The Old New Thing

It’s surprising how suddenly those new skins started pouring in

January 9, 2009 Jan 9, 2009 01/9/09
Raymond Chen
A friend of mine told me a story of a project from over ten years ago. Part of the product design was that it would include a bunch of skins (visual styles). The development team had written up the skinning infrastructure, but the company which was hired to create the actual skins hadn't delivered anything. My friend's assignment was to test ...

The programmers don’t design skins; they just make skins possible

January 8, 2009 Jan 8, 2009 01/8/09
Raymond Chen
Not all skill sets are interchangeable. That's why we have concepts like division of labor and specialization. But it appears that not everybody understands this. I was reminded of this topic when I read the reactions to the Microsoft Exchange Team announcing that they had added Xbox and Zune themes to OWA. Many people were shocked, such ...

Raymond misreads flyers: A Taste of WWL

January 7, 2009 Jan 7, 2009 01/7/09
Raymond Chen
There were flyers in our building inviting people to attend a food event called A Taste of WWL. The letters WWL stand for Windows and Windows Live, but the font they chose for the sign was confusing to me. The capital L looked like a capital I, and I misread the poster as an invitation to attend A Taste of WWI. And then I thought, "Who ...

Microspeak: Learnings

January 6, 2009 Jan 6, 2009 01/6/09
Raymond Chen
If things you teach are teachings, then things you learn must be learnings, right? Good Microspeak citations for this word are hard to find since the word is rarely used in a sentence; it's just a heading in a slide presentation. I found dozens of presentations that had a slide titled Learnings from XYZ, or, for those who want to sound really ...

Not my finest hour: Misreading a product label

January 5, 2009 Jan 5, 2009 01/5/09
Raymond Chen
I had finished some store-bought soup and thought to myself, "That was a pretty good soup. What brand was it? I'll buy it again." I went to my recycle bin to fish out the aseptic box that the soup came in, and looked for the brand name. And I found it: dnos. I thought to myself, "That's a strange name for a soup company...

Even if you have code to handle a message, you’re allowed to call DefWindowProc, because you were doing that anyway after all

January 5, 2009 Jan 5, 2009 01/5/09
Raymond Chen
Just because you write case WM_SOMETHING: doesn't mean that you have to handle all possible parameters for the WM_SOMETHING message. You're still allowed to call the DefWindowProc function. After all, that's what you did when you didn't have a case WM_SOMETHING: statement in the first place. switch (uMsg) { case WM_CHAR: OnChar...

Kids love cake, but that doesn’t make them good judges of cake

January 2, 2009 Jan 2, 2009 01/2/09
Raymond Chen
My friend who got married last year went to the Seattle Wedding Show (here are some pictures from the 2007 show courtesy of a vendor's blog) and, through a series of circumstances not relevant to the story, combined the visit with a brief stint of babysitting for her nieces, one a tomboy and the other a girly-girl. The children's father came...

Why doesn’t Windows 95 format floppy disks smoothly?

January 2, 2009 Jan 2, 2009 01/2/09
Raymond Chen
Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only. Who spends all day formatting floppy disks? From the reaction of geekdom, it appears that there are lots of geeks who sit around formatting disks all day. (Psst, you can buy them pre-formatted.) But why did Windows 95 get all sluggish when you formatted...

Follow-up: A new DUI record set in the state of Washington

January 1, 2009 Jan 1, 2009 01/1/09
Raymond Chen
A year ago, I noted that a new DUI record had been set for the state of Washington. It took a while, but the story finally settled out. Recapping the story so far (links in the original article): The driver's attorneys eventually succeeded in having her released from jail (where she had been held on $300,000 bail) to a treatment center. ...