The Old New Thing

No good deed goes unpunished, part 2

October 19, 2006 Oct 19, 2006 10/19/06
Raymond Chen
Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad for a few reasons. ...

Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy

October 18, 2006 Oct 18, 2006 10/18/06
Raymond Chen
Help text is not the place to put logic puzzles. In Windows Vista, when you go to the System control panel, you are shown a number that describes your computer's rating. But are higher numbers better or worse? If I had a choice, would it be better to have a 1 rating or a 5 rating? In earlier betas of Windows Vista, you ...

Answering phones at KUOW for their Fall 2006 pledge drive

October 17, 2006 Oct 17, 2006 10/17/06
Raymond Chen
I spent Saturday evening as a volunteer answering the phone for one of our local public radio stations, KUOW. This was the first time I had worked a pledge drive, and it was a fun experience. I was there sort of as an honorary member of a group of friends who get together every week for drinks; they decided to volunteer for the pledge drive ...

What does the letter "T" in LPTSTR stand for?

October 17, 2006 Oct 17, 2006 10/17/06
Raymond Chen
The "T" in comes from the "T" in . I don't know for certain, but it seems pretty likely that it stands for "text". By comparison, the "W" in probably comes from the C language standard, where it stands for "wide...

Raymond's excursions into East Asian pop music, episode 4: Yuki

October 16, 2006 Oct 16, 2006 10/16/06
Raymond Chen
When my story left off, a colleague of mine had dedicated himself to finding some good Japanese pop music, and what he found was this music video of the song JOY by Japanese pop star Yuki Isoya, who performs under the stage name YUKI. The video was mesmerizing. The Flash Gordon extras. The dance steps. The blinking. The hyperventilating...

640 x 480 is still not dead

October 16, 2006 Oct 16, 2006 10/16/06
Raymond Chen
Windows still has to worry about displays running at 640×480 resolution. Even though the default minimum resolution was bumped up to 800×600 for Windows XP, there are still 640×480 devices out there, typically tiny monitors on servers. One common set-up is to have a bank of tiny little monitors, each corresponding to one...

Shifting fortunes at Airbus over the A380

October 12, 2006 Oct 12, 2006 10/12/06
Raymond Chen
The Airbus A380 will be the largest-capacity commercial passenger plane, once they get around to making them. Now two years behind schedule, the A380 is not making life any easier for their parent company EADS. And in this two-player world, bad news for Airbus means good news for Boeing. As a Seattleite, I naturally root for Boeing over ...

How do I prevent multi-line edit controls from eating the Enter key?

October 12, 2006 Oct 12, 2006 10/12/06
Raymond Chen
You might decide to put a multi-line edit control in a dialog box, not because you want the user to input multi-line data, but because it's a convenient way to display multi-line text. When you do that, you may notice that the Enter key does not invoke the default dialog button, as you might normally expect. That's because the multi-line edit ...