated with a thread message. has no idea what to do with a message with no associated window. It has no choice but to throw the message away. This has dire consequences ...

The friend who brought to my attention the guide to British pub etiquette reports that Portsmouth's Millennium Tower, centerpiece of the Millennium Project, is still not finished, due for completion (scroll to the end of the article) in May 2005. To disguise the embarrassment, they've renamed it to Spinnaker Tower, thereby—as the Hampshir...

The function accepts a parameter. The documentation explains that it is a handle to the DLL containing the hook procedure. Why does the window manager need to have this handle? It needs the handle so it knows which DLL to load into each process when the hook fires. It injects the DLL you pass, then calls the function you pass. Clearly the fu...