The Old New Thing

A burglar tells you the best place to hide your money

August 3, 2009 Aug 3, 2009 08/3/09
Raymond Chen
Jeffrey Strain chats with a former burglar and learns the best place to hide money. ("The bank," responds the former burglar. Oh, the best place to hide money in the house...) A month later, the follow-up article discussed the worst places to hide money (that sound like good ideas but aren't...

When giving a presentation with a diagram, pretend the diagram doesn't exist

August 3, 2009 Aug 3, 2009 08/3/09
Raymond Chen
::Wendy:: suggested enabling a means of displaying pictures on the blog without messing up the display of the whole post. Actually, I've simply given up on the pretty diagrams since everybody seems to hate them. You may have noticed that I've been using ASCII art instead. It's certainly easier for me to write, though it's also a bit uglier...

How organizations inadvertently confirm facts when they try not to

July 31, 2009 Jul 31, 2009 07/31/09
Raymond Chen
On the Media in its story "Fact? Check!" forwarded the revelation (uncovered by the PBS program Frontline in the first part of their "News War" series) that the fact that the United States Justice Department launches a leak investigation implicitly confirms the leak! That's because one of the prerequisites for a leak investigation is that ...

What is the difference between Directory and DirectoryBackground?

July 31, 2009 Jul 31, 2009 07/31/09
Raymond Chen
One item I left off the list of special progids is . Recall that is the progid for file system folders (a subset of which represents all shell folders, both file system and virtual). Closely related is , which isn't really a progid, but it is a place where shell extensions can register themselves. Specifically, it's where context menu ...

What is the difference between CSIDL_DESKTOP and CSIDL_DESKTOPDIRECTORY?

July 30, 2009 Jul 30, 2009 07/30/09
Raymond Chen
Among the various values you can pass to functions like are and . What's the difference between them? The is the virtual folder that represents the desktop. The contents of this virtual folder is what gets displayed on top of your wallpaper. The virtual folder is populated from various locations, some of them virtual, and some of them ...

The advantage of knowing your limits of discrimination

July 29, 2009 Jul 29, 2009 07/29/09
Raymond Chen
A story a while back about ridiculously expensive speaker cables and James Randi's challenge to tell the difference between them and modestly-priced cables reminded me of a conversation I had with a wine-loving friend of mine. He went on a wine tasting tour and sampled wines of varying quality and price. His conclusion was that he could ...

How do I put a window at the edge of the screen without triggering the automatic positioning behavior?

July 29, 2009 Jul 29, 2009 07/29/09
Raymond Chen
Last time, we saw that Windows 7 lets you position windows to fill the left or right half of the screen by just dragging the window to the appropriate edge. (This also works for the top and bottom half of the screen.) But what if you just want a window near the edge without the automatic positioning? Just grab the window from the far ...

How do I quickly position two windows side by side?

July 28, 2009 Jul 28, 2009 07/28/09
Raymond Chen
Commenter n/a posted a laundry list of feature requests. I'm not going to address all of them here (though I inadvertently addressed one of them a while ago). But today I'm going to address request number two, "A simple switch to create two windows, one alongside the other, vertically split." That feature has been around since Windows ...