The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Raymond's highly scientific predictions for the 2007 NCAA men's basketball tournament
Every year, when it comes time to fill out my NCAA bracket, I choose an arbitrary criterion. You'd think this would take less work, but it actually takes more. My original plan was to rank teams based on how much they pay their head coaches, but it turns out that the salaries (and bonuses and perks) of the head coaches of school basketball programs is hard to find! Instead, I went with something much easier to find but which is still somewhat indicative (in an indirect sense) of the strength of the program: The seating capacity of the home arena. Update: The first full round is the crucial one. Not only are h...
This American Life: What I Learned From Television, Seattle edition
Ira Glass paid another visit to Seattle (here's an appearance on local public radio station KUOW), this time for a live taping of an episode of his radio show This American Life titled "What I Learned From Television." He also took the opportunity to introduce another auditoriumful of people to the same-named television program premiering March 22nd. I myself was skeptical of the idea of transitioning TAL to television, but the clips we saw were absolutely gorgeous. Footage of people's shoes? Interviewing pre-teens in a field of waist-high grass? It sounds crazy, but it works and, more importantly, remains true...
Don't be so fast to discount those oddball time zones
This weekend marks the beginning of Daylight Saving Time in most parts of the United States, the first year under the new transition rules in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Pay extra attention to your clocks this weekend. If you have a device that automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time, and it hasn't been updated for the new transition rules, you may end up having to adjust your clock four times this year: Okay, that's the end of the public service announcement. I try to commemorate the Daylight Saving Time transition days by writing about time zones, and this time, it's about those time zones whose ...
Just what the world has been wishing for: Surströmming ice cream
Every culture has its strange food that is used to scare away the foreigners. In Sweden, it's surströmming. (Surströmming is even classified as hazardous material by some airlines.) And, you know, when you dig into your plate of surströmming, I bet the first thing that goes through your mind is, "Wow, this would go great with some ice cream." Well, your wish has been answered. Surströmmingsglassen är här. Surströmming ice cream is here (Caption: Ice cream with Västerbotten cheese, cloudberry, and flatbread.) Let's see. A carton of Rocky Road, a little Cookie Doug...
The GETDISPINFO notifications tell you what information they want
The notifications used by the common controls are used when the control asks its parent to generate information that had been marked as delay-rendered, either explicitly via values such as or implicitly by being an owner-data control, for example. In fact the control is really just the middle man between the code that requested information about an item (via a message like ) and the code that generates it (your handler). In other words, the code flow goes like this: Somebody interested in retrieving data from a list view creates a structure and initializes the and other fields as necessary, based on the ma...
The wisdom of seventh graders: John Locke and influential persons
My friend the seventh grade teacher was leading the class in a discussion of the most influential persons in history, and after two days of the students collectively deciding whom they would put on the list, my friend revealed the list compiled by the author Michael H. Hart. The students felt bad that their collaborative list didn't match the one this author came up with (as if this author's list was somehow the "correct answer"), but my friend pointed out how many names matched between the author's list and the student's list, as well as the fact that the list was the author's informed opinion and not some abso...
Microspeak: Sit in it!
The title of this entry is a bad pun on a catchphrase from 1970s television. I apologize to those for whom the 1970s are a bad memory. A snippet of Microspeak that bothers me is the verb phrase "to sit in". Example: "I'm in the Nosebleed group which sits in Bob Smith's organization." I think it means "to be a part of" but I'm not quite sure. Maybe it just means that they're there temporarily until they can find a more permanent "seating assignment."
What was the first parameter to CoInitialize used for?
Larry Osterman explains in a two-part series, The sad story of CoGetMalloc and Why was the ability to specify an allocator during CoInitialize removed from the system?
Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 3
In an internal discussion of the women blogger conference known as BlogHer, somebody asked, "Why isn't there a BlogHim?" I replied, Isn't that the plural of the word "blog" in Hebrew? This got quite an amused response from the Hebrew-speaking (or at least vaguely Hebrew-aware) members of the mailing list. Not bad for having studied Hebrew for about ten seconds. (Apparently a better spelling of the plural would be "blogim" or "bloggim". But it wouldn't have been as funny.)