The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
The great Polish Sea -or- We forgot Poland!
Oopsie.
Let the dead computer scavenging commence!
Now that my old computer is up on bricks in the virtual front yard, the scavenging has begun. I got a piece of email from one of my colleagues saying, "Say, you aren't using that PC-2100 memory any more are you?" Why no, in fact, I wasn't. Christmas comes early. (He offered to buy the memory off of me, but since I had already written the old computer off as a loss, I just gave him the memory. But even he didn't want the 256MB memory stick.) I've still got a perfectly good Socket A 1GHz AMD Thunderbird, a full-size ATX (not ATX1) case with power supply, a modem (wow, remember those?), a network card, an AG...
For a brief shining moment, DirectX was more popular than another word that ends in x
In the month after DirectX 3 was released, "directx" became the number one most-searched-for term on microsoft.com. That in itself wasn't too surprising. What was more surprising was the word in sixth place: "sex". That puzzles me to this day. What kind of people search for "sex" on microsoft.com? And what were they expecting to find?
Non-resolution of the dead home desktop problem
Last time, I told of attempting to upgrade my home computer and failing. I ultimately gave up and returned the parts to the store, telling them that I thought the IDE controller on the motherboard was dead. They refunded my money after a false step where they refunded me more than I paid for the components in the first place! (I bought the motherboard and CPU as a bundle, but the person who rang up the return treated them as two separate items and ended up refunding me the full price instead of the bundled price. It's one thing to return a defective product and get your money back. But to turn a profit doing so ...
Offline mode silently prevents you from streaming media content
Into Windows Media Player (version 9 if you're keeping score at home), I type the URL of an MP3 file (poor man's podcast) and get the error message "The download of the specified resource has failed." On this dialog there two buttons: Close and Web Help. Close closes the error dialog, of course. Web Help does nothing. Turns out the real problem was that I was in offline mode. Go to the File menu and uncheck "Work Offline". So if you get the "The download of the specified resource has failed." error, check that you aren't accidentally running in offline mode. Working backwards, I'm guessing that the Web H...
Invalidating the null window redux
The people who work on the next generation of the window manager, known as the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), told me that their original plan was to get rid of the compatibility hack that says that invalidating the null window invalidates the entire desktop, but by an amazing coincidence, two days after I posted that article, they received a report that the beta version of an upcoming product from a major vendor still relies on that behavior (albeit accidentally). They contacted the vendor who agreed to fix the bug, but the fact that a modern program still relies on this ancient behavior gave them pause. If a p...
More tales of dead computers: My home desktop
Yes, I said that my next dead computer story would be the AlphaServer, but late-breaking news has forced me to shuffle the order a bit. My home computer has been circling the drain for several months. (The Northbridge fan would buzz and sometimes spin really slowly.) When the motherboard finally stopped powering on, I knew its time was up. Being the clueless geek I am, I figured, "No big deal. Swap out the motherboard and I'm back in business." Easier said than done. For you see, my computer is so old, nobody makes motherboards compatible with the one I had. According to Wikipedia, not only has Socket A b...
Quick and dirty Hallowe'en costume for physics geeks
When I was considering with some friends what I could be for Hallowe'en this year, one of the ideas that emerged in a fit of brainstorming was "Schrödinger's cat". To dress up as Schrödinger's cat, or more accurately, the Schrödinger cat thought experiment, you just need a cardboard box and a heavy marker. Use the marker to write "Contents: Schrödinger's cat. Warning: Do not observe." If you really want to get fancy, you can stick a cat doll inside the box to satisfy the people who ignore the warning. (Then you can scold them for collapsing the wave function.) Leave it ambiguous as to whether...
Psychic debugging: Why doesn't my program show up when I call ShellExecute?
This question came in from a customer (paraphrased): If I run my program from the command prompt, it works great, but if I run it from my launcher via , it never appears. See how good your psychic powers are at solving this problem before I give you the second question that gives away the answer. Any luck? Here's a second question from a different source (but which coincidentally came in the same day). I'm trying to use to open a document. The function succeeds (returns a value greater than 32), but I don't get anything on the screen. The problem the second person is having lies in the last parame...