The Old New Thing

Why can't I install Windows on my USB drive?

A collection of limitations (both hardware and software) currently prevent Windows from booting and running off a USB drive. Some of them are described in this whitepaper from WinHEC 2003. Another reason not mentioned in this paper is that during any hot-plug operation, the USB bus is completely reinitialized. Windows really doesn't ...

Playing on an entirely different level

Competitive Scrabble® is another game entirely. For example, here's a game from the 2001 World Championship. You can follow it move-by-move, or you can read the game commentary. The name "Stefan" you see in the commentary is Wall Street Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, ...

Not all short filenames contain a tilde

I'm sure everybody has seen the autogenerated short names for long file names. For the long name "Long name for file.txt", you might get "LONGNA~1.TXT" or possibly "LO18C9~1.TXT" if there are a lot of collisions. What you may not know is that sometimes there is no tilde at all! Each filesystem decides how it wants to implement short ...

First thing we do is kill all the jerks

There a fascinating article in today's New York Times on a troop of baboons which went pacifist: ... researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly ...

Unicode collation is hard

The principle of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to Unicode collation. If you hand it a meaningless string and ask to compare it to another meaningless string, you get meaningless results. I am not a Unicode expert; I just play one on the web. A real Unicode expert is Michael Kaplan, whose explanation of how comparing invalid ...

Extraterrestrial income

As I was reading one of the bajillion annual reports in my mailbox, I happened across a comment regarding extraterrestrial income. Space aliens have to pay income tax? Oh, no, it was just a misread for the controversial extraterritorial income exclusion...

The random number seed can be the weakest link

Random number generation is hard. That's why you should leave it to the experts. But even if you choose a good random number generator, you still have to seed it properly. The best random number generator in the world isn't very useful if people can guess the seed. That's why seeding the random number generator with the current ...

Comparing the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish languages.

As I got onto the plane for my outbound flight, I grabbed a Norwegian newspaper, having mistaken it for a Swedish paper. Fortunately, the two languages are so similar I was able to fake my way through it without too much difficulty. (And it's definitely an odd sensation reading U.S. cartoons translated into Norwegian...) The on-board ...

Where does the taskbar get grouped button titles from?

If the "Group similar taskbar buttons" box is checked (default) and space starts to get tight on the taskbar, then then the taskbar will group together buttons represending windows from the same program and give them a common name. Where does this common name come from? The name for grouped taskbar buttons comes from the version resource...