The Old New Thing

Other - The Old New Thing

If you don't trust your administrators, you've already lost

September 21, 2006 Sep 21, 2006 09/21/06
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Why doesn't the Shutdown dialog use Alt to get alternate behavior?

September 19, 2006 Sep 19, 2006 09/19/06
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Sometimes my psychic powers are weak

September 18, 2006 Sep 18, 2006 09/18/06
Raymond Chen
Why does my MFC program exit unexpectedly? The stack trace at the point we hit goes like this: Thanks. You can already see some of what's going on, but clearly more information is needed. My first psychic suggestion was to examine MFC's message pump to see what causes it to exit. Then follow the money backwards. That's what we want ...

If you ask a Yes/No question, make sure the user also knows what happens when they say No

September 11, 2006 Sep 11, 2006 09/11/06
Raymond Chen
I was talking with someone last year who had a gripe about a music organizer program. Suppose you create some playlists and then decide, "Oh, nevermind, I don't like this playlist." You highlight the playlist and click "Delete". You then get a dialog box that asks, "Do you want to move the songs in this playlist to the Recycle Bin?" "Well, no...

Just change that 15 to a 1

September 5, 2006 Sep 5, 2006 09/5/06
Raymond Chen
It would be nice and easy to just change that 15 to a 1. If only it were that simple. In the case described in that article, it's not that a single operation was attempted fifteen times in a loop. Rather, the fifteen operations were scattered all over the program. Suppose, for example, that the network operation was "Get the attributes ...

I think I've just broken the internet

September 4, 2006 Sep 4, 2006 09/4/06
Raymond Chen
On our internal blogging discussion mailing list, John Kennedy explained that he was trying to set up a video blog but somehow he ended up including the entire video into his RSS feed. He managed to fix the problem, but apologized: If the internet is broken, it was my fault. That was funny enough, but Keith Combs chimed in with some ...

If you work at a company, it's not your computer any more

August 30, 2006 Aug 30, 2006 08/30/06
Raymond Chen
My posting a while back on solving one problem by creating a bigger problem was written from the standpoint of an IT department doing something like tweaking a logon script. I even mentioned that context partway through but clearly didn't highlight it clearly enough. So say you're an IT department and somebody says, "Oh, just install this ...

As I recall, Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution

August 29, 2006 Aug 29, 2006 08/29/06
Raymond Chen
I remember reading a news report on a court case wherein the defendant claimed protection under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. An interesting angle, especially since the case was being tried in Germany under German law. I may be wrong, but it is my impression that Germany did not ratify the United States Constitution. ...

We know it's insecure, but we want to do it anyway

August 25, 2006 Aug 25, 2006 08/25/06
Raymond Chen
I remember a question from somebody who asked, paraphrasing: We're writing a secure screen saver that the user can interact with. We're going to present the user with various types of information, and if they click on a hot link, we want to launch a web page on their desktop once the user unlocks the workstation. We know it's insecure, but we...