The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Two-year-old as finite state machine
Some time ago I joined a family for dinner, and they had a two-year-old. During dinner, the two-year-old accidentally knocked over her glass, and liquid quickly spread across the table. The adults at the table sprang into action, containing the spill on the table, wiping it up, and checking for leakage onto the floor. After all the excitement died down, the two-year-old looked down, saw the empty glass, and threw her hands up in the air, proudly announcing, "I drank it all!"
Reading the error message carefully can help you see how the computer misinterpreted what you typed
The details have been changed since they aren't important but the lesson is the same. A customer had the following problem with a command-line tool: I've created a taglist but I can't seem to get it to work with the command. When I ask it to track the taglist, it can't find it. But if I ask for all my taglists, there it is. Yes, the command isn't working, but let's take a closer look at that error message. It says . Strange, because you are trying to track a taglist, not a tag. Shouldn't the error message be ? Aha, the problem is that the command takes a list of tags on the command line, not a tagl...
Grown in the middle of some very respectable Seattle suburbs, such as Renton
"The marijuana is grown in the middle of some very respectable Seattle suburbs, such as Renton." This is a funny sentence if you're a longtime resident of the greater Seattle area, because Renton has historically been a working-class town. (Here's Almost Live's parody of South King County to give you an idea of what Renton is up against.) The city is working to change its reputation. I wish them luck.
Woe unto PROGMAN.INI
Sad but true: Once you document a file format, it becomes a de facto API. The Windows 95 team learned this the hard way when they set out to replace Program Manager with Explorer. Not only were the settings in the file documented, so too was the binary file format of files. The binary file format was included for diagnostic purposes: If you have a corrupted file, you can use the binary file format documentation to try to recover what you can out of it. But many people treated this documentation not as a FYI, but as a backdoor API. Instead of using the formal DDE interface for creating program groups and...
Welcome to the 11th annual Mid-Atlantic Road-E-O
The top sanitation truck drivers in the mid-Atlantic area converged on Pen Arygl, Pennsylvania for the regional finals of the SWANA Trash Collectors Road-E-O. And the results have been posted [pdf]. Only A Game's Ron Schachter reports [mp3]. (Despite the wackiness, the competition does highlight skills that all truck drivers need to master in order to complete their rounds.) And there's plenty of beeping.
The wheels of government bureaucracy turn slowly: Green cards
When foreign nationals come to work at Microsoft, the legal department gets to work with the paperwork of applying for permanent residency (colloquially known as a green card even though the cards haven't been green for a long time). Obtaining permanent resident status in the United States takes a ridiculous amount of time, and I remember the irony when one of my colleagues finally received his green card... on his last day working at Microsoft. Still, at least it arrived in time, if only barely. :: Wendy :: received her green card two months after she left the country.
Walt Mosspuppet: The return of the fake blog
Fake Steve Jobs put on the map the wonderful insanity of the fake celebrity blog. (I'm sure there were others before Fake Steve Jobs, but that's the one that made it cool and hip.) Copycats sprung up, from Fake Steve Ballmer to Mock Mark Cuban, but none of them really had the staying power of good old Fake Steve Jobs. (movie trailer voice) Until now. Introducing Walt Mosspuppet, a fake video blog starring a puppet version of the technology reporter. I love this guy.
One way to make sure nobody sends you feedback
Last year, somebody sent out a message to very large group of people describing a change to, well, what it described isn't important to the story. What's important is that the message ended with the following sentence: If you have questions, please send them to abcdef. If you don't see why this was a brilliant move, go back and check what that "abcdef" link really does. One of my cynical colleagues noted, "Maybe this was intentional. That way, when they get no feedback, they can say, 'See, this was an awesome decision. Nobody complained!'"
And they don't take American Express
A conversation between two friends of mine. Friend 1: Here's the fifteen dollars I owe you. Oh wait, I only have a twenty. Do you have a five? Friend 2: I don't carry cash. Everybody takes credit cards. Friend 1: I don't take credit cards. In my imagination, Friend 1 would have responded to "Everybody takes credit cards" with "Well, in that case, here ya go. Put it on my credit card." (The title is a tag line from a Visa credit card advertising campaign from years past.)