The Old New Thing

Psychic debugging: When reading unfamiliar code, assume it's mostly correct

April 23, 2007 Apr 23, 2007 04/23/07
Raymond Chen
You may be called in to study a problem in code you've never seen before or be asked to look over a proposed change to some code you've never seen before. When this happens, you have to take shortcuts in your analysis because following every function call to the bottom would not only take far too much time, but also take you so far away from ...

The format of bitmap resources

April 20, 2007 Apr 20, 2007 04/20/07
Raymond Chen
The next entry in the continuing sporadic series on resource formats is the bitmap. You thought accelerator tables were simple; bitmaps are even simpler. A bitmap resource takes the same form as a file, except that there is no . That's all...

No farting please, we're Americans

April 17, 2007 Apr 17, 2007 04/17/07
Raymond Chen
Apparently, when translating their Pokémon game from Japanese to English, Nintendo changed a question in an in-game personality test that asked you what you would do if you farted. In the English-language version, you merely broke a rotten egg. What, do they think kids in the U.S. don't fart? Or that they don't enjoy fart jokes. Allow ...

The Notepad file encoding problem, redux

April 17, 2007 Apr 17, 2007 04/17/07
Raymond Chen
About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it. First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports. 8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ...

See the Seattle Symphony on television in high definition

April 16, 2007 Apr 16, 2007 04/16/07
Raymond Chen
If you missed it on Saturday and Sunday night, you have a few more chances left. Set your DVR to record Seattle Symphony from Benaroya Hall: Brahms, Kernis and Kodály on one of its handful of repeat airings this week (the next one is tonight at 6pm on KCTS-HD). According to the story in the Seattle Times, it includes close-ups of ...

Changes to power management in Windows Vista

April 16, 2007 Apr 16, 2007 04/16/07
Raymond Chen
As I noted some time ago, it's hard to get programmers excited about power management. What's worse, programs that do take the effort to care about power management often do it rudely, hijacking your computer and preventing you from going into standby or hibernation, instead preferring to drain your battery until the computer just dies from ...