The Old New Thing

Why doesn't the Shutdown dialog use Alt to get alternate behavior?

September 19, 2006 Sep 19, 2006 09/19/06
Raymond Chen
When you select "Shut Down" from the Start menu, a dialog appears with three options: "Stand By", "Turn Off" and "Restart". To get the secret fourth option "Hibernate" you have to press the shift key. Would the Alt key be the more obvious choice for revealing alternate options? You might think so, but it so happens that Alt already has ...

Project Update 2: Voyage to Our Hollow Earth

September 18, 2006 Sep 18, 2006 09/18/06
Raymond Chen
If everything went according to plan, the trip to the hole in the Arctic Ocean should have completed a few months ago. I went to the web site to see what they found, only to discover that it's been postponed another year, to June 26, 2007. This is clearly the handiwork of the world government attempting to suppress the release of ...

Sometimes my psychic powers are weak

September 18, 2006 Sep 18, 2006 09/18/06
Raymond Chen
Why does my MFC program exit unexpectedly? The stack trace at the point we hit goes like this: Thanks. You can already see some of what's going on, but clearly more information is needed. My first psychic suggestion was to examine MFC's message pump to see what causes it to exit. Then follow the money backwards. That's what we want ...

Disaster averted, thanks to international time zones

September 15, 2006 Sep 15, 2006 09/15/06
Raymond Chen
Boy, the world has been really lucky this year. After successfully avoiding a massive tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, the world narrowly escaped global disaster as predicted by Yisrayl Hawkins, leader of the organization The House of Yahweh. What saved us? Well, I'll let Mosheh Sang, leader of the organization in Kenya, explain: According ...

Allocating and freeing memory across module boundaries

September 15, 2006 Sep 15, 2006 09/15/06
Raymond Chen
I'm sure it's been drilled into your head by now that you have to free memory with the same allocator that allocated it. matches , matches , matches . But this rule goes deeper. If you have a function that allocates and returns some data, the caller must know how to free that memory. You have a variety of ways of accomplishing this. One is...

Raymond's excursions into East Asian pop music, episode 3: Morning Musume (モーニング娘)

September 13, 2006 Sep 13, 2006 09/13/06
Raymond Chen
It really all started with Katamari Damacy (塊魂). The music for that game is so darned infectious, and it was my fascination with that music that prompted my colleague to loan me the CDs his wife bought while she traveled through Asia. I already mentioned China Dolls (中國娃娃). Another of the CDs in the ...