The Old New Thing

This American Life: What I Learned From Television, Seattle edition

March 9, 2007 Mar 9, 2007 03/9/07
Raymond Chen
Ira Glass paid another visit to Seattle (here's an appearance on local public radio station KUOW), this time for a live taping of an episode of his radio show This American Life titled "What I Learned From Television." He also took the opportunity to introduce another auditoriumful of people to the same-named television program premiering ...

Don't be so fast to discount those oddball time zones

March 9, 2007 Mar 9, 2007 03/9/07
Raymond Chen
This weekend marks the beginning of Daylight Saving Time in most parts of the United States, the first year under the new transition rules in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Pay extra attention to your clocks this weekend. If you have a device that automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time, and it hasn't been updated for the new ...

Just what the world has been wishing for: Surströmming ice cream

March 8, 2007 Mar 8, 2007 03/8/07
Raymond Chen
Every culture has its strange food that is used to scare away the foreigners. In Sweden, it's surströmming. (Surströmming is even classified as hazardous material by some airlines.) And, you know, when you dig into your plate of surströmming, I bet the first thing that goes through your mind is, "Wow, this would go great with...

The GETDISPINFO notifications tell you what information they want

March 8, 2007 Mar 8, 2007 03/8/07
Raymond Chen
The notifications used by the common controls are used when the control asks its parent to generate information that had been marked as delay-rendered, either explicitly via values such as or implicitly by being an owner-data control, for example. In fact the control is really just the middle man between the code that requested information ...

The wisdom of seventh graders: John Locke and influential persons

March 7, 2007 Mar 7, 2007 03/7/07
Raymond Chen
My friend the seventh grade teacher was leading the class in a discussion of the most influential persons in history, and after two days of the students collectively deciding whom they would put on the list, my friend revealed the list compiled by the author Michael H. Hart. The students felt bad that their collaborative list didn't match the...

Microspeak: Sit in it!

March 7, 2007 Mar 7, 2007 03/7/07
Raymond Chen
The title of this entry is a bad pun on a catchphrase from 1970s television. I apologize to those for whom the 1970s are a bad memory. A snippet of Microspeak that bothers me is the verb phrase "to sit in". Example: "I'm in the Nosebleed group which sits in Bob Smith's organization." I think it means "to be a part of" but I'm not quite ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 3

March 6, 2007 Mar 6, 2007 03/6/07
Raymond Chen
In an internal discussion of the women blogger conference known as BlogHer, somebody asked, "Why isn't there a BlogHim?" I replied, Isn't that the plural of the word "blog" in Hebrew? This got quite an amused response from the Hebrew-speaking (or at least vaguely Hebrew-aware) members of the mailing list. Not bad for having studied Hebrew ...

It's official, it's the Hannukah Eve Storm of 2006

March 5, 2007 Mar 5, 2007 03/5/07
Raymond Chen
(Following up on an earlier entry.) The National Weather Service chose a name for the wind storm of December 2006: It's going to be called the "Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006". But what is Hannukah Eve? Eh, it doesn't look like anybody's getting too worked up over that. You can download the entire list of entries (over 5000 of them) from...

Hiding files is not the same as protecting them

March 5, 2007 Mar 5, 2007 03/5/07
Raymond Chen
An anonymous commenter suggested that we should give up on "hiding protected operating system files". After all, if we "protect operating system files", that should be enough, shouldn't it? Well, except that some files are still hidden even though they are not protected. For example, your encryption keys are fully accessible to you (after ...