The Old New Thing

The audacity of selling things that don't belong to you

July 3, 2007 Jul 3, 2007 07/3/07
Raymond Chen
NPR some time ago reported on a most audacious scam: Selling someone else's property out from under them. But this guy was small potatoes, selling properties owned by churches and other non-profit organizations. The king in this category of fraud is Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower... twice...

If the system says that an embedded string could not be converted from Unicode to ANSI, maybe it's trying to tell you something

July 3, 2007 Jul 3, 2007 07/3/07
Raymond Chen
It's probably trying to tell you that an embedded string could not be converted from Unicode to ANSI. One of our programs is throwing the exception "Type could not be marshaled because an embedded string could not be converted from Unicode to ANSI." It happens only if we use the Chinese version of the program. Why are we getting this ...

The conversations backstage at computer Go tournaments

July 2, 2007 Jul 2, 2007 07/2/07
Raymond Chen
Steve Rowe linked to an essay on why computers can't play Go well even though they've mastered other "difficult" games like chess. I was reminded of a description I received of what happens backstage at computer Go tournaments (i.e., tournaments that pit Go-playing computers against each other). ("Backstage" is a bit of a misnomer, of ...

Don't forget to pass the current directory along with the command line to your single-instance program

June 29, 2007 Jun 29, 2007 06/29/07
Raymond Chen
If you make a single-instance program, and somebody runs a second copy of the program and passes a command line, the most common way of handling this is to hand the command line to the first copy of the program and let the first copy deal with it. When you do this, don't forget about the current directory. If somebody passes a relative path...

If it's optional, then don't make it mandatory

June 28, 2007 Jun 28, 2007 06/28/07
Raymond Chen
I was filling out an online form, and it gave me the option of providing feedback on the service I had received. The button was marked "optional", but I clicked it anyway because there were one or two things I thought were worthy of mentioning, suggestions on how they could improve the user's experience with the Web site, that sort of thing. ...