The Old New Thing

Get Sea-Tac flight information (including gate and baggage claim) via email

May 15, 2007 May 15, 2007 05/15/07

Raymond Chen

There are lots of flight status sites out there. (My favorite is FlightAware because it's the geekiest of them.) Many of them will send you email alerts when flight information changes, but the one from the Port of Seattle is the only one I know of that will also tell you when the arrival gate and baggage claim carousel number change, which ...

Command lines need to be quoted; paths don't

May 15, 2007 May 15, 2007 05/15/07

Raymond Chen

While it's true that one category of problems comes from failing to quote spaces in command lines, it is a false statement that "path names in the registry should have quotation marks around them for obvious reasons." In fact it's the opposite. Path names should not be quoted. Think about it: Quotation marks are a parsing issue, not a file ...

Service required * Brewer error *

May 14, 2007 May 14, 2007 05/14/07

Raymond Chen

Last year, one of the fancy-dancy iCup devices (yes that's its name, I kid you not) in the kitchen of my building went on the fritz. Things break, that's to be expected. The screen which normally guides you through the selection process instead displayed an error message. The problem was not that it was out of coffee; when that happens, a ...

Evergreen Philharmonic Baroque Festival 2007

May 11, 2007 May 11, 2007 05/11/07

Raymond Chen

The Evergreen Philharmonic Orchestra is a student orchestra consisting of the best high school musicians in the Issaquah School District.† Last weekend I attended their annual Baroque Festival, although there was only one Baroque piece on the program. (False advertising, maybe, but I'll let it slide.) Why was I at a high school student...

Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch

May 11, 2007 May 11, 2007 05/11/07

Raymond Chen

To execute a command in each subdirectory of a directory tree from a batch file, you can adapt the following: (If you want to play with this command from the command prompt, then undouble the percent signs.) The option enables various special behaviors of the command. The most important change is that a string in single-quotation marks...

Email tip: Don't ask the same question multiple times in different groups

May 10, 2007 May 10, 2007 05/10/07

Raymond Chen

If you have a question and you want to ask multiple people or groups, do not send the question individually to each group. Just send the question once with your recipient list on the To line. If you send it individually, then each recipient will not know that you asked the question to other groups as well. This in turn creates wasted effort ...

Revelations of My Friends: An ancestor of today's Mad Libs

May 9, 2007 May 9, 2007 05/9/07

Raymond Chen

Literary detective Paul Collins stumbled upon a precursor to today's Mad Libs known as Revelations of My Friends. Listen to the NPR story to hear Scott Simon play, and go to Paul Collins' web site to see some of the drawing that Scott laughed at...

Don't be helpless: At least look at the function you're using

May 9, 2007 May 9, 2007 05/9/07

Raymond Chen

Sometimes I see people ask a question and get an answer, but the answer doesn't quite work. But instead of trying to understand the answer in order to see why it doesn't work and develop a better solution, they just play stupid. Here's an example. The names have been changed but the story's the same. How do I get a handle to a bright pink ...

Session 0 isolation: Where backward compatibility loses to security

May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07

Raymond Chen

One of the major changes to services in Windows Vista is session 0 isolation. After reading the summary, you can follow that first supplementary link, Impact of Session 0 Isolation on Services and Drivers in Windows Vista, to dig deeper and receive guidance on how you need to modify your service. Then again, some of the questions I see ...

The administrator is an idiot

May 8, 2007 May 8, 2007 05/8/07

Raymond Chen

Nearly all computer administrators are idiots. That's not because the personnel department is incompetent or because it's impossible to train competent administrators. It's because, for a consumer operating system, the computer administrator didn't ask to be one. In nearly all cases, the computer administrator is dad or grandma.† They ...