The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Hand gestures for numbers
When I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, I began noticing the hand gestures that accompanied numbers. When people said "six", they often punctuated it by holding out their hand with the thumb and pinky extended, palm towards the speaker. That's because they were using Chinese number gestures. (It so happens that the gesture for "six" is the same in both the Chinese and Taiwanese systems.) What was particularly amusing was that when I asked them about it later, they had no recollection that they had done it and didn't even notice that I was doing it. "I noticed you said 'six'," as I make the 'six' gesture. ...
Things you already know: How do I wait until my dialog box is displayed before doing something?
One customer wanted to wait until the dialog box was displayed before displaying its own dialog box. (Personally, I think immediately displaying a doubly-nested dialog box counts as starting off on the wrong foot from a usability standpoint, but let's set that issue aside for now.) The customer discovered that displaying the nested dialog box in response to the message was premature, because as we all know, the is sent before the dialog box is displayed. The question therefore is, "How do I want until my dialog box is displayed before doing something?" One proposed solution was the following code fragment: ...
It’s that season again: The Microsoft Company Meeting
Today is the 2006 Microsoft Company Meeting, and with it the continuation of what I consider to be one of the most annoying Company Meeting traditions: The group that cheers wildly any time their project name is mentioned. It's never the same group year to year. Instead, a different group (or groups) independent decides to be the annoying one for any particular meeting. For illustrative purposes, let's call the 2006 group "Project Nosebleed". (All project names in this entry are fictitious and are used solely for illustrative purposes. Any similarity to actual projects is purely coincidental. But I mean, really,...
If you don't trust your administrators, you've already lost
Occasionally, a customer will ask for a way they can restrict what the administrator can do. The short answer to this is, "Um, no, that's why they're called 'Administrator'." You can try to set up roadblocks, say, ACL files to revoke access to a file you don't want the administrator to read, but the Administrator can always take ownership of the file and read the contents that way. At the end of the day, the Administrator owns the local machine. Often, people ask this question because they want to grant certain employees selected subsets of the full set of capabilities available to the Administrator. The way to ...
It is as if our leaders have not been educated in orbital space colonization
Yesterday were held the primary elections in the state of Washington. Most of the partisan positions were uncontested, so there wasn't much to research. The one with the most candidates was for one of the state's Senate seats, and among those candidates were some who might be considered "a bit unorthodox". None of these candidates appears to have won their respective election, so we won't be seeing much more of them this election season. But that's okay. All four of these candidates are "regulars" on the ballot, so they'll almost certainly be back in two years if not sooner.
Don’t forget to unregister your window classes when your DLL shuts down dynamically
You can get strange errors otherwise.
The tale of the radioactive Boy Scout
Under no circumstances should you attempt this at home.
Why doesn't the Shutdown dialog use Alt to get alternate behavior?
When you select "Shut Down" from the Start menu, a dialog appears with three options: "Stand By", "Turn Off" and "Restart". To get the secret fourth option "Hibernate" you have to press the shift key. Would the Alt key be the more obvious choice for revealing alternate options? You might think so, but it so happens that Alt already has meaning. In this dialog, the Alt key would be a disaster, because the underlined letters indicate keyboard accelerators, which are pressed in conjunction with the Alt key. In other words, from the Shut Down dialog, you can type Alt+S to stand by, Alt+U to turn off, or Alt+R to res...
Project Update 2: Voyage to Our Hollow Earth
If everything went according to plan, the trip to the hole in the Arctic Ocean should have completed a few months ago. I went to the web site to see what they found, only to discover that it's been postponed another year, to June 26, 2007. This is clearly the handiwork of the world government attempting to suppress the release of information they have all held in secret for decades. All their attempts to prevent the discovery of the polar opening only serves to confirm its existence!