The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why do some comments have a star?
Every so often, someone posts a really funny comment, and I feel stupid just posting the remark "Haha, that was funny" or even worse "LOL". So I'm going to try giving them a star instead. Chris Blackwell wins the first star. Hopefully people won't post comments just fishing for a star. (I realize that this is a vain hope and that I will probably have to cancel the star program within the week.)
When there is a long line of people waiting for a shared resource, you want to investigate the person who is hogging the resource, not the people waiting in line for it
If you see a long line of people waiting for a phone booth (note: this analogy assumes you remember how phone booths work), and you want to understand the reason for the long line, do you Go to a person waiting in line and begin your investigation there? Go to the phone booth (and the person inside) and begin your investigation there? If there is a long line of people waiting for a single resource, a resource that there is not normally a long line for, you would probably look at the person who is using the resource to see if, for example, they are a chatterbox who will be on the phone for an hour, or if ...
Why do Swedes count "1, X, 2"?
Occasionally, when an article in Swedish needs to count off three items, they are not labelled "1, 2, 3" but rather "1, X, 2". Why is that? I asked Jesper Holmberg, and he was kind enough to explain. (The entire exchange naturally was conducted in Swedish. Here's my translation.) As with most of the good things in life, it has to do with football [soccer]. In Sweden, it is not only legal to bet on horse races, football, and other stuff, but the Swedish government even has its own betting agency. "One, cross, or two" comes from the betting ticket, the slip of paper you fill in when you be...
What is the effect of setting the /3GB switch on my 64-bit Windows machine?
Nothing.
Fake trend watch: Bridesmaid pre-nuptial agreements
The only actual citation was a joke, yet it's a trend?
A shell extension is a guest in someone else's house; don't go changing the carpet
A customer was running into this problem with a shell extension: I am writing a shell namespace extension. I need to get data from a COM server, which requires impersonation via with . As I am just writing an extension into , I am not able to call , anymore from my extension. Is there a way I can start by setting in its COM initialization? I was browsing through web, and seems to take some settings from registry, but couldn't find anything related to this one. First of all, who says that the host process is ? If I open Notepad, then do a File.Open, and then navigate to your shell extension, boom, your sh...
Intelius cancels its cell phone directory, saving me the trouble of having to opt out of it every three months
A few years ago, I wrote about a new cell phone directory that charges $15 to give you incorrect information, and from which you have to renew your opt-out every three months. Well, apparently, less than a year later, due to "complaints from consumers and Verizon Wireless," Intelius decided to discontinue the service. Intelius is back in the news, because they have filed a preliminary prospectus with the SEC for an initial public offering. (According to TechCrunch, this is their second attempt at an IPO.) "It's important to know the history. Many investors looking at his history would be very careful." The pe...
Microspeak: Cookie licking
Now nobody else can have it.
Umpires are the lymphatic system of the baseball diamond
When I go to a baseball game, I try to remember to watch the umpires. They move around in a counter-intuitive way: They don't run toward the ball. They don't run toward the runner. Even when the ball is far away, the umpire runs from what appears to be one irrelevant position on the field to another equally irrelevant position. Yet no matter what eventually happens, there's always an umpire there to make the necessary call. (As opposed to the players on the field, who sometimes forget to cover third base.) That's because the umpires aren't playing the game of baseball as it happens on the field. They're playing...