The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
On the enduring appeal of Walker, Texas Ranger
Conan O'Brien airs clips from Walker, Texas Ranger. The putative excuse for this is that, as a result of the merger of NBC with Universal Studios, he can air clips from the show without paying royalties. The real excuse, of course, is that the clips are just so unintentionally funny. This appears to be a recurring sketch on Conan, so a little hunting around will reveal plenty of other clips. This is, of course, not to be confused with Chuck Norris Facts or the Chuck Norris Fact Generator or the Young Chuck Norris sketch from Saturday Night Live...
Why can't I display a tooltip for a disabled window?
Here's a question that floated past my field of view some time ago: When the mouse hovers over a disabled window, the tooltip associated with that window does not appear. Why is this? Why isn't this documented in MSDN? Actually, you already know the answer, and it is documented. You just have to connect the dots. When a window is disabled, it does not receive keyboard or mouse input. The documentation for says so in so many words, right in the first sentence. Next, how do tooltips know when to appear and disappear? Well, one way is to modify your window procedure so it takes all its input messages and forw...
Your chance to meet Raymond if you are near Palo Alto on the 23rd
There's been a slight change in plans. I will be in Palo Alto on April 23rd rather than April 20th. Not that anybody is affected by this beyond the folks at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus, since nobody else took me up on my offer. I guess I'm not as popular as I thought. Update 13-Apr-2007: Here's my schedule for April 23rd when I'm down San Jose way. Now the term "presentation" is a bit of an overstatement. It's really just me telling a bunch of stories, but instead of sitting at a table with a bunch of people, I'll be standing in front of a room. Same stories, different audio system. I'll have a number o...
His lips are moving: In order to serve you better
Q: How do you know when a lawyer is lying? A: His lips are moving. This is of course a completely unfair and discriminatory joke. Many lawyers are women. Anyway, today I'm going to rant about the phrase "In order to serve you better." Whenever you hear this phrase, you are pretty much guaranteed that whatever follows will in fact not serve you better at all. When I bought tickets to see Real Madrid play against some Americans, the online ticket service gave me multiple options for receiving my tickets. I could have them mailed to me, or I could have the tickets sent to me electronically. And for some reason...
Why does my thread pool use only one thread?
Because one thread is all it needs.
Groundwork being laid for Vladimir Putin to run for his fourth term (out of a maximum of two)
The Russian constitution limits the president to two consecutive four-year terms, and Vladimir Putin is coming up on the end of his third. When he ran for his third term, he explained that his first term didn't count since it was served under the old constitution. This explanation appears to have been widely accepted because everybody reports that he is coming up on the end of his second term, not his third. (But I think it's funnier if you think of it as his third.) Now it appears that the groundwork is being laid for Putin to run for his fourth term. Out of a maximum of two. I'm not saying he does or doesn't...
Why do operating system files still adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention?
Commenter Brian Reiter asks a duplicate of a question that was already submitted to the Suggestion Box: Darren asks why operating system† files still (for the most part) adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention. There are a few reasons I can think of. I'm not saying that these are the reasons; I'm just brainstorming. First, of course, the name of a DLL cannot change once it has been chosen, because that would break programs which linked to that DLL by its old name. Windows 95 did not require the system volume and user profile volume to support long file names, although that was certainly the cas...
What do the colors in the elevation dialog mean?
On Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled, when you right-click a program and select Run as Administrator, the elevation prompt contains a particular snippet of warning text and a corresponding color-coding. Here are what the four colors mean. You can learn about the philosophy behind UAC in this Channel9 interview. Pre-emptive snarky comment: "UAC sucks!" The purpose of this entry is not to discuss whether UAC is a good idea or not. I'm just trying to help by providing information on what the colors mean. This is one of the entries that I was afraid to write. On its own, it's useful information, b...
On the effect of dandruff on climate
The Improbable Research blog alerted me to a news report on the effect of dandruff and other cellular material on climate (full report).