The Old New Thing

Iced-over roads + people who can't drive = very expensive (and dangerous) game of billiards

January 17, 2007 Jan 17, 2007 01/17/07
Raymond Chen
Unbelievable video of people in Portland, OR who should know better trying to drive down an icy road. (Direct WMV link. Interview with the person who shot the video, but you're going to have to put up with the inane local news-anchor chatter. That last link includes images of cars that, yup, struck the fire truck.) It's as if these people ...

Should all windows appear in the taskbar?

January 17, 2007 Jan 17, 2007 01/17/07
Raymond Chen
No new content today, just some follow-up discussion on the topic of windows that don't appear in the taskbar. The rules for which windows appear in the taskbar have been documented in MSDN for years, so changing the rules now would mean doing so after the game has ended. Consequently, this is not the sort of change that can be made lightly...

One Armstrong = 13.5 mph

January 16, 2007 Jan 16, 2007 01/16/07
Raymond Chen
Out of curiosity, I wanted to know how fast Tour de France riders go up l'Alpe D'Huez, the legendary mountain climb. Using information from the Wikipedia page, I calculated that Lance Armstrong's 2004 ascent had an average speed of approximately 13.5 mph (22 kph). Consequently, I invented the Armstrong, a unit of bicycle velocity, ...

EnumChildWindows already enumerates recursively

January 16, 2007 Jan 16, 2007 01/16/07
Raymond Chen
I often see people write code that goes something like this: The intent here was to perform the operation on all the windows in a window tree by operating on the root, then operating on each of the children. Operating on the children is in turn performed recursively, so that we eventually see every window in the tree. Except that if you ...

The wisdom of sev^H^H^Heighth graders: It was not just white people who were helped by Martin Luther King

January 15, 2007 Jan 15, 2007 01/15/07
Raymond Chen
(Today is the birthday of the famed civil rights leader, the first time since 2001 that the federal holiday coincides with the correct historical date. It seemed an auspicious date to return to the time machine essay.) The eighth grade students were given the same in-class writing assignment as the seventh graders, with the same ground ...

Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps?

January 15, 2007 Jan 15, 2007 01/15/07
Raymond Chen
Craig Ward figures that if he asks enough questions I might answer one of them. "Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps? How about VB?" People use whatever they decide best meets the requirements for the task at hand. That could be a batch file, a C++ program, a perl script, a web page with a bunch of JScript, use your ...

How do I print the contents of a rich text control?

January 12, 2007 Jan 12, 2007 01/12/07
Raymond Chen
For some reason, people are really puzzled by rich edit printing. I'm no expert on printing, but even I was able to figure it out. The kernel is the message. Each time you call it, a little bit more of the rich text control is printed, and the message returns the index of the first unprinted character, which you can pass back in to print the...

How do I put more than 32,000 characters into a rich text control?

January 11, 2007 Jan 11, 2007 01/11/07
Raymond Chen
Last time we looked at loading an entire file into a rich text control. The code runs great, until you try to use it to display a license agreement provided by your legal department, and then some paranoid user reports that they can't read past page seven. (What, somebody reads those things?) What's going on? If you don't specify otherwise...

Ken Levine teaches us about television script writing

January 10, 2007 Jan 10, 2007 01/10/07
Raymond Chen
Ken Levine has written for some of the most well-known television programs of the past few decades. M*A*S*H, Cheers (for which he won an Emmy), Frasier. And that's not counting his second (third? fourth?) career as a baseball announcer. He writes about whatever is on his mind, be it Barry Bonds' 715th home run, what not to put into your ...