The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
It's official, it's the Hannukah Eve Storm of 2006
(Following up on an earlier entry.) The National Weather Service chose a name for the wind storm of December 2006: It's going to be called the "Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm of 2006". But what is Hannukah Eve? Eh, it doesn't look like anybody's getting too worked up over that. You can download the entire list of entries (over 5000 of them) from the NOAA web site. They also have their own discussion of how the contest went.
Hiding files is not the same as protecting them
An anonymous commenter suggested that we should give up on "hiding protected operating system files". After all, if we "protect operating system files", that should be enough, shouldn't it? Well, except that some files are still hidden even though they are not protected. For example, your encryption keys are fully accessible to you (after all, they're your encryption keys), but they are marked as hidden because if you deleted them, your encrypted files are in trouble. "If visibility itself is core to somebody's security, why not safeguard against a file's enumeration via the ACL?" The purpose of hiding protec...
Public service announcement for Seattle area taxpayers: Some transit taxes can be itemized and deducted
If you itemize your taxes, there are some taxes you can claim on Schedule A line 7 that you may not be aware of. These taxes are special because they are based on the value of the vehicle and therefore qualify as a "personal property tax" from the IRS's point of view. While you're on Schedule A, don't forget to claim your deduction for state sales tax on line 5. You can look up the local sales tax rate for any Washington address by using this handy web form on the State of Washington Department of Revenue site. If you prefer doing it the slow way, you can download all the local sales t...
The .Default user is not the default user
If you ever gone spelunking in the registry key, you've no doubt found the user named . Who is this guy? Despite its name, the profile for the .Default user is not the default user profile. It's actually the profile for the Local System account and is an alias for . ( is the security identifier for the Local System account.) Consequently, settings in are used by programs and services that run as Local System. The most visible examples of programs that run as Local System are and , the programs that display the interface for logging onto the system. Whatever color scheme and screen saver you choose for the Loc...
West Bank Story, the movie that sells itself in five seconds
This weekend, I attended an Oscar-watching party, and when the clips from the nominees for Live Action Short Film were run, I was completely won over by West Bank Story. Five seconds of dancing, finger-snapping Jews and Arabs is all I needed. When filling out your Oscar party ballot, "Live Action Short Film" is one of those categories you just close your eyes and pick randomly since you don't know anything about any of the movies. It felt like everybody else at the party felt the same way I did: If we had seen that clip, we would all have voted for it. In our minds, it won the award before the envelope was even...
If you have to ask, you're probably doing something wrong
If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you're probably doing something wrong. If you're nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface design is in serious need of rethought, because you just created a usability nightmare. If you have to ask about the maximum number of threads a process can create or the maximum length of a command line or the maximum size of an environment block or the maximum amount of data you can ...
More Vista wallpapers from Hamad Darwish
Long Zheng does it again. He follows up his interview with Hamad Darwish with a report on what Hamad has been doing lately, as well as links to high resolution versions of the entire Vista wallpaper photo shoot, including photos that didn't make the final cut.
Another retired computer: The Alpha Rawhide
This computer didn't die like the previous one; it merely outlived it usefulness. In its prime, the machine was a force to be reckoned with. It was about the size of a small refrigerator and generated about as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. It contained four, count 'em, four Alpha AXP processors, each running at a mind-boggling 400 MHz. It had one gigabyte of RAM and thirteen gigabytes of hard drive space (striped over over a dozen fast SCSI drives). Hey, back in the 1990's these were impressive hardware specs. When it was in active use, the machine ran a batch file that simply grabbed the latest so...
How hard could it be? Must provide own garage.
A good friend of mine forwarded me this help-wanted ad on CraigsList: Need a programmer to make a Search Engine like Google I'm looking for some Programmer(s) who can help me create a search engine like Google. Only qualified person(s) encouraged to apply. Compensation: no pay Good luck with that.