The Old New Thing

Sorry, my kitchen is on fire

March 4, 2004 Mar 4, 2004 03/4/04
Raymond Chen
The other night my phone rang just as I discovered that I overheated my pan and the oil was starting to burn. I rushed to the phone, thinking it's the people I had invited to dinner, but no, it was some telemarketer. "Hello, is this Mr. Chen?" "Sorry, can't talk now, my kitchen is on fire." "Oh my God, sorry!" <click> I'll ...

Where do those customized web site icons come from?

March 4, 2004 Mar 4, 2004 03/4/04
Raymond Chen
In a comment to yesterday's entry, someone asked about the customized icon that appears in the address bar... sometimes. There's actually method to the madness. I was going to write about it later, but the comment (and misinformed answers) prompted me to move it up the schedule a bit. (The originally-scheduled topic for today - the ...

Calling the irony patrol

March 3, 2004 Mar 3, 2004 03/3/04
Raymond Chen
I don't speak Dutch, so I went of course to a Dutch search engine, www.vinden.nl. And upon my arrival I was greeted with a pop-up ad offering me a pop-up blocker. There's something wrong about that...

Blow the dust out of the connector

March 3, 2004 Mar 3, 2004 03/3/04
Raymond Chen
Okay, I'm about to reveal one of the tricks of Product Support. Sometimes you're on the phone with somebody and you suspect that the problem is something as simple as forgetting to plug it in, or that the cable was plugged into the wrong port. This is easy to do with those PS/2 connectors that fit both a keyboard and a mouse plug, or ...

Why are HANDLE return values so inconsistent?

March 2, 2004 Mar 2, 2004 03/2/04
Raymond Chen
If you look at the various functions that return s, you'll see that some of them return (like ) and some of them return (like ). You have to check the documentation to see what each particular function returns on failure. Why are the return values so inconsistent? The reasons, as you may suspect, are historical. The values were chosen to...

Why 16-bit DOS and Windows are still with us

March 1, 2004 Mar 1, 2004 03/1/04
Raymond Chen
Many people are calling for the abandonment of 16-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows compatibility subsystems. And trust me, when it comes time to pull the plug, I'll be fighting to be the one to throw the lever. (How's that for a mixed metaphor.) But that time is not yet here. You see, folks over in the Setup and Deployment group have gone and...

The correct order for disabling and enabling windows

February 27, 2004 Feb 27, 2004 02/27/04
Raymond Chen
If you want to display modal UI, you need to disable the owner and enable the modal child, and then reverse the procedure when the modal child is finished. And if you do it wrong, focus will get all messed up. If you are finished with a modal dialog, your temptation would be to clean up in the following order: But if you do that, ...

Why do timestamps change when I copy files to a floppy?

February 26, 2004 Feb 26, 2004 02/26/04
Raymond Chen
Floppy disks use the FAT filesystem, as do DOS-based and Windows 95-based operating systems. On the other hand, Windows NT-based systems (Windows 2000, XP, 2003, ...) tend to use the NTFS filesystem. (Although you can format a drive as FAT on Windows NT-based systems, it is not the default option.) The NTFS and FAT filesystems store ...