Showing tag results for Other

Jan 6, 2005
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A rant against flow control macros

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I try not to rant, but it happens sometimes. This time, I'm ranting on purpose: to complain about macro-izing flow control. No two people use the same macros, and when you see code that uses them you have to go dig through header files to figure out what they do. This is particularly gruesome when you're trying to debug a problem with some cod...

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Dec 28, 2004
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Computing the size of a directory is more than just adding file sizes

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One might think that computing the size of a directory would be a simple matter of adding up the sizes of all the files in it. Oh if it were only that simple. There are many things that make computing the size of a directory difficult, some of which even throw into doubt the even existence of the concept "size of a directory". Reparse point...

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Dec 27, 2004
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You can create an infinitely recursive directory tree

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It is possible to create an infinitely recursive directory tree. This throws many recursive directory-traversal functions into disarray. Here's how you do it. (Note: Requires NTFS.) Create a directory in the root of your C: drive, call it C:\C, for lack of a more creative name. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. click on the Disk Manage...

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Dec 21, 2004
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Sometimes people don’t like it when you enforce a standard

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Your average computer user wouldn't recognize a standards document if they were hit in the face with it. I'm reminded of a beta bug report back in 1996 regarding how Outlook Express (then called "Microsoft Internet Mail and News") handled percent signs in email addresses (I think). The way Outlook Express did it was standards-conformant, and I s...

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Dec 17, 2004
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Excellent blog about Windows and Unicode

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Michael Kaplan has probably forgotten more about Unicode than most people know. He knows about the mysterious placement of the Won character in the Korean character set, and the same for the Japanese Yen character, what the invariant locale is, why Korean text sorts strangely if you pass the NORM_IGNORENONSPACE flag, and other strange and wond...

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Dec 16, 2004
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How to get more hits on Google than even Steve Ballmer

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Ein deutscher Blogger namens Tony schrieb dass Robert Scoble is gaining on Steve Ballmer. Mit anderen Worten, dass eine Google-Suche nach "Robert Scoble" ungefähr 172.000 Seiten findet, während eine Google-Suche nach "Steve Ballmer" ungefähr 302.000 Seiten zeigt. Er fragte, ob jemand einen anderen Microsoft-Angestellten finden kann...

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Dec 3, 2004
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Why are documents printed out of order when you multiselect and choose “Print”?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you select say five files and then right-click them and choose "Print", they tend to print in a random order. Why is that? The shell invokes the Print verb on each file in turn, and depending on how the program responsible for printing the document is registered, one of several things can happen. These three ways of registering print act...

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Nov 29, 2004
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Why doesn’t the RunAs program accept a password on the command line?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The RunAs program demands that you type the password manually. Why doesn't it accept a password on the command line? This was a conscious decision. If it were possible to pass the password on the command line, people would start embedding passwords into batch files and logon scripts, which is laughably insecure. In other words, the feature is ...

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