The Old New Thing

"Special skills" draft on the drawing board

March 30, 2004 Mar 30, 2004 03/30/04
Raymond Chen
The [U.S.] government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages. Apparently, there is already a special system to draft "health care personnel", whatever that means. Can you imagine the havoc that could be wrought by disgruntled programmers ...

It's embarrassing how little Swedish you need to know

March 29, 2004 Mar 29, 2004 03/29/04
Raymond Chen
Because everybody here speaks English. Perfectly. Sometimes they'll speak English to me even before I say anything. (My comparative silence probably gives me away as a non-native.) Other times they'll notice that I'm speaking with a bad accent and switch to English. Some humor me by speaking Swedish until I finally break down and ask (in ...

The army is cool, except for the part where you have to fight

March 29, 2004 Mar 29, 2004 03/29/04
Raymond Chen
There's some to-do over a soldier who volunteered to serve in the army who has since changed his mind and is applying for conscientous objector status. I noticed this trend over two years ago, when people who had enlisted in the armed forces underwent a change of heart after the World Trade Center attacks: Many of the enlisted ...

You know you've been in Sweden too long when…

March 28, 2004 Mar 28, 2004 03/28/04
Raymond Chen
Some Aussie ex-pats developed a list of “You know you've been in Sweden too long when...”. My friend who is acting as my host (and who is himself a U.S. ex-pat) says that the list is astonishingly accurate, and that your reaction to it goes through several phases. For example, my friend explained points 73 and 74 to me...

What U.S. college students miss from home

March 27, 2004 Mar 27, 2004 03/27/04
Raymond Chen
I didn't believe it until I saw it myself: My friend asked me to bring red and blue plastic cups to Sweden because the U.S. students really miss them. It's true. Here's why. (This needed to be explained to me because this was a part of U.S. college life I missed out on.) These cups are valuable because they are opaque. This allows you to walk ...

The ways people mess up IUnknown::QueryInterface

March 26, 2004 Mar 26, 2004 03/26/04
Raymond Chen
When you're dealing with application compatibility, you discover all sorts of things that worked only by accident. Today, I'll talk about some of the "creative" ways people mess up the IUnknown::QueryInterface method. Now, you'd think, "This interface is so critical to COM, how could anybody possible mess it up?" Forgetting to respond to...

Yahoo's privacy policy regarding web bugs

March 26, 2004 Mar 26, 2004 03/26/04
Raymond Chen
Here's Yahoo's privacy policy regarding so-called web bugs (or as they call them "web beacons") - these are the little 1x1 images that web sites use to keep track of where you're going. Halfway down the page (at least as of the time I wrote this, which is not the same as the time this gets posted since I write stuff in advance...) in ...

Swedish spicy food

March 25, 2004 Mar 25, 2004 03/25/04
Raymond Chen
My friend Jonathan is acting as my host in Uppsala, and he was responsible for preparing dinner for a staff party at his nation. He chose curry. The same thing he chose the last time he was responsible for preparing dinner for a party. The last time, one of the attendees ceremonially dumped the curry into the trash because it was "...

URLs too small? Here comes hugeurl.com

March 25, 2004 Mar 25, 2004 03/25/04
Raymond Chen
Sure, everybody knows about little tinyurl.com, handing out short URLs for large unwieldy ones. But nobody pays any attention to tinyurl.com's arch-nemesis: www.hugeurl.com, or as they like to call themselves, http://www.hugeurl.com/?ZWY3ZTE0NWFmOTg5ZDU2M2QxYWI3ZTNhMGJj ZjlhNGMmMTImVm0wd2QyUXlVWGxXYTJoV1YwZG9WVll3Wkc5alJsWjBUVlpP ...