The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
The Minimalist Jukebox Festival
Last year, NPR covered The Minimalist Jukebox Festival, a week-long exploration of the school of minimalist music. The NPR story includes a clip of my favorite minimalist work: Music for 18 Musicians, as well as a telling of the classic minimalism knock-knock joke. I remember reading somewhere that the world premiere of Music for 18 Musicians was performed by an ensemble of only seventeen musicians by doubling up a vocalist with an instrumental line. This was done to reduce the cost of travel. If true, it would make for another one of those "Unfair trivia questions" like "How many years did the Hundred Years'...
If control-specific messages belong to the WM_USER range, why are messages like BM_SETCHECK in the system message range?
When I discussed which message numbers belong to whom, you may have noticed that the messages for edit boxes, buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, scroll bars, and static controls go into the system range even though they are control-specific. How did those messages end up there? They didn't start out there. In 16-bit windows, these control-specific messages were in the control-specific message range, as you would expect. Imagine what would have happened had these message numbers been preserved during the transition to Win32, (Giving you time to exercise your imagination.) Here's a hint. Since 16-bit Wi...
Wayback machine: The Fake Job
Digging through my pile of junk, I found a reference to a fake article in The New Yorker magazine titled My Fake Job that turned out to be (partly) fake itself. Unfortunately, I missed the article the first time around so I didn't get to see what all the excitement was about, but it sure sounded like a funny article. (Fractionally more details from the article here.) I understand there are these buildings called "libraries" that keep hard copies of this stuff. Need to make a mental note to check one out someday.
Sometimes it feels like the effort isn't even appreciated
Some time ago, the application compatibility folks found a program that was corrupting the heap, and they applied a fix that worked around the specific type of corruption that the program performed. And then a bug came on that same program. It was a heap corruption failure during the program's processing of global destructors. The authors of that program were so clever, they found a way around the compatibility fix and managed to corrupt the heap anyway! Update: To clarify, there was no updated version of the program. (That's why I wrote "that same program" and not "an updated version of that program".) There ...
It's that season again: The 2007 Microsoft Company Meeting
Yes, it's that time of year again, time for the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, and therefore time for another of Raymond's reminiscences about meetings past. (If you want a report on the meeting itself, I'm sure Mini-Microsoft will oblige. Here's the company meeting preview.) Over a decade ago, one of my colleagues informally organized a bike ride to the company meeting. (I didn't go; this was before I had taken up bicycling.) He got a small group of people from the organization to join him, and as they headed out in the morning, they "accidentally" made a wrong turn and headed towards North Bend instead o...
If your theory is "build it and they will come", you have to make sure there is a "they"
Creating an infrastructure for managing the content you wish you had doesn't actually create that content. Another possible response to the crisis management issue I considered yesterday is to say "Okay, we need to have an official Company X Breaking News site so that people who are looking for an official response to some hot topic can find it." Except that if you look at the original problem, it wouldn't have helped. The problem wasn't that there was a response to the hot topic that nobody could find. There was no response at all because the people who would formulate that response were busy working on ...
I mean, come on, these are laptops
Last year, Weekend America (co-hosted by former Seattleite Bill Radke—we miss you, Bill!) did a story on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, which calls itself PLOrk. It's an interesting experiment, but computer music doesn't really move me. It's not the computer-ness that bugs me (I was fascinated by music played on Gameboys, after all) but rather the lack of traditional musicality. That said, the chord that opens the piece on online gambling creeps me out. Not because of the piece itself, but because it is dangerously reminiscent of the chord played at the Tulalip Casino, a steady synthesized triad playe...
Whenever there is a coordination problem, somebody says, "Hey, let's create a process!"
Whenever there is a coordination problem, somebody says, "Hey, let's create a process." Now you have two coordination problems. I see this over and over, and paradoxically the people who create a process for managing a coordinating problem come off looking like proactive problem-solvers who get ahead of the problem. They're the go-getters, the people who look at each problem as an opportunity for continuous improvement. All that great management buzzword stuff. It doesn't matter whether or not the process actually works, because failure is an orphan, and besides, nobody follows up a year later to see whether yo...
Volunteers help save fruit from home fruit trees from going to waste
It's the season where people with fruit trees in their yard are drowning in fresh fruit, be they pears, apples, plums, whatever. It's not long before you find yourself desperately looking for people to give it away to, having pretty much run out of things you can make plums into. This is where Community Fruit Tree Harvest steps in. (Coverage in The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. There's also Lettuce Link for donating produce from your home garden.) The volunteers at Community Fruit Tree Harvest will visit your house and pick the fruit from your tree, donating it to local food banks. Every...