The Old New Thing

A very brief return to part 6 of Loading the Chinese/English dictionary

October 6, 2006 Oct 6, 2006 10/6/06

Raymond Chen

Back in Part 6 of the first phase of the "Chinese/English dictionary" series (a series which I intend to get back to someday but somehow that day never arrives), I left an exercise related to the member of the union. Alignment is one of those issues that people who grew up with a forgiving processor architecture tend to ignore. In this ...

Why does Windows hide keyboard accelerators and focus rectangles by default?

October 5, 2006 Oct 5, 2006 10/5/06

Raymond Chen

The release of Windows 2000 introduced a new setting: "Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key," which defaults on for most Western languages. What's the story behind this setting? I still have the rationale from the user interface designer who introduced this feature. Here's a redacted copy: To ...

You can invent new adjectives too

October 4, 2006 Oct 4, 2006 10/4/06

Raymond Chen

It's not just verbs and nouns. I just saw the adjective "planful" in a piece of email. I don't know what that is supposed to mean. Neither do dictionary.com or Encarta...

There's a reason why envelopes have backs

October 3, 2006 Oct 3, 2006 10/3/06

Raymond Chen

For some reason, people are upset that I don't have hard data for the cost difference between "slow" and "fast" mode enumeration. I already did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed that fast mode reduces the total time to enumerate the items in a folder from five minutes to two seconds. That's what's so great about back-of-the-...

If only he'd known to offer to back up their PC instead

October 3, 2006 Oct 3, 2006 10/3/06

Raymond Chen

I love it when two unrelated stories conspire to create amusement beyond what each one provided separately. We start with this report from BoingBoing of a man on Craigslist who offered to perform computer maintenance and repair in exchange for second base. (For those not familar with North American high school sexual slang—and that ...

Any similarity to actual German or Swedish words is purely coincidental

October 2, 2006 Oct 2, 2006 10/2/06

Raymond Chen

Earlier this year, the Advertising Standards Authority (the UK's advertising watchdog) ruled that the use of umlauts in the name of kitchen furniture manufacturer Möben is purely decorative and not intended to mislead consumers into believing that the company is German or Scandinavian. The fact that the name is only one letter away from...

Does a dual-core processor count as one or two for licensing purposes?

October 2, 2006 Oct 2, 2006 10/2/06

Raymond Chen

Now that dual-core processors are gaining in popularity, there has been some confusion over whether a dual-core processor counts as one or two. This discussion of multicore processor licensing may clear things up. The short answer is that a dual-core processor still counts as one processor. For example, Windows XP Professional supports up to...

Eating Belgian food at Brouwer's Cafe in Fremont

September 29, 2006 Sep 29, 2006 09/29/06

Raymond Chen

Last year, some friends and I went for dinner at Brouwer's Café, a Belgian pub/restaurant in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The menu is pub food, which means that everything comes with frites and a choice of several dipping sauces, none of which is ketchup. One of my friends spent some formative years of her life in the ...

Quotation marks around spaces aren't necessary in the PATH environment variable

September 29, 2006 Sep 29, 2006 09/29/06

Raymond Chen

The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the ...

When you crash, make sure you crash in the right place

September 28, 2006 Sep 28, 2006 09/28/06

Raymond Chen

Last time, I recommended that functions should just crash when given invalid pointers. There's a subtlety to this advice, however, and that's making sure you crash in the right place. If your function and your function's caller both reside on the same side of a security boundary, then go ahead and crash inside your function. If the caller is ...