The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Raymond’s highly scientific predictions for the 2009 NCAA men’s basketball tournament
Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, the criterion is the school's graduation rate for basketball players. Lower graduation rate wins. However, if the teams are seeded 11 or more positions apart, I'll give the win to the favorite (just to get rid of highly unlikely upsets). Update: *The Marquette/Utah State game is a draw based on graduation rates, so it went to the tie-breaker: players arrested. Update 9am: Fixed the prediction for the game between LSU and Akron. Thanks, Adam, for pointing this out. ...
Well, duh, I’d sure better get my money back
The vending machines in my building proudly announce Guaranteed to deliver or your money back. Well, duh. If I don't get the product, I'd sure better get my money back. Pre-emptive snarky comment: "I'm suing Microsoft."
Overheard conversation fragment: Shrimp is not vegetables
I walked past a woman in the grocery store who was talking on her mobile phone. I only caught one sentence. She said, in an annoyed voice, "Shrimp is not vegetables." (Then again, purple is a fruit, so anything's possible.) Update: manicmarc correctly deduced that the tone and body language of the person on the phone indicated that her previous sentence in the conversation was something like "What vegetables do you want to have with dinner?"
Why does the MoveWindow function let you suppress repainting?
Commenter Phil Quirk asks via the suggestion box why the function lets you suppress repainting. "Shouldn't the OS be able to figure out if the window needs to be repainted?" Indeed the window manager does do a very nice job of figuring it out if you pass , which is the expected value of the parameter. But if you think you're smarter than the window manager, then you can pass and tell the window manager, "Even though you think the window needs to be repainted, don't repaint it. Trust me on this." Why would you try to outwit the window manager? Maybe you have special knowledge about how your application beh...
Raymond rewrites newspaper headlines, episode 2
The local community newspaper featured a color photograph of a twelve-year-old student holding a bright orange safety flag while another student crosses the street in front of him. The caption reads as follows: XYZ School 6th-grader John Doe, at right, will be honored Friday night at Safeco Field as one of the state's top safety patrol students. "On Monday morning, he will be found stuffed inside his locker," the caption did not conclude.
The perilous quandary of including external drivers on the Windows CD
(Technically, it's probably more a dilemma than a quandary, but I like the phrase perilous quandary.) Driver coverage is always a sticking point for Windows deployments. If the Windows CD doesn't include a driver for your particular hardware, you're probably going to say, "Windows sucks. I installed the latest version on my machine and it didn't work with my video card/sound card/network card/whatever." The people who are responsible for deciding which drivers are included on the CD have to balance a lot of factors. How popular is the hardware? Will the hardware vendor allow Microsoft to include the driver...
If Michael Jackson took up bhangra dancing
If Michael Jackson took up bhangra dancing, it might look something like this
Engineering is about tradeoffs: How hard will you work to save 68KB of disk space?
One of the recurring themes in the comments to my explanation of the historical reasons why there are two copies of Notepad was to use a hard link (or possibly a symbolic link) to save having to waste the disk space for two whole copies of Notepad. As I like to say, engineering is about tradeoffs. Let's look at the cost-benefit analysis. On the one hand: Install two copies of Notepad. Cost: 68KB of disk space. On the other hand: Use hard links or symbolic links. Cost: Add support for hard links or symbolic links to the FAT filesystem, to the operating system Setup program, to file formats such as the Window...
Et tu, Fargo
Last year, our friends over in the Fargo campus mocked us wusses for shutting down the campus over something as weenie as a touch of snow. Yesterday, there was a safety alert on the internal company home page: Alert The Fargo Campus is closed effective immediately due to inclement weather. The City of Fargo is pulling the plows from the snow emergency routes. Employees are encouraged to leave the Fargo Campus. Yup, Fargo has been shut down due to inclement weather. Explanation for people who don't get it: Both this and the mock weather advisory issued by the Fargo campus are just examples of friend...