The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
If Twitter is micro-blogging, then is what I’m doing macro-tweeting?
Here are a collection of brief messages not worthy of a full blog entry. I think I'm going to call it macro-tweeting.
Why is there a dry fountain in the Redmond North campus?
One of the things that may strike you if you visit Microsoft's Redmond North campus is that there's a large, dry fountain outside the cafeteria. Why isn't the fountain running? The Redmond North campus was purchased from Safeco, and with the purchase, Microsoft obtained title to a fountain whose design had two fatal flaws: Having large quantities of water dripping into a parking garage is not a good situation, and the Facilities people shut off the water and drained the fountain to prevent any further water damage. Further investigation revealed that the problem was quite serious and was not a simple fi...
Do QueryProcessCycleTime and QueryThreadCycleTime include cycles spent in kernel mode?
Do and include cycles spent in kernel mode? Yes, they do. They count cycles spent both in user mode and in kernel mode.
The Suggestion Box is for suggestions, that’s why it’s called a Suggestion Box
As you may have noticed, Mondays are generally used for responding to suggestions posted to the Suggestion Box. But often people post things into the Suggestion Box that aren't actually topic suggestions. Commenter Ulric decided to take up a slot in the suggestion box by pointing me to a funny video because he "couldn't resist." Actually, I was wrong about saying that it's not a topic suggestion. The video itself is the topic, so there you have it. Though I think some people may need to do a little better at exercising self-restraint. Commenter Yuhong Bao posted a series of entries to the suggestion box whic...
What are your high school language students complaining about today?
One of my friends is a high school language teacher, and I used to ask her, "So, what are your students complaining about today?" That was back when her school used the traditional "First we learn the personal pronouns, then we learn the present tense of regular verbs, then we learn nouns in nominative case..." grammar-based language acquisition system. That system works reasonably well for me (although I prefer to learn the major points all at once rather than in pieces), but it requires an appreciation for rules (and their exceptions) that most high school language students don't really have. That's why I li...
How does Raymond decide what to post on any particular day?
Occasionally somebody asks about the timing of an entry I've written and wants to know how far ahead with this blog thing I really am. To give you an idea of how far in advance I write my blog entries, I wrote this particular entry on February 13, 2008. Generally, the articles are published in the order I wrote them; this particular entry ended up on February 27, 2009 because that was the next available open day. If the big news topic of February 27th, 2009 happens to be related to this entry, it's just a coincidence. Now, with a buffer of over a year, I do have quite a bit of leeway in choosing when any pa...
Pressing a registered hotkey gives you the foreground activation love
One category of application that people complained about is the application launcher which keys off a hotkey and doesn't get the foreground love. Well, except that windows with registered hotkeys do get the foreground love. After you call the function to register a hotkey, the window manager will send you a message when the user presses that hotkey, and along with it, you will get the foreground love. If you call from inside your hotkey handler, the foreground window will change according to your instructions. A special administrator-only list of programs which are exempt from rules would just be ad...
Star Trek meets The A-Team
Rumors swirl that there's a movie version of The A-Team in the works. If they haven't decided on the casting yet, here's an option they may have overlooked: The cast of Star Trek. (I like how in the clips used in the fake trailer, they use one of an episode where Kirk is old. And in Hollywood, making a character older means graying their hair. They never gain weight when they age, unlike the actors themselves.)
Smart quotes: The hidden scourge of text meant for computer consumption
They look pretty but act differently.