The Old New Thing

From Doom to Gloom: The story of a video game

January 18, 2006 Jan 18, 2006 01/18/06
Raymond Chen
NPR's Morning Edition developed a series on the subject of flops, and one of their segments was devoted to the rise and fall of John Romero. You can read more about the phenomenon known as Daikatana in a huge series on Gamespot. Set aside at least an hour if you choose to read it. You can also read the Dallas Observer story that opened ...

The cost of trying too hard: Splay trees

January 18, 2006 Jan 18, 2006 01/18/06
Raymond Chen
Often, it doesn't pay off to be too clever. Back in the 1980's, I'm told the file system group was working out what in-memory data structures to use to represent the contents of a directory so that looking up a file by name was fast. One of the experiments they tried was the splay tree. Splay trees were developed in 1985 by Sleator and Tarjan ...

Understanding what things mean in context: Dispatch interfaces

January 16, 2006 Jan 16, 2006 01/16/06
Raymond Chen
Remember that you have to understand what things mean in context. For example, the IActiveMovie3 interface has a method called get_MediaPlayer. If you come into this method without any context, you might expect it to return a pointer to an IMediaPlayer interface, yet the header file says that it returns a pointer to an IDispatch interface ...

France, she is, how you say, on sale!

January 13, 2006 Jan 13, 2006 01/13/06
Raymond Chen
Marketplace reports on the start of the winter sale season in France. By law, retailers are permitted sales only twice a year, so the onset of sale season generates quite a bit of shopping madness. There is also a proposal to allow more sale periods, but opponents argue that doing so would harm smaller businesses. Coming from the land of ...

Why do words beginning with "home" get treated as URLs?

January 13, 2006 Jan 13, 2006 01/13/06
Raymond Chen
Vitaly from the Suggestion Box asked (with grammatical editing), Could you explain why Windows starts the web browser if the file name passed to ShellExecute starts with "home". First thing to note is that this URL-ization happens only after the function has tried all the other possible interpretations. If a file named "homestar" is ...

When web sites rely on security holes

January 12, 2006 Jan 12, 2006 01/12/06
Raymond Chen
Perhaps the biggest risk when making a change in the name of security is all the things that may have been relying on the previously-lax security settings. After all, disabling an insecure feature is easy. The hard part is disabling it while retaining compatibility with people who were relying on that feature. In the security investigations I'...

The decoy visual style

January 11, 2006 Jan 11, 2006 01/11/06
Raymond Chen
During the development of Windows XP, the visual design team were very cloak-and-dagger about what the final visual look was going to be. They had done a lot of research and put a lot of work into their designs and wanted to make sure that they made a big splash at the E3 conference when Luna was unveiled. Nobody outside the visual styles...

The decoy display control panel

January 10, 2006 Jan 10, 2006 01/10/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, we saw one example of a "decoy" used in the service of application compatibility with respect to the Printers Control Panel. Today we'll look at another decoy, this time for the Display Control Panel. When support for multiple monitors was being developed, a major obstacle was that a large number of display drivers hacked the ...