The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, available online for a short time only
Get it while it's hot. Available through this weekend only, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a three-act Web series featuring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, a wannabe mad scientist evildoer who video-blogs about his plans for world domination, his application to the Evil League of Evil, his arch-enemy Captain Hammer, and his crush on the cute girl at the local laundromat. Oh, and it's a musical. Episodes one and two are available now. Episode three goes online on Saturday. Watch it. Trust me. Watch it.
A new record for the shortest amount of time between an email message and its resend
As I've noted before, people didn't answer your first question for a reason, but one thing I forgot to point out is that you also need to give people a chance to answer the first time at all! Occasionally, I'll see somebody ask a question, and then resend the question a short time later. You also have to take into account the time of day. There was one message I recall that was sent around 4:30pm on Tuesday, and at 10am on Wednesday, it was "Resent due to no response." Now, sure, you waited nearly 18 hours before resending, but most of that time, people were at home not checking their email, and for a big chun...
The best building name on the University of Washington campus
The best building name on the University of Washington campus is Sieg Hall, for many years home to the computer science department, and named after former university president Lee Paul Sieg.
Microspeak: Well, actually management-speak
I hate management-speak. Here's an example from an internal Web site. The purpose of this Web site is two-fold. Wow, let's look at the first stated purpose. It goes on for so long and uses blatant management-speak such as "facilitate" and "leverage" that by the time it's over, I forget how the sentence started. Going back and reading it again, it appears that the first item is identical to the second! It's just that the first item says it in a more confusing way. The second item shows evidence of management wordsmithing as well. "Utilize" instead of "use". An action verb like "establish" rather tha...
News flash: Online drug sales are shady!
In what I'm sure is a fantastic surprise to everybody who has visited the Internet, according to a report in the New York Times, researchers at Columbia University have discovered that there are prescription drug pushers on the Internet who will sell you prescription drugs without a prescription. From what I can gather, they didn't actually check whether what they ordered were indeed what the sites purported the substances to be (although thanks are extended to MasterCard, Visa, American Express and PayPal for their assistance, which means that they did investigate whether the major online payment systems c...
The evolution of menu templates: 32-bit extended menus
At last we reach the 32-bit extended menu template. Introduced in Windows 95, this remains the most advanced menu template format through Windows Vista. As you might expect, the 32-bit extended menu template is just a 32-bit version of the 16-bit extended menu template, so if you've been following along, you should find no real surprises here; all the pieces have been telegraphed far in advance. The header remains the same: struct MENUHEADER32 { WORD wVersion; WORD cbHeaderSize; BYTE rgbExtra[cbHeaderSize-4]; }; The differences here from the 32-bit classic menu template header are analogous t...
The evolution of menu templates: 16-bit extended menus
Windows 95 introduced a new menu format, known as "extended menus". You declare these in a resource file with the MENUEX keyword. The 16-bit extended menu is really just a temporary stopping point on the way to the 32-bit extended menu, since the 16-bit form is supported only by the Windows 95 family of operating systems. It's sort of the missing link of menu templates. Things start off the same as the 16-bit classic menu, with a structure I've been calling MENUHEADER16: struct MENUHEADER16 { WORD wVersion; WORD cbHeaderSize; BYTE rgbExtra[cbHeaderSize-4]; }; The version number for extended m...
When companies make it hard for you to pay money they are owed
Elissa Ely runs into a bureaucratic wall trying to pay her invalid mother's credit card bill. They won't tell her the outstanding balance on her mother's account because "it seemed to run the risk that a stranger might pay someone else's bill." My own mother ran into a similar problem. She wanted to find out the balance in an old elementary school bank account of mine that we both had long forgotten about. She went to the bank (this was pre-Internet) to obtain the balance, but the bank wouldn't tell her since she wasn't the account holder. My mother asked if she could make a deposit into the account, and they ...
Why does the “Install Font” dialog look so old-school?
8 wonders why the "Install Font" dialog looks so old-school. (And Kevin Provance demonstrates poor reading skills by not only ignoring the paragraph that explains why the suggestion box is closed, but also asking a question that's a dup of one already in the suggestion box!) Because it's a really old dialog. That dialog has been around for probably two decades now. It works just fine, and since it's not really a high-traffic dialog, updating it takes lower priority than things that get used more often. Development and testing resources aren't infinite, after all. I'm sure that if you look harder, you can ...