The Old New Thing

What does an NMI error mean? (The infamous "Hardware Malfunction")

February 27, 2007 Feb 27, 2007 02/27/07
Raymond Chen
I promised to talk more about NMI, so here it is. What generates an NMI? What does it mean? The first question is easy to answer but doesn't actually shed much light: Any device can pull the NMI line, and that will generate a non-maskable interrupt. Back in the Windows 95 days, a few really cool people had taken the ball-point pen ...

The politician's fallacy and the politician's apology

February 26, 2007 Feb 26, 2007 02/26/07
Raymond Chen
I learned this from Yes, Minister. They call it the politician's fallacy: As befits its name, you see it most often in politics, where poorly-thought-out solutions are proposed for urgent problems. But be on the lookout for it in other places, too. You might see somebody falling victim to the politician's fallacy at a business meeting, say...

Please feel free to stop using DDE

February 26, 2007 Feb 26, 2007 02/26/07
Raymond Chen
A commenter asked, "As an application programmer, can I really ignore DDE if I need to interact with explorer/shell?" The answer is, "Yes, please!" While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically...

The 2007/2008 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
Raymond Chen
Every year, I put together a little pocket guide to the Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they want. As before, you might find it helpful, you might not, but here it is anyway. Notes: This chart doesn't include "one-off" concert series such as the Visiting Orchestras or ...

How to get your laptop to resume from standby in under two seconds

February 22, 2007 Feb 22, 2007 02/22/07
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues recently posted the story of the work he did to get laptops to resume quickly. The fun part was implementing the optimizations in the kernel. The not-fun part was finding all the drivers who did bad things and harassing their owners into fixing the bugs. One some laptops, he could get the resume time down to an ...

With what operations is LockWindowUpdate not meant to be used?

February 22, 2007 Feb 22, 2007 02/22/07
Raymond Chen
Okay, now that we know what operations is meant to be used with, we can look at various ways people misuse the function for things unrelated to dragging. People see the "the window you lock won't be able to redraw itself" behavior of and use it as a sort of lazy version of the message. Though sending the message really isn't that much ...

Mandarin Chinese gaining popularity in public schools

February 21, 2007 Feb 21, 2007 02/21/07
Raymond Chen
NPR reports that Mandarin Chinese is gaining popularity in public schools. (But please oh please don't take pronunciations lessons from the student at time code 3:25. His first tone was clearly a second—falling victim to the classic mistake of applying English tone shaping to Chinese syllables.) On the other hand, some of those ...

With what operations is LockWindowUpdate meant to be used?

February 21, 2007 Feb 21, 2007 02/21/07
Raymond Chen
As I noted earlier, the intended purpose of can be captured in one word: dragging. The simplest case of is used by the window manager when you move or resize a window and "Show window contents while dragging" is disabled. When you start the move/size operation, the window manager locks the entire desktop so it can draw the dotted-rectangle...