The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Microspeak: Suited and booted
At Microsoft's consulting divisions, customer visits are a part of the job. A shorthand has developed to describe how formally dressed you should be at the meeting with the customer. (I leave it as an exercise to develop the comparable attire for women.) Note: This Microspeak entry was submitted by a colleague from the UK, so it may be peculiar to the UK dialect of Microspeak.
Today, we use a GPS to locate Baby Jesus
When Baby Jesus disappears from a Nativity scene, he might be wearing a tracking device: For two consecutive years, thieves made off with the baby Jesus figurine in Wellington, a town of 60,000 in Palm Beach County, Fla. The ceramic original, donated by a local merchant, was made in Italy and worth about $1,800... Last year, officials took a GPS unit normally used to track the application of mosquito spray and implanted it in the latest replacement figurine. After that one disappeared, sheriff's deputies quickly tracked it down. It's sad that the world has come to this, but nice to know that technology is ...
Why does the Explorer address bar reset itself while you’re typing into it?
When you ask Explorer to navigate to a new location, the steps go roughly like this (vastly oversimplified): Pretty straightforward, right? Well, commenter dhiren asks: Any idea why the address bar in Explorer randomly decides to reset itself while you're typing in it? It's not like Explorer is saying, "Ha, ha! Sucker!" Explorer is just doing its thing, following its happy little checklist, and when it finally locates the navigation target, it moves on to step three and switches the view and synchronizes the address bar to match the view. If you've messed with the address bar in the meantime, the s...
PDC 2008 notes: The aftermath
The Web page associated with my PDC 2008 talk has been updated to include the source code that I used for all of the demos. Other remarks:
Being lucky may be a matter of observing things you weren’t planning to observe
On BBC's The One Show, presenter Michael Mosley tests a theory of Professor Richard Wiseman that part of being lucky is simply being more aware of incidental information in your surroundings, information seemingly unrelated to the task at hand but which may ultimately help you achieve your goal. (Professor Wiseman has many interesting videos on YouTube. I particularly like the colour-changing card trick. (Spoiler: I noticed only one of the changes myself. What I found fascinating was that he made no effort to hide the sound of the backdrop changing, because he knew nobody would notice.) We've seen mani...
The Washington 2008 unclaimed property auction
After five years, the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes are turned over to the state, which attempts to contact the owners, but if the owners cannot be located after three years, they are put up for auction. Things like this antique watch with a Swedish dedication: "Till min kära syster Nanny fr. Elin — Mors klocka" = "To my dear sister Nanny, from Elin — Mom's watch". It's sad that something with such obvious sentimental value is being sold off. Or, if you are more of the nerdy type, you could bid on Star Trek comic books graphic novels or a Michael Jordan rookie trading card.
Don’t use global state to manage a local problem
We've seen a few instances where people have used a global setting to solve a local problem. For example, people who use the function to prevent a window from redrawing, toggle a global setting to see what its value is, or who change the system time zone as part of an internal calculation. To this, I'll add as an example a program which figures that if you don't want the program's feature, you don't want that feature in any competing products either. The first service pack of Windows XP introduced the Set Program Access and Defaults control panel. Among other things, media players can register here to ...
A bar on Microsoft main campus? What should we call it?
When my colleagues discovered that Seattle bar Spitfire is opening a bar on the main Microsoft campus, a quick game of Name that bar sprung up. (Todd Bishop has his suggestions.) Here are some names we came up with: Though I suspect they'll just call it Spitfire. Sidebar: Although alcohol is available at many company-sponsored social events, there is no pressure to drink an alcoholic beverage, and people don't even notice one way or the other. (Just like nobody notices that you had the vegetarian appetizers and avoided the meat ones.)
How do I change the directory Windows uses for user profiles?
To change the directory Windows uses for user profiles (by default, the directory), set the setting in your unattend file. This setting is available only via the unattend file. There is no GUI interface for this, nor can it be changed after Windows has been installed. Sorry.