The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
When programs assume that the system will never change, episode 1
An example, all too frequent, of ways programs assume that the user interface will never change is reaching into system binaries and sucking out undocumented resources. In the shell, we have fallen into the reluctant position of carrying "dead" icons around for the benefit of programs that assumed that they would always be available. However, we often make these "orphaned" icons blank so that these programs don't crash, but they don't necessarily look all that wonderful either. Recently, I learned of a new type of resource stealing: Stealing animations. For Windows Vista, there have been many changes to th...
Seattle Twenty-Five for $25 November 2005 restaurant list is available
A regular restaurant promotion in the Seattle area is called Twenty-Five for $25 (The "$" is silent). Other cities have their own versions of this. New York's is called Restaurant Week, for example, and Toronto's is called (I am not making this up) Winterlicious. The common theme is that participating restaurants offer a prix fixe menu for a reduced price. Twenty-Five for $25 offers dinner for $25 or lunch for $12.50. Restaurant Week offers lunch for $20.05 (the price goes up by a penny each year); some restaurants also offer dinner for $30.05. Winterlicious's menus are C$10/$20 for lunch and C$20/$30 for di...
It’s like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag
Michael Swanson announced last night that the arduous process of assembling the PDC 2005 DVD content is now complete and the results are now online. For free. For six months. You can choose a session and watch it via streaming video, or you can download the video itself for offline enjoyment (!). Michael also has links to the order form if you want to have shiny silver DVDs in your grubby mitts. I'm told that the masters have been released to manufacturing; this means that shiny silver DVDs (including Channel9 bonus tracks) will probably be in the grubby mitts of attendees by (U.S.) Thanksgiving. But do...
One person’s discoverable feature is another person’s annoyance
When I discussed the behavior of Windows XP SP2's autoplay dialog, one person suggested making the CD autoplay configuration dialog more discoverable to solve the problem of people not knowing how to get back to the dialog to change the settings later. But what is the boundary between discoverability and annoying behavior? Windows 95 drew a bouncy arrow pointing to the Start button to draw your attention to it, because usability testing revealed that it wasn't discoverable enough. Yet there existed a population of people who found the arrow downright annoying. And this even though it only app...
New device detected: Boeing 747
Once again, airplane manufacturers have been giving serious consideration to offering Internet access in the skies. Back in 1994, Boeing considered equipping each seat with a serial modem. Laptop users could hook up to the modem and dial out. (Dial-up was the primary means of connecting to the Internet back in those days.) We chuckled at the though of attaching the serial cable and getting a Plug-and-Play pop-up message: New device detected: Boeing 747
Fair Isle: Knitters Wanted
The National Trust of Scotland has two houses to let on the island of Fair Isle, population: 65. The two properties are available at a very reasonable rate of only £300. Per year. Although the National Trust does not promise a job, it points out that there are skill shortages in construction and knitting. The knitting cooperative apparently has more orders than it can fill. (You can listen to the entire story and find a link to the original advertisement on NPR's web site.) (Alas, the deadline for applications has passed. That NPR story led to an avalanche of interest from the United States, mostly f...
Why is it even possible to disable the desktop anyway?
Some time ago, I mentioned the dangers of disabling the desktop window. But why is it even possible to disable the desktop anyway? This is simply an artifact of the history of philosophy of Windows operating system design. Back in the old days, memory was tight, hard drives were luxuries, the most popular CPU for the IBM PC didn't have memory protection, and software development was reserved for the rarefied elite who could afford to drop a few thousand dollars on an SDK. This had several consequences: Certainly there could have been a check in all the places where windows can be disabled to reject at...
The things in the PDC 2005 introductory video
I remarked earlier that the creative director for the PDC rummaged through our offices looking for stuff which was to be used in the opening PDC video to decorate a developer's cubicle. It all flashed by really quickly, but if you were paying attention, you might have been able to make out the following: One thing you won't find in the developer's cubicle, however, is a can of soda. That's because none of the soda companies would give permission for their product to appear in this video. Later in the video, several pages from the web site tastingmenu.com are flashed across the screen. Puzzle: Why was th...
Quick and dirty buzzword bingo cards in Excel
Jensen Harris's brief example of using Excel's random number generator reminded me that I had need for the random number generator recently myself: Generating buzzword bingo cards. At the Battlestar Galactica party, our hosts needed to create some Battlestar Galactica-themed buzzword bingo cards and asked me to help out. Here's how I did it: It's not beautiful, but it gets the job done.