The Old New Thing

Do I need rush processing? Beats me!

February 9, 2007 Feb 9, 2007 02/9/07
Raymond Chen
During the preparations for the 2005 PDC, I was filling out an application for a corporate credit card. (The rant behind why I was filling out this application in the first place will have to wait for another day.) One of the options was to check a box to request rush processing at an additional charge of $10. There was one key piece of ...

Who is most likely to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship?

February 8, 2007 Feb 8, 2007 02/8/07
Raymond Chen
You can count on The Annals of Improbable Research to produce groundbreaking results. One of my favorites is Who is most likely to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship?, in which researcher (and AIR editorial board member) Eric Schulman performs a careful statistical analysis of previous winners of the MacArthur Fellowship in order to ...

Why does my property sheet blink and the immediately disappear?

February 8, 2007 Feb 8, 2007 02/8/07
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, a customer will ask, "I'm trying to display a property sheet, but when I call the function, the property sheet blinks onto the screen and then immediately disappears. What is wrong?" Recall that displaying a property sheet entails filling out a structure, which in turn contains a pointer to either an array of s, or more often...

Maintaining standards of Japanese food abroad

February 7, 2007 Feb 7, 2007 02/7/07
Raymond Chen
They've been nicknamed the sushi police. In response to horror stories from Japanese travelling abroad and being shocked by what passes for Japanese food outside their borders, the Japanese agriculture ministry is developing certification standards for restaurants abroad that want to call themselves Japanese. Their results are supposed to be...

Why can't I create my dialog box? Rookie mistake #2

February 7, 2007 Feb 7, 2007 02/7/07
Raymond Chen
Another class of rookie mistake is less obvious from looking at the code. The problem with this code is that we forgot to call to register the listview class. More generally, the problem is that one of the controls on the dialog uses a window class that was not registered. (For example, maybe there's a rich edit control on the dialog, but...

Why can't I create my dialog box? Rookie mistake #1

February 6, 2007 Feb 6, 2007 02/6/07
Raymond Chen
Each dialog box resource is specified either by an integer ordinal or by a string name. But a simple typo will turn one into the other. Do you see the two "classic rookie mistakes"? It may be easier to spot if you take the resource file and send it through the preprocessor first: The first call to passes as the resource name. But ...

Public service announcement for United States taxpayers: In tax year 2006, you can claim a $30 refund if you owned a telephone

February 5, 2007 Feb 5, 2007 02/5/07
Raymond Chen
The United States government authorized a one-time refund of long-distance excise taxes paid between March 2003 and July 2006, but early returns suggest that many taxpayers are unaware of this refund. (Here's the IRS press release that goes into more detail and includes a list of most common mistakes people have been making.) The easy way ...