The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Film students and The Bicycle Thief
The current generation of young people grew up in a very different world from us older folks. There has always been an Internet. Everybody is accessible by mobile phone. Cars have always had power windows. (Which reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who has an older-model car and was giving a ride to an eight-year-old relative. The youngster pointed at the window crank and asked, "What's this?" Upon learning its purpose, the young passenger spent the remainder of the trip opening and closing the window, giggling with glee. "You know, most people pay extra so they don't have to do that.") But it's not just e...
MS-DOS also allowed spaces in file names, although vanishingly few programs knew how to access them
A little-known fact about MS-DOS is that it allowed spaces in file names. Sure, you were limited to 8.3, but a file called "" was legal in MS-DOS, and you could indeed create such a file. Good luck finding programs that didn't treat you as insane when you asked for that file, though. Although the file system supported files with spaces, practically no programs supported them. Command line tools saw the space as the end of the file name. You couldn't quote the file name because no command line tool supported quotation marks to protect spaces. After all, if you believed that spaces were illegal characters in file ...
Up and down often substitute for compass directions, but you have to know when you've taken it too far
The official curriculum for seventh grade students in the state of Washington includes Washington history and geography. My friend the seventh grade teacher typically includes as part of this curriculum an assignment wherein each student is assigned one of the state's counties on which to produce a brief report. It is common to substitute up and down for north and south when speaking informally, but it is also important to know when you've taken the substitution too far. One student's report on Pierce County began with the following sentence: Pierce County is at the bottom of Puget Sound.
Attack of the rogue feature: Oh no, where did my Explorer icon labels go?
A customer reported that on Windows Vista, if you hold down the shift key and repeatedly click the View button in the command bar of an Explorer window, you will eventually reach a state where all the labels under the icons have disappeared! Where did they go, and how do I get them back? Congratulations, you stumbled across a rogue feature. One of the developers who worked on Windows XP decided to add a cute shortcut: Holding down the shift key when switching to Thumbnail mode will cause the labels to disappear. (At least, that was the intent of the rogue feature, but it so happens that as a side effect,...
More musings on the peculiar linguistic status of languages acquired in childhood
You don't even notice.
Command line parsers look at what you typed, not what what you typed looks like
Command line parsers are stricter than human beings. The computer cares about what you typed. If you type something else that superficially resembles what you want, but is not actually what you want, then you won't get what you want, even though it sure looks like what you want. I covered a special case of this topic earlier when I described smart quotes as the hidden scourge of text meant for computer consumption. You think you typed a quotation mark, but the editor secretly "improves" it from U+0022 to U+201C. Then you paste the text into a command line and you get strange output because the command line pa...
If somebody speaks a language I’m not expecting, sometimes I don’t understand it, even though I should
It depends on whether the language is in the instinctive part of my brain.
A 32-bit application can allocate more than 4GB of memory, and you don't need 64-bit Windows to do it
Commenter Herb wondered how a 32-bit program running on 64-bit Windows can allocate more than 4GB of memory. Easy: The same way it allocates more than 4GB of memory on 32-bit Windows! Over a year before Herb asked the question, I had already answered it in the tediously boring two-week series on the myths surrounding the /3GB switch. Here's a page that shows how you can allocate more than 2GB of memory by using shared memory (which Win32 confusingly calls file mappings). That code fragment allocated 4GB of memory at one go, and then accessed it in pieces (because a 32-bit program can't map an entire 4GB memor...
The most unwanted song ever
A follow-up to why ABBA songs are so catchy: Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid, and David Soldier developed a song scientifically engineered to be the most unwanted song ever: By their calculations, "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece." Ah, opera rap. Also check out The Most Wanted Paintings. America's Most Wanted Painting contains "an autumnal landscape with wild animals, a family enjoying the outdoors, the color blue, and George Washington."