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The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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More about the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus

After I mentioned that house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus, I received an e-mail message from Mike Daly which corrects some of my mistakes and provides additional details: Actually, there were two houses in the strip in front of RedWest. The one you show has not been moved. The other ended up on blocks and parked opposite the RedWest driveway while the parking garage was built. That house eventually was moved north down the street and put on a foundation (about two years ago). You can see it in the middle of this picture. The yard is in straw, and there is a new blacktop drive going down the north s...

The 2006/2007 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance

I put together this little pocket guide to the 2006/2007 Seattle Symphony subscription season for my symphony friends to help them decide which ticket package they wanted. Maybe it'll help you, too. Maybe not. But since I already put it together, I may as well post it. Explanatory notes follow the table. Notes: This chart doesn't include "one-off" concert series such as the Visiting Orchestras or Distinguished Artists series. Two boxes in the Bravo series are marked ½. The Thursday Bravo series includes the Ravel concert, whereas the Saturday Bravo series includes the Beethoven concert. The comments ...

Adding a new flag to enable behavior that previously was on by default

One of the suggestions for addressing the network compatibility problem was to give up on fast mode and have a new "fast mode 2". (Equivalently, add a flag to the server capabilities that means "I support fast mode, and I'm not buggy.") This is another example of changing the rules after the game is over, by adding a flag to work around driver bugs. Consider a hypothetical program that uses fast mode on Windows XP. It runs against a Windows Server 2003 server and everybody is happy. Suppose you make a change to Windows Vista so that it requires that servers set a new "fast mode 2" flag in ord...

Maybe you don't sound like Carl Kasell, but you can have his job

According to the wonderful Mixed Signals, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is searching for radio hosts. They're calling it "American Idol for public radio". I recently stumbled across Mixed Signals and was instantly hooked. Some of my recent favorites: The curatorship of Mixed Signals appears to change hands rather frequently. The last few entries I linked above were from Robert Smith, whom I had the pleasure to meet at KUOW studios when he was stationed in Seattle.

How to fill in that number grouping member of NUMBERFMT

If you look at the structure, the way groups are expressed by the member do not match the value returned by : expresses grouping as a series of semicolon-separated numbers, each expressing the number of digits in each group (least-significant group first). A trailing zero indicates that the last grouping should be repeated indefinitely. For example, "3;2;0" means "Group the three least significant digits, then in twos until you run out of digits." If there is no trailing ";0", then there are no commas past that point. For example, "3" means "Group the three least significant digits, then stop." The member ...

Merchandise your food with pride

There is a new placard in our cafeteria which reads "Merchandise your food with pride". That's the first time I've seen the word "merchandise" used as a verb. Here, I'll translate that last paragraph into management speak for you: The cafeteria newly signed a placard whose read is "Merchandise your food with pride". That's my first see of a verbed "merchandise". Earlier this year, I was chatting with a Boeing employee who mentioned that he "had to status an action item". I have yet to see the word "status" used as a verb at Microsoft, but it's only a matter of time.

Locale-sensitive number grouping

Most westerners are familiar with the fact that the way numbers are formatted differ between the United States and much of Europe. What people don't realize is that the grouping is not always in threes. In India, the least significant group consists of three digits, but subsequent groups are in pairs. I've also seen reports that the first group consists of five digits, followed by pairs: Meanwhile, Chinese and Japanese traditionally group in fours. What does this mean for you? Don't assume that numbers group in threes, and of course you can't assume that the grouping separator is the comma and the decimal...

Where did start.com get its name?

I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, "Hey, is anybody using start.com?" I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to "synergize" with the "Start Me Up" campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting renewed year after year. (Perhaps we should also put marketing in charge of renewing passport.com since they seem to do a better job of keeping on top of expiring registrations than whoever is in charge of Passport.) It was probably at about the time I got that email ...

Chain tax preparers do not fare well in undercover investigation

The Government Accountability Office paid nineteen visits to chain tax preparers, presented information on two hypothetical families, and asked for assistance in preparing the tax return. "Only two returns showed the correct refund amount, but both of those returns included errors." The article goes into specifics of what sorts of mistakes were made. A Marketplace report added that mistakes with tax credits were particularly bad because messing them up can render you ineligible for claiming them in the future. Add to that the plans for the IRS to permit tax preparers sell information about their clients to mar...