The Old New Thing

Tips from an American on on driving in Taiwan

Although I have been a passenger in a car many times, I thank my lucky stars that I have never had to be the person behind the wheel in Taiwan. But if you decide you want to give it a shot, you might want to pick up some driving tips from an American who spent time in Taiwan as an English teacher, part of his Teaching English in Taiwan site...

What's so special about bitmaps and DCs?

You can select pens, brushes, fonts and bitmaps into a DC with the function, and from this list, bitmaps are special. Because, if you look carefully, bitmaps are the only modifiable objects on the list. Pens, brushes and fonts cannot be modified once they are created. But bitmaps, oh, bitmaps. A bitmap selected into a DC changes as you draw ...

What does CS_SAVEBITS do?

If you specify the class style, then the window manager will try to save the bits covered by the window. But the real question is why, because that is your guide to using this power only for good, not for evil. When a window whose class specifies the class style is displayed, the window manager takes a snapshot of the pixels on the screen ...

A new scripting language doesn't solve everything

Yes, there are plenty of scripting languages that are much better than boring old batch. Batch files were definitely a huge improvement over back in 1981, but they've been showing their age for quite some time. The advanced age of boring old batch, on the other hand, means that you have millions of batch files out there that you had better ...

No good deed goes unpunished: Bug assignment

Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which ...

Correctly spell xerophthalmia and the crowd goes wild

One of the things I did in San Francisco was attend a performance of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I went into the show with some trepidation, fearing that it would recall painful memories from my own career on the spelling bee circuit as a middle-schooler. Fortunately, my experience as a spelling bee participant only served to...

No, really, you need to pass all unhandled messages to DefWindowProc

Earlier I had discussed that you have to return the special value if you want to deny a device removal query because too many programs thought that they had covered "all" the Windows messages and just returned zero for the others. Since then, there have been lots of other window messages added to the system, many of which contain nontrivial ...

Ich habe meinen Computer zu Deutsch gewechselt

This weekend, I changed my computer's user interface language from Swedish (where it had been since November 2003) to German. Germany is the country I'm most likely to vacation to next, and I figured I should start pseudo-immersing myself. Of course, all it really means is that I'm going to be learning a lot of computer-related German words ...

Troubleshooting tips are not formal product documentation

The Microsoft Knowledge Base is filled with product support tips, but be careful to understand the scope of those tips. Generally speaking, information provided in the Knowledge Base exists for troubleshooting purposes, not for program design. That's why each article lists specifically which operating system it applies to: There is no ...