The Old New Thing

The cultural axes of punctuality and waiting in line

May 27, 2008 May 27, 2008 05/27/08
Raymond Chen
Even ten minutes after my conference talk was scheduled to begin, people were still wandering into the hall. My host explained that in Portugal, nothing starts on time. (This Web site goes so far as to say that arriving a half hour to 45 minutes late is customary.) I asked whether the Portuguese form orderly lines when waiting for things. ...

You can't give away something that isn't yours

May 27, 2008 May 27, 2008 05/27/08
Raymond Chen
This rule of real life applies to code as well. If something doesn't belong to you, then you can't give it away. For example, functions like and take ownership of the item that you pass it. In SetClipboardData's case, the memory block you pass as the parameter becomes the property of the clipboard. For it's the that becomes the ...

Welcome to the International Bank of Raymond

May 26, 2008 May 26, 2008 05/26/08
Raymond Chen
Over a decade ago, one of my colleagues (whom I'll call "Ralph" for the purpose of this discussion) told me that he briefly ran an international bank. Well, not really. Ralph's first roommate was another Microsoft employee, somewhat of the stereotypical computer nerd in the sense that he could write code like a maniac but didn't have a good ...

What does TranslateAccelerator do?

May 23, 2008 May 23, 2008 05/23/08
Raymond Chen
For some reason, there appears to be some confusion over what does. It's very simple, and it's all spelled out in the documentation. You give it a message, and if the message is a keypress that matches an entry in the accelerator table, the corresponding or message is sent to the window you said you are translating messages for. One ...

Microspeak: On-board (verb)

May 22, 2008 May 22, 2008 05/22/08
Raymond Chen
Here are a few citations. On a list of activities: Presumably they mean bring on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn't convert a noun to a verb; they converted a prepositional phrase to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language. Here's a snippet from a blog post which seems ...

Food discovery: Vietnamese sandwiches, aka bánh mì

May 21, 2008 May 21, 2008 05/21/08
Raymond Chen
Some friends came down to visit from Vancouver to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate, and when the topic of lunch arose, one of them suggested Vietnamese sandwiches. "What are Vietnamese sandwiches?" I asked. "Okay, that settles it. We're having Vietnamese sandwiches for lunch," was the response. We went to the generically-named...