The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines is online and downloadable
Get it before it's obsolete. The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines document is available in PDF format.
Imagine our luck when we found one of the fancy conference rooms available for our meeting
Some time ago, the group I was a member of was looking for a conference room in which to hold their weekly team status meeting. The group leader went to the so you want to book a conference room for your weekly meeting internal Web site and, hey wow, there was a slot available in one of the fancy conference rooms for Tuesdays at ten in the morning. Not all conference rooms are created equal. Most of them are pretty utilitarian in nature with a central table, standard-issue chairs, a speaker phone, a whiteboard against one wall, all the stuff you need for a meeting but nothing particularly noteworthy. But in thi...
Parents billed when kids miss school: Pay for play
The Scotts Valley school system is asking parents to compensate the district when they take their kids out of school to go on vacation. Adds a new wrinkle to the phrase "pay for play". I remember the days when we were taught the difference between the things you must do (obligations, responsibilities) and the things you want to do.
Creating shortcuts in the same folder as the target isn’t as stupid as you may think
Commenter Mihai wonders, "Why would I want to keep the original file and the link in the same folder?" Dragging a file, and in particular right-dragging a file, is not easy for all people. There are people with poor dexterity who have trouble with dragging; for them, right-dragging would be even worse. But even people with normal levels of dexterity have problems with dragging: Just put them in front of a Tablet PC. On a Tablet PC dragging with the fingertip can get tricky because your hand obscures the drag target, and most people don't have very pointy fingers, so the precision of the drop is prett...
People become more trustworthy the more you trust them
My faith in humanity goes up when I see an unattended self-service stand where customers are trusted to pay for what they take. It works because the system is open to public view, and any passer-by (or even just a poster of a pair of eyes) can spot the cheater. (Then again, it takes only a tiny percentage of cheaters to ruin it for everyone.) I remember reading a story on self-checkout devices which said that product theft actually went down after the devices were installed. Apparently the customers were more trustworthy than the employees when it came to retail theft. People will rise to the occasion and...
Microspeak: T-shirt sizing
Larry Osterman discussed the buzzword T-shirt sizing, which means "making extremely rough estimates in terms of a small number of predefined categories." The term comes from the traditional way T-shirt sizes are specified in the United States. Instead of having T-shirts in sizes 4, 5, 6 and so on, there are only a small number of sizes: Small, medium, large, and extra-large. (Sometimes augmented by extra-small, extra-extra-large, etc.) Forcing the estimate into one of a fixed set of sizes allows the process to go quickly while still producing a result that is at least within the same zip code as a more detaile...
How do I get a window back on the screen when it moved far, far away?
Commenter Aggravated notes that some programs remember their location when the window is closed and restore to that location when the window is reopened, even if that position is off the screen. These programs clearly were using screen coordinates instead of workspace coordinates to save and restore the window. Okay, so you've got a program that restored its window position incorrectly and ended up putting it off the screen. Now what do you do? The keyboard interface comes to the rescue. Switch to the application, say by clicking on its taskbar button or by Alt+Tab'ing to it. Then type Alt+Space to call...
Writing a sort comparison function, redux
Prerequisites: Experience with sort functions such as qsort. Overqualifications: Familiarity with sort algorithms. If you break the rules for sort comparison functions, then don't expect the result of a sort call to be meaningful. In fact, if you really mess it up, you can corrupt memory or go into an infinite loop. My program hangs when I used this sort comparison function (pseudocode): int compare(x, y) { return x >y ? +1 : -1; } What's even more strange is that sometimes instead of hanging, the program crashes. It all works correctly if I add one line: int compare2(x, y) { if (x == y) retur...
A puzzle: Why are so many fake LiveJournal blogs written by 29-year-olds?
NPR's All Tech Considered blog notices a huge spike of LiveJournal users who claim to be 29 years old. They conclude (almost certainly correctly) that these are all fake journals created by spam bots. But why 29 years old? One possible answer.