The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why has my clipboard stopped working?
You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same desktop.) The window manager automatically closes the clipboard if a process terminates while it has ownership of the clipboard, but if a program opens the clipboard and simply forgets to close it for whatever reason, the clipboard will remain unavailable to other programs unti...
Food products that are offenses against nature: Bisquick Shake 'n Pour
Yes, it's another entry in the extremely sporadic series of food products that are offenses against nature. Today it's the incorrectly-punctuated Bisquick Shake 'n Pour. For people for whom adding a half cup of milk and one egg to two cups of Bisquick powder is too complicated, now they've even dehydrated the milk and egg and pre-measured the mix, so all you need to do is add a measured amount of water. Because you know, cracking an egg is so time-consuming. My colleague who tips me off to all the foods that are offenses against nature let me know by email that even she, mother to a three-week-old baby, was ...
Dlaczego Microsoft zatopił Polskę?
A colleague of mine stopped by my office to tell me that he got a telephone call from his father in Poland asking him why Microsoft sunk Poland. My colleague was somewhat baffled by this question, since his father isn't a computer nerd, but his father explained that he saw the story on the front page of the newspaper. Apparently, the story ran in the largest Polish newspaper, but it doesn't appear that they credited their source, demonstrating that quality journalism is hard to find in any country. My guess is that the jump into Poland came from this page, which does credit my article. I'm just guessing, thou...
Raymond misreads newspaper headlines, episode 3
The headline: First lady to speak at Ala. school hit by tornado. My interpretation: There's a woman who was the first woman to speak at an Alabama school. This is notable presumably because she had to break some historical gender barrier in order to be invited to give an address there. That woman was hit by a tornado. My reaction: Man, what horrible luck, for a person to be hit by a tornado. I hope she's okay. What the headline actually meant: A school in Alabama was hit by a tornado. The First Lady will visit that school.
Why are accelerators for hidden controls still active?
In the suggestion box, Serge Wautier asked why accelerators for hidden controls remain active. He's apparently rather insistent because he asked the question again a few months later. Asking the same question multiple times reduces the likelihood that I'll answer it. Consider yourself lucky that I wrote this answer before I noticed the duplicate; otherwise I would probably have skipped it. Why are accelerators for hidden controls still active? Very simple: Keyboard accessibility. The dialog manager considers controls which indicate that they want characters () to have no keyboard accelerator. There are a l...
Behind the Scenes at Mythbusters does not include experiments or explosions
Mythbusters is going on the road. Well, the show isn't actually going on the road. Just the two hosts. In Behind the Scenes at Mythbusters, they go on stage to tell stories about the myth busting process, but they won't conduct any actual experiments or blow anything up. (And therefore the reason for going to the show is what, exactly?) Oops, the Portland people forgot to edit the ad copy. It still says "A hilarious evening with Jamie Heyneman and Adam Savage" even though the show is in the afternoon. Tickets for the Seattle and Portland shows go on sale today. (Fans in San Diego will have to wait until Sept...
Why are some GDI functions named ExtXxx instead of XxxEx?
By convention, an enhanced version of a function is called , but there are many GDI functions that don't follow this conventions, most notably , which should have been named under the convention. Why don't the GDI functions follow that convention? Because they were named before the convention was established. Nothing nefarious, just an artifact of history.
The sad demise of whimsical teasing in Comic Chat
Internet Explorer 3 came with the IRC client Comic Chat, a product from the research division. And it's not surprising that a program as goofy as Comic Chat would put something goofy in the default profile. If you didn't set a profile when you created your character, it defaulted to "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Of course, it wasn't long before people complained that the text was snotty. So much for trying to be funny.
India Calling: Call centers from the Indian point of view
In the United States, the growing relocation of call centers to India has been the source of much hand-wringing, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: What effect is this having on India? The primetime soap opera India Calling looks at the effect of a 600,000-person industry, the eyebrows raised when neighbors see a young single woman heading to work at night and returning in the morning, the social change this new affluence brings, and the stress of a job that consists in large part of talking to rude, angry Americans. Welcome to Bollywood.