The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Just change that 15 to a 1
It would be nice and easy to just change that 15 to a 1. If only it were that simple. In the case described in that article, it's not that a single operation was attempted fifteen times in a loop. Rather, the fifteen operations were scattered all over the program. Suppose, for example, that the network operation was "Get the attributes of this file." The program might be filling in a file listing with several columns, one for the icon, another for the file name, another for the file author, and the last one for the last-modified time. Well, that doesn't access the same file fifteen times. Oh wait, there'...
I think I've just broken the internet
On our internal blogging discussion mailing list, John Kennedy explained that he was trying to set up a video blog but somehow he ended up including the entire video into his RSS feed. He managed to fix the problem, but apologized: If the internet is broken, it was my fault. That was funny enough, but Keith Combs chimed in with some technical advice, and then added, If you manage to break the internet, it won't be the first time.
You're white. Do you want to be in my friend's soap opera?
What does a Mandarin-speaking American woman in Beijing do? If you're Rachel DeWoskin, you serendipitously wind up the star of a daytime Mandarin-language soap opera called Foreign Babes in Beijing, a show that takes all the Western stereotypes (from the Chinese point of view) and milks them for all their melodramatic worth. (They probably watched too much Dallas.)
On the unanswerability of the maximum number of user interface objects a program can create
The answer to the question "What is the maximum number of window classes a program can register?" is not a number. Most user interface objects come from a shared pool of memory known as the "desktop heap". Although one could come up with a theoretical maximum number of window classes that can fit in the desktop heap, that number is not achievable in practice because the desktop heap is shared with all other user interface objects on the desktop. For example, menus and windows go into the desktop heap, as well as more obscure objects like active window enumerations, window positioning handles used by , and even h...
The wisdom of seventh graders: Contributions to class discussion
(In the continuing sporadic series on the wisdom of seventh grade students.) My friend the seventh grade teacher once had to deal with a class that had gotten out of hand by assigning the students a short essay in which they had to address three questions: One of the more disruptive students answered the questions thus:
The dialog class goes under the sneaky name WC_DIALOG
An anonymous commenter wanted to know how to create a dialog box with . The window class for dialog boxes is . I'm not quite sure why anybody would want to create a dialog box this way, but there you have it.
How do you wash soap?
Steve Makofsky wondered, "How do you throw out a garbage can?". Along similar lines, I always wondered how you washed soap.
If you work at a company, it's not your computer any more
My posting a while back on solving one problem by creating a bigger problem was written from the standpoint of an IT department doing something like tweaking a logon script. I even mentioned that context partway through but clearly didn't highlight it clearly enough. So say you're an IT department and somebody says, "Oh, just install this other program and learn a new programming language and convert your existing batch file to it, and then your problem will be easy to solve." You might not be too excited about that type of "solution". And even if you decide, "Okay, I can justify to my boss taking a week away f...
As I recall, Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution
I remember reading a news report on a court case wherein the defendant claimed protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. An interesting angle, especially since the case was being tried in Germany under German law. I may be wrong, but it is my impression that Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution. There's actually a point to this anecdote. Occasionally, when someone notes that Windows doesn't do one thing or another thing for legal reasons, people will post comments saying something like, "Well, a German court ruled that XYZ is legal, so your reason is bogus." Or, "...