The Old New Thing

NFL cracks down on grandstanding

April 22, 2004 Apr 22, 2004 04/22/04
Raymond Chen
The National (US) Football League adopted a 15-yard penalty for pre-planned celebrations, such as last year's "phone call from the end zone" or 2002's "autographed football". Apparently, the existing monetary fines weren't having much of an effect on players with multi-million-dollar contracts. (Surprised?) So now the league is ...

Why the compiler can’t autoconvert foreach to for

April 21, 2004 Apr 21, 2004 04/21/04
Raymond Chen
People have discovered that the "natural" C# loop construct is fractionally slower than the corresponding manual loop: The first thing that needs to be said here is that The performance difference is almost certainly insignificant. Don't go running around changing all your foreach loops into corresponding for loops thinking that your ...

Good-Bye, Lenin!

April 21, 2004 Apr 21, 2004 04/21/04
Raymond Chen
This weekend I saw Good-Bye, Lenin!, a German movie about a young man who must pretend that East Germany still exists, for the sake of his mother who was in a coma during the fall of the Berlin Wall and therefore remains unaware of the earth-shattering changes the took place while she was unconscious. There is, of course, the comedy of...

Why can't the system hibernate just one process?

April 20, 2004 Apr 20, 2004 04/20/04
Raymond Chen
Windows lets you hibernate the entire machine, but why can't it hibernate just one process? Record the state of the process and then resume it later. Because there is state in the system that is not part of the process. For example, suppose your program has taken a mutex, and then it gets process-hibernated. Oops, now that mutex is ...

Beethoven as ambient music

April 20, 2004 Apr 20, 2004 04/20/04
Raymond Chen
Who knew that Beethoven wrote ambient music? The people at NOTAM took Beethoven's 9th Symphony and slowed it down so that the entire performance takes 24 hours. It's actually quite nice to listen to. (I like 2.1 myself.) [Rats, scooped by MetaFilter. Honest, it was in my queue! Nobody will believe me; they'll think I swiped it ...

A $2 billion bridge to one person

April 19, 2004 Apr 19, 2004 04/19/04
Raymond Chen
The New York Times reported on two enormous construction projects of dubious merit: [The first bridge] would connect [Ketchikan, population 7845] to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million. The other bridge would span ...

WM_KILLFOCUS is the wrong time to do field validation

April 19, 2004 Apr 19, 2004 04/19/04
Raymond Chen
"I'll do my field validation when I get a WM_KILLFOCUS message." This is wrong for multiple reasons. First, you may not get your focus loss message until it's too late. Consider a dialog box with an edit control and an OK button. The edit control validates its contents on receipt of the WM_KILLFOCUS message. Suppose the user fills in ...

Mapping all those "strange" digits to "0" through "9"

April 16, 2004 Apr 16, 2004 04/16/04
Raymond Chen
In an earlier article, I discussed how the Char.IsDigit() method and its Win32 counterpart, GetStringTypeEx report things to be digits that aren't just "0" through "9". If you really care just about "0" through "9", then you can test for them explicitly. For example, as a regular expression, use [0-9] instead of \d. Alternatively, for a ...

Sorry, no free ice cream in Tennessee; it's illegal

April 16, 2004 Apr 16, 2004 04/16/04
Raymond Chen
It seems that giving away ice cream has been illegal in Tennessee since 1957, when state legislators were trying to combat alleged unfair trade practices by the dairy industry. Upon its being alerted to the existence of this law, the state Senate and House unanimously passed a bill to repeal the law, sending it to the governor for ...

Astonishingly, rules apply to everyone.

April 15, 2004 Apr 15, 2004 04/15/04
Raymond Chen
Spain's Crown Prince and his fiancée are outraged that they had to go through airport security in Miami. "The prince and his bodyguard felt they should not be subjected to the screening, but if they do not have an escort from the State Department or the Secret Service, it is required," she added. "It is the law." Apparently...