The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
When you agree to write to a particular length, make sure your content is actually that length
Your editor has a magazine to fill.
Why are developer tools orange?
The Secret Geek Leon Bambrick wonders why developer tools are orange. Coincidence? Worldwide conspiracy?
Things other people have written that have amused me, Episode 2
Somebody posted a time-saving tip and concluded with "You'll save yourself at least 5 minutes per year." I jokingly wrote back, "I already do XYZ which does this automatically, and besides, saving 5 minutes per year isn't much anyway. I spend that much time picking my nose." The response: "Yeah, but now you can do both nostrils."
Thanks for identifying the good programmers for us
Many years ago, my manager told me about a recruiting trip he made. In response to a large number of job applications submitted from a city where a major competing software company had its offices, a small group of Microsofties travelled to that city to interview those applicants and hold a mini-job fair, so that other interested parties could also show up and interview for positions. When the company learned that Microsoft was coming to interview people, they called an emergency meeting which all their top programmers were required to attend, timing it to coincide with the job fair. The theory must have been th...
Two-year-old as finite state machine
Some time ago I joined a family for dinner, and they had a two-year-old. During dinner, the two-year-old accidentally knocked over her glass, and liquid quickly spread across the table. The adults at the table sprang into action, containing the spill on the table, wiping it up, and checking for leakage onto the floor. After all the excitement died down, the two-year-old looked down, saw the empty glass, and threw her hands up in the air, proudly announcing, "I drank it all!"
Reading the error message carefully can help you see how the computer misinterpreted what you typed
The details have been changed since they aren't important but the lesson is the same. A customer had the following problem with a command-line tool: I've created a taglist but I can't seem to get it to work with the command. When I ask it to track the taglist, it can't find it. But if I ask for all my taglists, there it is. Yes, the command isn't working, but let's take a closer look at that error message. It says . Strange, because you are trying to track a taglist, not a tag. Shouldn't the error message be ? Aha, the problem is that the command takes a list of tags on the command line, not a tagl...
Grown in the middle of some very respectable Seattle suburbs, such as Renton
"The marijuana is grown in the middle of some very respectable Seattle suburbs, such as Renton." This is a funny sentence if you're a longtime resident of the greater Seattle area, because Renton has historically been a working-class town. (Here's Almost Live's parody of South King County to give you an idea of what Renton is up against.) The city is working to change its reputation. I wish them luck.
Woe unto PROGMAN.INI
Sad but true: Once you document a file format, it becomes a de facto API. The Windows 95 team learned this the hard way when they set out to replace Program Manager with Explorer. Not only were the settings in the file documented, so too was the binary file format of files. The binary file format was included for diagnostic purposes: If you have a corrupted file, you can use the binary file format documentation to try to recover what you can out of it. But many people treated this documentation not as a FYI, but as a backdoor API. Instead of using the formal DDE interface for creating program groups and...
Welcome to the 11th annual Mid-Atlantic Road-E-O
The top sanitation truck drivers in the mid-Atlantic area converged on Pen Arygl, Pennsylvania for the regional finals of the SWANA Trash Collectors Road-E-O. And the results have been posted [pdf]. Only A Game's Ron Schachter reports [mp3]. (Despite the wackiness, the competition does highlight skills that all truck drivers need to master in order to complete their rounds.) And there's plenty of beeping.