The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why is the function SHStripMneumonic misspelled?
If you wander through MSDN, you may stumble across the function . The correct spelling is mnemonic. Why is the function name misspelled? "It was like that when I got here." The function was originally written for internal use only, and the person who wrote the function spelled the word incorrectly. Still, since it was an internal function, there was no real urgency to fix it. After all, there is no technical consequence of the spelling of a function's name, as early entrants of the IOCCC discovered. If you really wanted to, you could just call all your functions through . There the function remained, misspel...
I assume it's cracking good, though I'm not the expert
I have many friends who are enamored of all things cheese, enjoying the subtle nuttiness of a fribble-frabble cheese or the elastic grassiness of an imported Rückwärtspilzhaus. To me, on the other hand, they all just taste like cheese. My friends would probably enjoy this weekend's Seattle Cheese Festival. (Word on the street is that it gets really crowded by midday, so get there early.) I, on the other hand, would struggle to come up with commentary even as insightful as "Gee, that's salty." I'd probably start with "Hm, I think this tastes like cheese." For people like me, here are some tips on put...
If users can shut down the machine, it's not a security hole if they can shut down the machine
One great way to come up with a dubious security vulnerability is to take something completely innocuous and wrap it inside layer upon layer of obfuscation, and then you proclaim that the obfuscation is the vulnerability. Here's an example based on an actual dubious vulnerability report: Title: Native NT application can shut down computer Description: I have written this native NT application which bypasses the Win32 layer and talks directly to the low-level native NT functions. By calling various native NT functions, I can cause a dialog box to appear which includes a Shut Down button that shuts down the com...
Selling your life for a quarter at a time
A year and a half ago, I stumbled across the essay Selling Your Life for a Quarter at a Time by Tim Barcz and found it quietly poignant. (Unfortunately, the spammers also found the essay and decided to fill it with garbage links. So much for poignant.) I tried to come up with a catchy tagline for this entry, but nothing worked. Coming up with something snappy would just be a disservice.
Build a slide show out of search results
My colleague David Washington discovered how you can combine the Sidebar slide show gadget with search folders to end up with a slide show that is built out of search results. Pretty neat.
The dead desktop computer: From good, bad, and ugly back to dead
When last we left my dead desktop computer, it had returned to the world of the living with the assistance of the onboard video adapter. The screen was fuzzy because I was running my LCD monitor through the analog VGA cable. Performing an auto-adjust helped a little but it was still blurry. Still, it was within the realm of acceptability for casual low-volume use. Well, the computer once again died, and before it finally kicked the bucket, the onboard video card started pumping out corrupted pixels. My suspicion that my motherboard ate video cards was correct. In fact, its appetite for video cards was so vorac...
Why always "Windows XP" and "Windows Vista" and not just "XP" and "Vista"?
When the Internet Explorer folks announced that they were going to call their next version of Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, many people responded to the awkward name by suggesting that it be shortened to Internet Explorer 7 XP and Internet Explorer 7 Vista. Why the longer names? Lawyers. Microsoft's own trademark guidelines† specify that the product names are Windows XP and Windows Vista and not just XP and Vista. The trademark is on the entire phrase, not just the last word. Furthermore, the tradem...
The Big Red Switch really was big and red
In this article on compatibility between the .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0, there is a passing mention of a setting nicknamed the "Big Red Switch". The power switch on the original IBM PC really was big and red. Well, orange-red. Here's a picture of the power switch on an IBM PC-AT. Decide for yourself what color it is. In college, the hallway that led to the basement lab where most of the computer science students did their work had a big red switch, a pushbutton, labeled "Emergency power shutoff". Nobody was sure whether it actually was hooked up to anything or was simply a joke, but nobody wante...
In Lisbon, walk/don't walk signs are mostly decorative
In Lisbon, walk/don't walk signs are mostly decorative. The real rule for crossing the street is look both ways and cross when safe. There's no requirement that you use a designated crosswalk. As long as the coast is clear, you can cross the street anywhere. When my host for the conference accompanied me to the conference center, we crossed the street and my host pointed out, "You know, we're actually using the official crosswalk this time." I was talking with one of the faculty members of the computer science department at IST and mentioned that in Seattle, the police issue tickets for crossing the street in...