The Old New Thing

When selecting system colors, match but don't mix

December 12, 2007 Dec 12, 2007 12/12/07
Raymond Chen
Here's a question that came in from a customer: Is there a way to view all the Windows color schemes at once? We want to display text in the color against a background of , and we want to check that this looks good in all of the themes. A mistake I see from some programs is mixing system colors that are not meant to be mixed. The colors I'...

Exploiting the inattentive, episode 3: Confusing movie titles

December 11, 2007 Dec 11, 2007 12/11/07
Raymond Chen
In early 1997, the movie Fly Away Home, a film about a teenage girl and her father rescuing a family of geese (inspired by Operation Migration), was released on DVD. the movie was well-reviewed and even earned an Academy Award nomination. The very same weekend, the movie with the very similar name Follow Me Home was released in theaters. ...

Why is my starting directory ignored when I elevate a command prompt?

December 11, 2007 Dec 11, 2007 12/11/07
Raymond Chen
Take a shortcut to the command prompt or some other Windows component, right-click it, and select "Run as Administrator." The "Start in" directory from the shortcut is ignored and you are always dropped into the system directory. Why is the starting directory ignored? To avoid a category of attacks (current directory attacks). According to ...

What seems obvious today may have been impractical then

December 10, 2007 Dec 10, 2007 12/10/07
Raymond Chen
In the discussion of the environment variable problem, BryanK posits that the real mistake was allowing batch files to modify their parent environment in the first place. Instead, they should have run in a sub-process. Try saying that when your computer has only 16KB of memory, which is how much memory the original IBM PC came with. Heck, ...

The magical healing properties of safe mode – bonus content

December 7, 2007 Dec 7, 2007 12/7/07
Raymond Chen
Okay, so you already read The healing properties of safe mode in TechNet Magazine. Here's the bonus content that was cut for space. First, the original title was "The Magical Healing Powers of Safe Mode," but it got trimmed for space reasons. (Ich bin mit der deutschen Übersetzung des ersten Satzes ein bisschen enttäuscht. Die ...

Am I for real or just a robot? part 2

December 6, 2007 Dec 6, 2007 12/6/07
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, somebody clicked the "Contact me" link in the navigation bar, and despite the warnings, asked a technical question. I responded, "If you have a question you can post it to the suggestion box." The reply: Please, don't use a bot which pretends to be you to answer e-mails. Especially such a poorly-designed one. Maybe those ...

Welcome to the Microsoft email culture

December 5, 2007 Dec 5, 2007 12/5/07
Raymond Chen
For good or ill, email is the most heavily used communication system at Microsoft, so much so that most people at Microsoft are known by their email addresses, sometimes more so than by their legal names! For example, most everybody at Microsoft knows Stephen Toulouse by his email address, "stepto" (pronounced as if it were spelled "steptoe...