The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?
Earlier versions of Internet Explorer used inline autocomplete, but newer versions use drop-down autocomplete that requires you to press the down-arrow key to select an item from the drop-down. Why the change? Because it interferes with normal keyboard operation. Suppose is in your history, but you want to go to . As you type the desired destination, inline autocomplete kicks in and fills in the remainder of the URL for you, . If you aren't watching the screen and just hit Enter, you end up going to the autocompleted URL instead of the URL you typed. Oops. To me, this is a fatal flaw, namely that one has...
Bicycling from Mercer Island to Microsoft main campus
I asked four people who commute by bicycle eastbound over the I-90 bridge to Microsoft main campus what route they take, and they gave three different answers. I've given them meaningless names just to tell them apart. The yellow route First half (markers A1 through A5) | Second half (markers B1 through B5). Animated version: Click markers 1 through 5 in order then markers 1 through 5 in order. Pro: Avoids downtown Bellevue Con: You're stuck on Bel-Red The blue route (two votes) First half (markers C1 through C5) | ...
Välkommen till Saerige?
Ballard is the Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle, and they ordered some stone slabs for a new seating area in Bergen Place Park. What they didn't expect was that the Swedish stone would read S∀ERIGE. I mean, yeah, those Swedes do strange things with their A's, like put dots and circles over them, but I'm pretty sure they don't turn them upside-down and treat them as V's.
The COM interface contract rules exist for a reason
Some people believe that the COM rules on interfaces are needlessly strict. But the rules are there for a reason. Suppose you ship some interface in version N of your product. It's an internal interface, not documented to outsiders. Therefore, you are free to change it any time you want without having to worry about breaking compatibility with any third-party plug-ins. But remember that if you change an interface, you need to generate a new Interface Identifier (IID). Because an interface identifier uniquely identifies the interface. (That's sort of implied by its name, after all.) And this rule ...
Night of the Knitting Dead
Okay, wrong zombie movie, but I couldn't resist the pun. Knit zombies reenact Dawn of the Dead. Now playing on Flickr.
The Hallowe’en-themed lobby
During the Windows 95 project, the window manager team stayed late one night and redecorated the lobby. They suspended a variety of Hallowe'en-themed objects from fishing lines: spiders, ghosts, witches, jack-o'-lanterns, that sort of thing. The fishing line went up and over pulleys, rigged so that the objects spookily rose and fell seemingly of their own volition. It was quite an impressive display. The fishing lines were anchored to various doors in the building. Since the doors they chose were highly-trafficked, this assured a random pattern of motion for the objects suspended from the fishing line. Of ...
Even in the enlightened year of 2005, we have programs that don’t handle long file names
When I saw Tim Sneath's description of the root cause for all the Windows Vista product key problems, I was amazed that the reason was something my readers tend to go completely ballistic over: Long file names. It so happens that one of the ISO mounting tools that people were using for installing Windows Vista doesn't support long file names! (At least not by default.)
How to recognize different types of sentinel timestamps from quite a long way away
Some time ago, I discussed several timestamp formats you might run into. Today we'll take a logical step from that information and develop a list of special values you might encounter. Note that if you apply time zone adjustments, the actual timestamp may shift by up to a day. All of these special values have one thing in common: If you see them, it's probably a bug. Typically they will arise when somebody fails to do proper error checking and ends up treating an error code as if it were a valid return value. (The special values 0, -1, and 0xFFFFFFFF are often used as error codes.)
Without a doubt, the world’s worst online Swedish lessons
Lesson 3: Schomething schtranger (mp3) is part three of a series of four (so far) horrifically bad Swedish lessons. (Warning: Off-color content and copious swearing, but nevertheless very funny.) Boz has been living in Sweden since June, and two of his so-called friends have been putting together Swedish language tapes for him. Listen along as he goes through the tapes, trying to repeat each of the phrases. Each of the lessons does illustrate a genuine detail of the Swedish language, even though Slaygon and Makke choose to illustrate the points using sentences you're unlikely to encounter in your average Swedi...