The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
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.
The role of vitamin D in beta cell function: The dance
In January 2008, John Bohannon held a contest titled Dance your PhD, wherein contestants were invited to express their PhD thesis in five minutes through the medium of dance. It was such a hit that it came back for a sequel: The 2009 Dance Your Ph.D. contest. Only a Game interviews John Bohannon [mp3]. You can also watch the winning dance, The role of vitamin D in beta cell function on YouTube, along with the other winners.
Email tip: If you want people to look at a screen shot, you have to tell them what they’re looking at
Some time ago, Ry Jones decided to take something that I wrote and condense it to make it funnier: Don't embed pictures. ... This isn't Highlights magazine. Those ellipses are deceptive, because they hide a change of topic! As a result, the two unrelated sentences appeared to be connected to each other. The comment about Highlights magazine was not a response to "Don't embed pictures." It was a response to a different part of that message. Here's the complete message, or an approximation thereof: Don't embed pictures. Send a link to your pictures. And when you ask us to look at the pictures which de...
A file can go by multiple names, but two files can’t have the same name
Thanks to short file names and hard links, a single file can go by multiple names. (And for the purpose of today's discussion, I'm treating the full path as the name instead of just the part after the last backslash. Don't make me bring back the nitpicker's corner.) For example, C:\PROGRA~1 and C:\Program Files are two possible names for the same directory thanks to short names. [Typo fixed 7:15am.] If you've created hard links, then you can give a single file two entirely unrelated names, and those names need not even be in the same directory. On the other hand, you can't have two files with the same name. Wha...
Thrift stores drowning in Christmas impulse gifts from yesteryear
Last year, the Washington Post covered the fates of The Thing, that Christmas impulse gift that stores place in enticing locations in the store to convince you that you simply gotta have it. The twirling apple peeler, the liquor carousel, the portable chocolate fountain (for your fancy party, no doubt). After a few years, some of them show up by the garbage-bagful at the Opportunity Shop thrift store. "We get three or four fondue sets a month... Sometimes we get stuff and I don't even know what the stuff is."
Why are the generic version numbers called NTDDI?
In my earlier discussion on the variety of symbols that describe the target Windows version, I pointed out that the symbols attempt to cut through the mess and consolidate everything into a single symbol. But why the name ? One of my colleagues contacted me privately with the story. When setting out to change the operating system version number, my colleague was shocked to find so many different version number mechanisms were scattered throughout the various Windows header files. It so happened that the DDK people were already in the process of cleaning up the version number mess and were using as their vers...
Neuroscience can be used for good or for evil; this one might fall in the evil bucket
Marketplace radio interviews Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (another book in the series Short catchy title: Long boring subtitle) about how stores get people to buy more stuff by taking advantage of how our brains are wired. (Unfortunately, at the time I checked, the Smell and Beer bonus tracks were broken. You can try to console yourself with Paddy Hirsch's explanation of margin calls in terms of Girl Scout Cookies.) Update: The Smell and Beer links work now.
When you start getting in-page errors on your hard drive, it’s time to go shopping for a new hard drive
The describes itself as "The instruction at XXX referenced memory at YYY. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of ZZZ." What does this mean? It means that the memory manager needed to read some memory from the disk, but the disk returned an error. (Namely, error ZZZ.) Since it has no way to return an error code to your program—I mean, after all, all your program did was read a variable from memory; there's no way to return an error code from int x = y if y cannot be read off the disk—it is reduced to raising an exception. When you see this message, and the ...
The struggle against those annoying plastic packages gains a few allies
Some companies are switching to easy-to-open packaging. Not a moment too soon, in my opinion.