The Old New Thing

Please disconnect all cell phones, signal watches, and pagers

September 20, 2005 Sep 20, 2005 09/20/05
Raymond Chen
Last Saturday night, a group of us (including butt photographer Wendy) attended a performance of the Seattle Symphony consisting of the world premiere of the orchestral arrangement of Shafer Mahoney's Sparkle, Richard Strauss' Don Quixote (with guest soloist Lynn Harrell) and concluding with Brahms' Fourth Symphony. I was pleasantly ...

Things to do at Microsoft when the power goes out

September 20, 2005 Sep 20, 2005 09/20/05
Raymond Chen
When the power goes out, the first thing you notice is how quiet everything becomes. The hum of the computers in the building stops. You hear... nothing. Bask in its peaceful silence. The next thing you do is turn off all the machines in your office, because you don't want to stress the power grid and network when the power eventually ...

Corrections to the answers I gave at the end of my PDC talk

September 19, 2005 Sep 19, 2005 09/19/05
Raymond Chen
I guess one advantage of having a web site is that I can publish errata. I haven't watched the Channel9 video (and probably never will; it's hard to watch yourself), but I do remember some of the questions at the end that I wasn't able to answer off the top of my head, but after a few days' research I think I can do it now. The person who ...

Why doesn’t Microsoft give every employee a UPS?

September 19, 2005 Sep 19, 2005 09/19/05
Raymond Chen
One reaction to my story about the oldest computer at Microsoft still doing useful work was shock (shock!) that Microsoft suffers from power outages. In the Pacific Northwest, winter windstorms are quite common, and it is not unexpected that a windstorm blow down tall trees (which are also quite common) which in turn take out power lines. ...

Fiddling with the fonts, part 2: Keeping the English font small

September 16, 2005 Sep 16, 2005 09/16/05
Raymond Chen
We concluded last time that we wanted the custom large font to apply only to the columns containing Chinese characters and leave the original font in place for the English columns. We do this by carrying two fonts around, choosing the appropriate one for each column. class RootWindow : public Window { ... private: HWND m_hwndLV; HWND ...

Fiddling with the fonts, part 1: Making the Chinese characters larger

September 15, 2005 Sep 15, 2005 09/15/05
Raymond Chen
Let's pay a quick visit to our continuing dictionary project. One of the things you may have noticed is that the Chinese characters are unreadably small. Let's fix that by making them larger. class RootWindow : public Window { public: virtual LPCTSTR ClassName() { return TEXT("Scratch"); } static RootWindow *Create(); RootWindow(); ~...

Typo patrol at the PDC

September 14, 2005 Sep 14, 2005 09/14/05
Raymond Chen
You can find the following typographical errors in the Big Room at the PDC: If you can locate all three of them and catch me at the PDC (say at the Fundamentals Lounge or at the Ask the Experts table), I'll award you a prize of um (rummaging through my bag) how about a retractable network cable? (Or an autographed business card? But then ...

The double-Ctrl+Alt+Del feature is really a kludge

September 14, 2005 Sep 14, 2005 09/14/05
Raymond Chen
Most people who care about such things know that you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice from the Welcome screen and sometimes you will get a classic logon dialog. (Note: "Sometimes". It works only if the last operation was a restart or log-off, for complicated reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion.) The ability to do the double-Ctrl+Alt+...

Sorry I missed you all this morning

September 13, 2005 Sep 13, 2005 09/13/05
Raymond Chen
Sorry to all you PDCers who stopped by the Fundamentals Lounge to see me. The scheduling software that the PDC organizers cooked up is, um, "suboptimal" and listed me for Tuesday 11.30a–2.30p instead of 2.30p–5.30p. During the early afternoon shift, I was actually in the Hands-On Lab. But I'll be in the Lounge on Thursday after my ...