The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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The concrete pedestrian bridge in the Washington Park Arboretum claims another victim
Low bridge, everybody down.
The contradictory dialog: Click Finish to begin
I was installing a program and its setup wizard said, and I am not making this up, Click Finish to begin installation. But wait, the weirdness doesn't end there. After you click Finish, the program installation completes, and then you get another page that tells you to click Close. This is misuse of the Finish button. Finish does not mean Almost finished. If the user clicks the Finish button, that's it. No more wizard pages. It's finished. The last two wizard pages should have read Click Next to begin installation. You have successfully installed LitWare 2.0. To close this wizard, click Finish.
Fell the force
Engrish, the whimsical term applied to poorly-translated or downright bizarre English used in non-English-speaking countries, is not restricted to East Asia, although the most well-known examples certainly come from there. While in Lisbon, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said Fell the force.
Windows doesn't close windows when a user logs off; that's your call
Commenter Peter Kankowski asks why Windows doesn't send and messages when the user logs off. That's what is for. To tell the program that the Windows session is ending, and that you should get done whatever last things you want to get done before the world comes to an end. Windows doesn't send the message because sending becomes complicated once there is more than one window. What is the correct order for sending when there are multiple windows? Besides, many programs don't respond to by closing. Instant messenger programs typically treat to mean "hide" rather than "close". Notepad displays an unsaved ...
Special advance screening of five seconds of True Lies
In response to Perhaps the movies made too literal a translation, Steve Sinofsky reminded me that everybody at Microsoft got a special advance screening of the movie True Lies, or at least five seconds' worth. The computer that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character infiltrates runs the Arabic version of Windows 3.1, and the Arabic version of Word 6 appeared on screen as well. Steve was in charge of the Office division at the time and managed to get permission to show a clip from a rough cut of the movie at the 1994 company meeting. He explains, "I had to run to the airport and pick up a beta tape, show ...
Proto-Microspeak: Center of value
I have only one citation, so it may not be proper Microspeak. With all of these features covering the scenario end to end, we wanted to create a new center of value. I still don't know what it means.
Baby Names for Dummies
While waiting in the check-out line at the local grocery store, I saw a book titled Baby Names For Dummies and amused myself for wondering what its goal was. Bonus chatter: One of my colleagues proposed a fourth interpretation: Maybe you are a store employee who dresses mannequins and you want help coming up with cute names for them. (On a related note, you might be ventriloquist who is starting an act with a dummy that is a baby.)
One-line batch script to delete empty directories
You don't need a whole 260KB program to do it. This batch file does the trick just fine: I call it . This is the long-forgotten follow-up to Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch. We're using the same technique as in that article, but pumping the result through "" to reverse the order of the enumeration so we enumerate the directories bottom-up rather than top-down. This is important for deleting empty directories because you have to remove the subdirectories before you remove the parent. Disclaimer: I doubt anybody actually enjoys working with batch files, but that...
Raymond misreads newspaper headlines, episode 2
I have a strange tendency to misread newspaper headlines. This week, I read the headline Rogan Sets 200 Back World Record, and I thought, "There's a world record for running 200 meters backward?" Well, actually there is, but this article was actually about the 200 meter backstroke (swimming). Once I figured that out, I was not confused by the next headline: Lochte Sets 100 IM World Record.