The Old New Thing

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. ...

Sorry, I don’t get calls on this phone often

December 31, 2008 Dec 31, 2008 12/31/08
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, I was in a small meeting: It consisted of the project manager, me, and one other person. Just a quick little status meeting to discuss how things were going. We were a few minutes into the meeting when the project manager's cell phone rang. Now, this was back in the days before cell phones were ubiquitous. They were pretty ...

Crazy or cell phone?

December 30, 2008 Dec 30, 2008 12/30/08
Raymond Chen
You've seen it, I'm sure. People walking down the street talking to themselves. Crazy or cellphone? What really gets me are the people who wear the headsets even when they aren't talking on the telephone, but rather in anticipation of receiving a telephone call. To those people, I have this to say to you: You're not that important. Get...

Every crash is a potential security vulnerability

December 30, 2008 Dec 30, 2008 12/30/08
Raymond Chen
Whenever I post about a programming error that can lead to crashes, the security team gets all excited and starts looking for ways to exploit it. For example, when I wrote about the fundamentally flawed flag, the security folks went scouring through the Windows source code looking for anybody who passed that flag, and then tried to come up ...