The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
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.
When you subclass a window, it’s the original window procedure of the window you subclass you have to call when you want to call the original window procedure
When you subclass a window, you set the window procedure to a function of your choosing, and you remember the original window procedure so you can pass it to the CallWindowProc function when your subclass function wants to pass the message to the original window procedure. For example, if you subclass a window like this: SubclassWidgetDialog(HWND hdlgWidget) { HWND hwndButton = GetDlgItem(hdlgWidget, ...); wndProcOrig = (WNDPROC) SetWindowLongPtr(hwndButton, GWLP_WNDPROC, (LONG_PTR)SubclassWndProc); // -or- // wndprocOrig = SubclassWindow(hwndButton, SubclassWndProc); ... } then your subclass ...
You can tell which people listed blogging as a performance review goal
I had been kind of baffled by some of the Microsoft employee blogs that appear to consist almost entirely of rehashes of Knowledge Base articles, or sometimes even just "A new Knowledge Base article on topic X has been published." Now, that's useful information to have if you're interested in topic X, but is it really something you can build a blog around? Can't you just sign up for KB notifications manually? (That's probably how the blog author found them anyway.) And then there are the head-scratcher blog entries like There are no new KB articles this week. But I never really thought too much abou...
The social skills of a thermonuclear device: Why did you hang up?
One morning I'm working in my office and I'm interrupted by a telephone call. The caller-ID shows that it came in through the switchboard. (I.e., somebody called the main Microsoft number and asked for me by name.) Me: Hello? Caller: [angrily] Mr. Chen, why did you hang up? I don't recognize the voice, and I haven't received a phone call in several days, so I have no idea who this person is or what he's talking about. But if somebody starts out rude to me, that doesn't put me in the friendliest of moods. Still, I use a polite tone of voice. Me: Oh, I'm sorry. I'll do it again. [click] A few minutes ...
The dummy icon that doesn’t know that its fifteen seconds are over
Commenter Myron A. Semack asks via the Suggestion Box why there is a hardware notification icon that doesn't do anything. This is the notification icon that is left behind if you dismiss the hardware notification balloon. I don't know, but I can figure it out based on information both you and I already know. First of all, notice that the only way to show a notification balloon is to associate it with a notification icon. After all, the tip of the balloon has to point to something. Therefore, it's not surprising that when the balloon shows up, a notification icon also appears. You can't display "just a ball...
When advanced users outsmart themselves: The device removal notification icon
A customer submitted a suggestion to the user interface team about the device removal notification icon. The device removal notification icon is far too hard to use. When I click on it, I get a menu that says Safely Remove Hardware, and when I click on that menu item, I get a dialog box that lists all the removable devices, with vague names like USB Mass Storage Device and propeller-beanie details like Connected on Port 0006, Hub 0004. When I click the Display device components check box, I'm presented with a tree view of hardware devices that only a geek could love. This is far too complicated. When I click...
Identity theft via repeated name changes
In the United States, it is legal to change your name as many times as you like, and you don't even have to have a reason, as long as you're not doing it with fraudulent intent. The ease with which name changes can be accomplished has been exploited by people who use it to carry out identity theft. Creditors coming after you? Change your name, attach it to a stolen Social Security number, and off you go. The story about name changes reminds me of a friend of a friend who lives in Taiwan. As a teenager, she was somewhat unhappy and changed her name on the advice of a fortune teller. (I get the impression that f...
Those notification icons, with their clicks, double-clicks, right-clicks… what’s up with that?
(A completely feeble attempt to mimic Michael Kaplan's blog entry titles which carry a much stronger voice.) Jonathan Hardwick made a short table of inconsistencies in how various programs handle clicks on their notification icons. How are these supposed to work? The final decision is up to the application, since it is the one that receives the mouse clicks and decides what to do. But what were the intended semantics for clicks on the notification icon? Left single click: Display a simple interface item targetting the casual user. In most cases, this would be a context menu, but if you are something lik...
Qrystal does more research into those spam blogs
Blogger Qrystal got hit with blog trackback spam and did research into the phenomenon, even discovering the author trying to sell the spam blog. And he had to cut the price because Google AdSense has cut him off. Ha, ha, haaahhhhh~! (Read the blog entry for the spammer's for-sale offers and other linkity goodness.)