The Old New Thing

Follow-up: Politically motivated armed robber being sent back to the U.S.

February 13, 2008 Feb 13, 2008 02/13/08

Raymond Chen

The accused armed robber who is using political asylum as his defense has been re-apprehended and will not fight being returned to the United States. I guess he needs to update the "About Me" section of his blog...

Controlling which devices will wake the computer out of sleep

February 13, 2008 Feb 13, 2008 02/13/08

Raymond Chen

I haven't experienced this problem, but I know of people who have. They'll put their laptop into suspend or standby mode, and after a few seconds, the laptop will spontaneously wake itself up. Someone gave me this tip that might (might) help you figure out what is wrong. Open a command prompt and run the command powercfg -devicequery ...

Thank you, people sitting behind me, for explaining what the conductor is doing

February 12, 2008 Feb 12, 2008 02/12/08

Raymond Chen

I didn't get a chance to thank you after the concert, but I did want to express my appreciation for the running commentary you provided during the performance of last week's concert of Debussy, Schönberg and Brahms. Most people wait until the break between pieces, some may even dare to exchange information in whispers during the ...

If you ask whether I'll be at a conference, the answer is usually No

February 12, 2008 Feb 12, 2008 02/12/08

Raymond Chen

It seems that whenever there is a technology conference, there's a decent chance that somebody will ask me via email or a comment whether I'm going. The default answer to Are you going to this conference? is No. You may find it hard to believe, but going to conferences around the world is not part of my job. My job is to sit in front of a ...

Why does Ctrl+ScrollLock cancel dialogs?

February 11, 2008 Feb 11, 2008 02/11/08

Raymond Chen

Commenter Adam Russell asks why Ctrl+ScrollLock cancels dialogs. Easy. Because Ctrl+ScrollLock is the same as Ctrl+Break, and Ctrl+Break cancels dialogs. Okay, that answer actually raises two more questions. First, why is Ctrl+ScrollLock the same as Ctrl+Break? This is a consequence of the backward compatibility designed into the Enhanced ...

Why couldn't you have more than one instance of a 16-bit multi-DS program?

February 8, 2008 Feb 8, 2008 02/8/08

Raymond Chen

Recall that the identified a set of variables. This causes a bit of a problem if your program has multiple data segments; in other words, multiple sets of variables. In such a program, the code would load the data segment of whatever variable it needed each time it needed to access a variable from a different segment. This was no problem at ...

Grass jelly may be an Asian drink, but it's not crazy

February 7, 2008 Feb 7, 2008 02/7/08

Raymond Chen

Chris Pirillo discovered Crazy Asian Drinks, a Web site devoted to the beverage preferences of people from the eastern part of Asia. Now, the text is really funny (which is important), but I would like to come to the defense of grass jelly drink. First of all, when I was growing up, grass jelly wasn't a drink. It was a dessert. It came in...

What did MakeProcInstance do?

February 7, 2008 Feb 7, 2008 02/7/08

Raymond Chen

doesn't do anything. What's the point of a macro that doesn't do anything? It did something back in 16-bit Windows. Recall that in 16-bit Windows, the was the mechanism for identifying a data segment; i.e., a bunch of memory that represents the set of variables in use by a module. If you had two copies of Notepad running, there was ...

Otaku cosplay culture makes another inroad into North America

February 6, 2008 Feb 6, 2008 02/6/08

Raymond Chen

In the summer of 2006, a Japanese-inspired maid café opened in Toronto. Known as the iMaid Cafe, it offers Chinese food served by young Chinese women in French maid costumes, while Japanese pop music plays in the background. Owner Aaron Wang explains the concept to Canadian television...

When there's a problem with the platform, you blame the platform, whether it's the platform's fault or not

February 6, 2008 Feb 6, 2008 02/6/08

Raymond Chen

I watched with a twinge of sad recognition Scoble's hissy fit when his blog didn't show up correctly in Bloglines because it was the classic application compatibility problem, just shifted to the world of Web 2.0. (I don't know what Web 2.0 means, but since nobody else who uses the term knows what it means either, I'm at least in good company...