The Old New Thing

The social skills of a thermonuclear device

February 17, 2004 Feb 17, 2004 02/17/04
Raymond Chen
Somebody@somewhere.else described me as having the social skills of a thermonuclear device. I don't remember the incident in question, but I'll have to accept that it happened. I have a very low tolerance for laziness. If you come to me for help, I expect you to have done your homework. (Though I try to scale my expectations to your position...

So what's to do in Sweden?

February 16, 2004 Feb 16, 2004 02/16/04
Raymond Chen
Here is where Raymond gets to abuse his power as a blogger to get some free travel advice. I will likely travel to Sweden in mid-March, with a whopping total of five months of Swedish under my belt. I'm sure I will embarrass myself horribly, but that's sort of the point, after all. The question is, "So what's to do in Sweden?" I was ...

The arms race between programs and users

February 16, 2004 Feb 16, 2004 02/16/04
Raymond Chen
There is a constant struggle between people who write programs and the people who actually use them. For example, you often see questions like, "How do I make my program so the user can't kill it?" Now, imagine if there were a way to do this. Ask yourself, "What would the world be like if this were possible?" Well, then there would be some ...

The Seattle Improbable Show (2004)

February 14, 2004 Feb 14, 2004 02/14/04
Raymond Chen
An overflow crowd attended The Seattle Improbable Show. It was, as expected, a rollicking good time. Mark Abrahams emceed and gave presentations, one on each of last year's Ig Nobel Prize winners, another chronicling various stages in the development of Project Grizzly. Other speakers were allotted five minutes (strictly and amusingly ...

Stories of going through airport security

February 13, 2004 Feb 13, 2004 02/13/04
Raymond Chen
I went through security three times at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport before my flight to Newark. My original flight was cancelled due to inclement weather in Newark, so I get rescheduled onto another flight that arrived three hours later. I thought to myself, "That's strange. Both flights are going to Newark. It's not like the ...

Bad version number checks

February 13, 2004 Feb 13, 2004 02/13/04
Raymond Chen
Version numbers. Very important. And so many people check them wrong. This is why Windows 95's GetVersion function returned 3.95 instead of 4.0. A lot of code checked the version number like this: Now consider what happens when the version number is reported as 4.0. The major version check passes, but the minor version check fails since 0...

Improbable Research comes to Seattle

February 12, 2004 Feb 12, 2004 02/12/04
Raymond Chen
The lunatics behind The Annals of Improbable Research and The Ig Nobel Prize will be in Seattle tomorrow night, Feburary 13. The meeting schedule lists the AIR presentation as "8:00PM-10:30PM, Special Event: Annals of Improbable Research (open to all registrants), Sheraton Hotel, Third Floor, Metropolitan Ballroom". The AIR folks said "Open to...

Sure, we do that

February 11, 2004 Feb 11, 2004 02/11/04
Raymond Chen
The DirectX video driver interface for Windows 95 had a method that each driver exposed called something like "DoesDriverSupport(REFGUID guidCapability)" where we handed it a capability GUID and it said whether or not that feature was supported. There were various capability GUIDs defined, things like GUID_CanStretchAlpha to ask the ...