The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
When you’re walking around a city, you usually forget to look up
When you're walking around a city, you usually forget to look up. It takes a landmark building to prompt you to admire anything above the ground floor. For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Times included a brief walking tour of Seattle architecture. The article doesn't mention one of my favorites: The roll-on deodorant building on the corner of Seneca and Second. The effect is most striking if you if you stand on Second and Union and look southeast at night. (Sadly, under the dome is just a roomful of machines.)
Consequences of the Explorer view model: If you create a view, then you succeeded, even if you’d rather fail
Commenter Anonymous asked why navigating to a drive with no media displays a dialog instead of showing the error message in the view. This is an unfortunate consequence of Explorer's browser/view model. The shell browser binds to the and asks for the view by calling . The view window calls to figure out what to show in the view—and here is where the error dialog appears asking you to insert a disc into the drive. The problem is that has to return an enumerator or an error code. There is no return value that says "Um, yeah, could you display this text instead?" In a narrow sense, there's no way to r...
Rachmaninov had big hands: An illustration
Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor, Op. 3, No. 2, performed as it is written, by classical music comedy duo Igudesman & Joo. I tried to learn that piece once. I didn't last long.
The great thing about priorities is that you can always go one higher
The phenomenon I call priority inflation has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels: Over the past few years, I've seen a shift in the labelling of priorities in planning documents. A new priority has been introduced: Priority Zero. Nobody has explained to me what Priority 0 means, but I assume somebody invented it to emphasize that the feature is even more critical than priority 1. Mind you, I'm not sure what could be more important to a project than "If we don't do this, we're all fired." Maybe "If we don't do this, the earth will exp...
If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority
Last time, I mentioned that eventually everything is top priority. A similar topic is what I'm calling priority inflation, which takes more than one form. Today's priority inflation is the introduction of new "top priority" items. (Chris Becker has some thoughts on this topic as well.) "XYZ is very important to our project. Please make it your top priority." A few weeks later, "ABC is very important to our project. It should take priority over all other issues." When this happens, I like to ask, "Is this even more important than XYZ?" I've done it so much that my management has changed the way it introduces...
Adventures in product testing: This phone’s so hot, it’ll set your head on fire
Actually, this is pretty cool. A phone that sets your head on fire. Most people charge extra for that. These lithium-ion polymer batteries can overheat due to an internal short circuit in the batteries, which can pose a fire hazard. The battery has only been used in the GN9120 wireless headset. Go ahead, make up your own joke.
If you wait long enough, everything is our top priority
I always crack a smile whenever I hear or read someone say that "XYZ is our top priority." The person may believe it at the moment they say it, but just wait a little while, and soon there will be a new top priority. If you call the person out on their shifting priorities, they usually come up with some hand-waving explanation that the two "top" priorities are actually the same thing. Last week, you said that customer satisfaction was our top priority, but just now you said that our employees' well-being is our top priority. Which one is the real top priority? In other words, which is more important, custome...
Is second-hand advice better than no advice at all?
Commenter Grow Up (if you're so grown up yourself, why not use your real name?) took issue with the second-hand advice I gave when the discussion of protecting sensitive data. In that discussion, I gave second-hand advice on how one could protect information, and one reader apparently thought I was trying to malign said second-hand advice or was holding it up as non-authoritative. (In case you forgot: Everything here is non-authoritative. It's all just my interpretation of the world around us. And that interpretation is often wrong. Don't make me bring back the nitpicker's corner.) I added the second-hand advi...
You’d think this sort of disclaimer on children’s modeling clay would not be necessary
"Molded results vary depending on child's age and level of skill."