The Old New Thing

Buy an island, or a country, or at least a replica of one

November 1, 2007 Nov 1, 2007 11/1/07

Raymond Chen

Off the coast of Dubai, Al Nakheel Properties is building a chain of 300 islands in the shape of the world. Learn more about the project by watching their video. The growing artificiality and commercialization of Dubai concerns some people, however. Locals joke that Dubai's call to prayer is "Attention shoppers!" The naysayers can cluck ...

Why does GetDiskFreeSpaceEx return the wrong amount of free space?

November 1, 2007 Nov 1, 2007 11/1/07

Raymond Chen

One customer discovered that viewing the properties of a drive from Explorer shows the amount of disk free space significantly lower than the actual amount of free disk space as resported by the disk management snap-in. The command prompt agrees with Explorer and shows the incorrect result. What's going on? Not surprisingly, both Explorer and...

The Acorn Wand, key to a magical puzzle hunt

October 31, 2007 Oct 31, 2007 10/31/07

Raymond Chen

Puzzle hunts are a popular pastime at Microsoft. For the Microsoft Intern Puzzleday 2007, the puzzle design team decided upon a Harry Potter theme. Competitors ("students") formed teams ("study groups") as they attended classes at the Hogwarts campus at Microsoft. Of course, since this is Harry Potter, you need a magic wand, so the puzzle ...

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Local execution

October 31, 2007 Oct 31, 2007 10/31/07

Raymond Chen

The security response team gets all sorts of reports, and a good number of them are from people who just get excited that they were able to do something unusual, even if it isn't a security vulnerability. Attached please find a security exploit in the ABC ActiveX control. If you save this Web page to a file and double-click it, it <does ...

Email tips from Adam Phillabaum

October 30, 2007 Oct 30, 2007 10/30/07

Raymond Chen

Adam Phillabaum of Doing Boeing (who kept the name even though he left Boeing and now works for PayScale) has his own tips for writing email. Recommended reading...

You can't change it, but you can hide it and add something that looks like it

October 30, 2007 Oct 30, 2007 10/30/07

Raymond Chen

Today we have another case of "Now you have two problems." The corporate customer already solved their problem halfway and needed help on the other half. The impossible half. We want to change the Add or Remove Programs icon in the Windows XP control panel so it runs our custom install management program instead of running the one built ...

Why doesn't Explorer show recursive directory size as an optional column?

October 29, 2007 Oct 29, 2007 10/29/07

Raymond Chen

"Why start up another program to see folder sizes, when they should just be right there, in Explorer, all the time?" The same reason \\ does not autocomplete to all the computers on the network: Because it would destroy corporate networks. Showing folder sizes "all the time" means that when you open, say, the root of a large server, ...

The King County Council race gets even stranger

October 26, 2007 Oct 26, 2007 10/26/07

Raymond Chen

I told you it was going to get weird. In the month since my last report, there have been a few developments in the county council race between an accused drunk (the incumbent) and a fringe candidate (the challenger). The Seattle Times tries to summarize the state of the race with a series of articles...

If you pass enough random numbers, eventually one of them will look valid

October 26, 2007 Oct 26, 2007 10/26/07

Raymond Chen

One customer traced a problem they were having to the way they were calling a function similar in spirit to this one: This function takes a clipboard format and looks for it on the clipboard. If found, it returns a copy of the data. Looks great, huh? The problem is that the customer would sometimes call the function as . The clipboard...

What's the deal with the EM_SETHILITE message?

October 25, 2007 Oct 25, 2007 10/25/07

Raymond Chen

If you look up the documentation on the and messages, they just say "not implemented". What's going on here? The and messages were added back in 2002 for the breadcrumb bar to use. Back in those days, the breadcrumb bar wasn't what you see in Windows Vista today, a series of buttons with drop-down arrows, each representing a level in the ...