The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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News flash: Snacks at the theater concession stand are not good for you
"We try to make them as healthy as possible," says Jose Mier. As healthy as sixteen inches of deep-fried dough, covered in sugar, and stuffed with caramel can be. That is to say, not healthy at all. Here are some ideas for making them healthier: Don't coat them in sugar, don't stuff them with Bavarian cream, and don't deep-fry them. Or just get over the fact that churros aren't healthy and stop pretending that they are. (I was tipped off to this article by the always-entertaining Ken Levine.) In related news, whole wheat Krispy Kreme donuts are not health food.
Don't require your users to have a degree in philosophy, episode 2
Earlier, we learned that help text is not the place to put logic puzzles. Neither are dialog boxes. I ran across a configuration dialog box that had the item Turn off Feature X This is a negative-sense checkbox, which turns your dialog box into a logic puzzle. Checkboxes should be phrased positively. Use Feature X (The only exception to the "no negative checkboxes" rule is the "don't show me this message again" checkbox.) Negative-sense checkboxes turn into a game of confuse-the-user. "If I uncheck 'Turn off Feature X', then I'm not not running it." It gives the impression that your progr...
Out there gathering map data, one intersection at a time
The New Yorker reported some time ago on how Navteq gathers map data. This story reminded me that, at least as of a few years ago, Navteq listed the driveway of a colleague of mine as a through road. Drivers came up to his driveway, realized that they've been hoodwinked, and spun their wheels in the gravel in frustration on their way out. He told me that he had reported the error to Navteq three years previously, but they still hadn't updated their map data. I haven't checked back to see if the data has been updated yet...
The only thing you can do with display names is display them
There are many functions that return strings called "display names". And the only thing you can do with display names is display them. Don't assume that the string actually means anything, because it doesn't. Theoretically, a function like could be implemented as and your program should still work. (Of course, this is merely a ground rule. Specific functions may have exceptions. For example, the has a special flag flag which explicitly indicates that the string returned is designed to be parsed.) The purpose of a "display name" is to be a string suitable for displaying to the user. The display name for...
What is a SM_SLOWMACHINE?
Jason Doucette asks how slow a machine has to be to be considered a . The answer: Pretty darned slow by today's standards. When the metric was introduced in Windows 95, the definition of a "slow machine" was as follows (roughly): That bit about the display driver is a little strange. Windows actually trusted display drivers to report when they were slow. The guidance in the device driver documentation was to mark a driver as slow if it did not perform graphics hardware acceleration, but of course no card manufacturer would admit that their card was slow! I suspect nobody ever set that bit. The "slow m...
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...