The Old New Thing

Why does icon text get a solid background if drop shadows are disabled?

July 8, 2004 Jul 8, 2004 07/8/04

Raymond Chen

A commenter asks why icon label have "those ugly color boxes" when there is a background image. The answer: Because the alternative would be worse. Imagine if there were no solid background between the text and the background image. You would end up with text against an unpredictable background, which doesn't help readability. Take...

Differences between managers and programmers, part 2

July 7, 2004 Jul 7, 2004 07/7/04

Raymond Chen

If you are attending a presentation, you can tell whether the person at the lectern is a manager or a programmer by looking at their PowerPoint presentation. If it's black-and-white, all-text, multimedia-free, and rarely has more than ten bullet points on a page, then the presenter is probably a programmer. If it's colorful, with ...

Differences between managers and programmers

July 6, 2004 Jul 6, 2004 07/6/04

Raymond Chen

If you find yourself in a meeting with a mix of managers and programmers, here's one way to tell the difference between them: Look at what they brough to the meeting. Did they bring a laptop computer? Score bonus points if the laptop computer is actually turned on during the meeting or if the laptop is special in some way (e.g., it ...

Being in upper management must damage certain portions of your brain

July 2, 2004 Jul 2, 2004 07/2/04

Raymond Chen

The air must be thinner the higher up the management chain you go, or maybe it just gives you more opportunities to look stupid. Like this message: From: <some upper manager> Subject: <some subject> I will try to keep this relatively brief as I know how busy everyone is. <... 4-page message follows...> If ...

You can already see the bug report that led to this dialog box

June 29, 2004 Jun 29, 2004 06/29/04

Raymond Chen

It's like stupid warning labels on consumer products: Once you read the warning label, you can already imagine the lawsuit that required the warning label to be written in the first place. Use that same imagination to interpret this Windows XP SP2 setup error message. [Dumb typo in title fixed 7:43am...

The suggestion box is now open

June 25, 2004 Jun 25, 2004 06/25/04

Raymond Chen

Please post suggestions for future topics in the suggestion box instead of posting off-topic comments. Note that the suggestion box is emptied and read periodically so don't be surprised if your suggestion vanishes.And now that there's a suggestion box, I'm going to prune off-topic comments more aggresively...

Tweaked comment policy

June 18, 2004 Jun 18, 2004 06/18/04

Raymond Chen

Along the navband on the left hand side is a link to the comment policy. The most significant change since its first release is that I introduced the two-week rule. As a general rule, comments posted more than two weeks after the article publication are eligible for summary deletion. It's great that you're all interested n stuff, but...

What are these directories called 0409 and 1033?

June 9, 2004 Jun 9, 2004 06/9/04

Raymond Chen

A reader asked, I was wondering why it's common for some Microsoft products to have a directory called "1033" within it's program directory installation location? What does it mean? This reader was probably from the United States, because 1033 is the locale identifier for "English (United States)", whose hexadecimal value is 0x0409...

Beware the hash reset attack

May 19, 2004 May 19, 2004 05/19/04

Raymond Chen

There are a variety of message digest algorithms out there, MD5 being a particularly popular one. These generate a "message digest" (essentially, a hash) so you can detect whether somebody has tampered with a file, the theory being that it's hard to tamper with a file without changing its hash. But make sure you record the file size as well...

When do you put … after a button or menu?

May 17, 2004 May 17, 2004 05/17/04

Raymond Chen

When do you put "..." after a button or menu? For example, some menus say "Save as..." and some buttons say "Customize...". What is the rule for dots? Many people believe that the rule for dots is "If it's going to display a dialog, then you need dots." This is a misapprehension. The rules are spelled out in the Windows User ...