The Old New Thing

the qUirKY jaPan HomEPage

March 23, 2004 Mar 23, 2004 03/23/04
Raymond Chen
The weird stuff about Japan you were afraid to ask about. The Seldom-Asked Questions are interesting, but what I find the most fascinating is the pictures of various Japanese subcultures. [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded...

A privacy policy that doesn't actively offend me

March 22, 2004 Mar 22, 2004 03/22/04
Raymond Chen
I've ranted before about privacy policies and how they don't actually protect your privacy. (All they're required to do is disclose the policy; there is no requirement that the policy must be any good.) Today I read MetLife's privacy policy and found to my surprise that it does not actively offend me. It's written in plain English...

Why an object cannot be its own enumerator

March 22, 2004 Mar 22, 2004 03/22/04
Raymond Chen
I've seen people using the following cheat when forced to implement an enumerator: Why create a separate enumerator object when you can just be your own enumerator? It's so much easier. And it's wrong. Consider what happens if two people try to enumerate your formats at the same time: The two enumerators are really the same enumerator...

The only logical conclusion is that he was cloned

March 20, 2004 Mar 20, 2004 03/20/04
Raymond Chen
Something is wrong with the world when fark finds something "real" news organizations miss. (When I first learned about fark, I confused it with FARC, a different organization entirely. That's right, a terrorist organization has its own official web site. Gotta love the Internet.)Anyway, fark has pointed out that the guy that ...

Catholic baseball fans want to eat meat on opening day

March 19, 2004 Mar 19, 2004 03/19/04
Raymond Chen
So it happens that Opening Day of the baseball season coincides with Good Friday, a day of "fasting and abstinence" according to Catholic tradition. (Then again, after Vatican II, the definition of "fasting and abstinence" weakened significantly. All that most people remember any more is "no meat".) Catholics in Boston have applied to ...

The car with no user-serviceable parts inside

March 18, 2004 Mar 18, 2004 03/18/04
Raymond Chen
For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "...

Why is the line terminator CR+LF?

March 18, 2004 Mar 18, 2004 03/18/04
Raymond Chen
This protocol dates back to the days of teletypewriters. CR stands for "carriage return" - the CR control character returned the print head ("carriage") to column 0 without advancing the paper. LF stands for "linefeed" - the LF control character advanced the paper one line without moving the print head. So if you wanted to return the print ...

Ännu skriver jag inte bra

March 17, 2004 Mar 17, 2004 03/17/04
Raymond Chen
I was exchanging e-mail with one of the people I will be visiting while I'm in Uppsala [link repaired 10:43pm]. and we wrote in double-translation, first in Swedish, with English translation beneath it. But eventually he gave up and wrote exclusively in English. I went back to my previous dual-language message and found a few pretty ...

More on the AMD64 calling convention

March 17, 2004 Mar 17, 2004 03/17/04
Raymond Chen
Josh Williams picks up the 64-bit ball with an even deeper discussion of the AMD64 (aka x64) calling convention and things that go wrong when you misdeclare your function prototypes...