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You can tell right away that Jan Miksovsky's flow|state is about user interface design. I've had the pleasure of working with Jan when he was at Microsoft. Whereas I focus on the mechanics of making a user interface happen, Jan looks at the bigger problems of design and interface architecture. For example, in this entry he considers the issue of...

I believe it was Marc Miller who related this story to me at the PDC. He was chatting with someone whose name badge identified him as an employee from a major high-end hotel chain. Marc joked, "Well, I think it's obvious which hotel you're staying at." "Oh no," the gentleman replied. "They won't let me stay there. Too expensive." [Raymond is ...

I was at a party in New York City earlier this year, and a conversation went like this: Person: What do you do? Me: I'm a computer programmer at Microsoft. Person: <viciously> I hate you. If Miss Manners didn't say so explicitly, I suspect she would nevertheless agree that snarling "I hate you" to somebody on first introduction is not ex...

One of the features new in the Windows XP Start menu is that "newly-installed" programs are highlighted. Before discussing the rules, a quick backgrounder on why the feature exists at all. Research revealed that one of the tasks people had trouble with was installing a new program and running it. The step that the "new programs" feature trie...

Is the /3GB switch supported on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition? It depends on what you mean by "supported". Unfortunately, the word has multiple meanings, and the intended meaning is not always obvious from context. One definition of "supported" is "The software makes a good-faith attempt to implement the functionality." For the purpose ...

When you install Windows on a machine that already has a copy of Windows, you get the option of performing a "clean" install (installing the operating system from scratch, ignoring the existing one) or an "upgrade" install (upgrading the existing operating system to the new one). And in real life, it turns out, surveys show that nobody upgrades t...

Whereas Larry started with a standard office layout and added a fancy-dancy desk chair, I have opted to modify the standard office layout by removing items. First, I got rid of the corner piece, which is a colossal waste of space due to its sheer size. All that space behind the keyboard and monitor serves only to collect dust. Out it goes. Inst...

One problem that I'm sure everybody has run into is what I'm going to call the "comp.unix.wizards" problem. People who have a problem with unix are looking for someone who can help them, and given the choice between a general questions group and a wizard group, they're obviously going to choose the wizards because that's where the smart people are!...

TechNet Magazine has picked me up as a columnist, and in their November/December 2005 issue they granted me the great honor of being on the back page. My opening salvo is an IT-ized version of one of my more popular early articles, but future issues will contain never-before-seen random musings on subjects of interest to IT professionals. And ...

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! (A...