The Old New Thing

Yet another experiment in motivating people to find and fix bugs

June 24, 2009 Jun 24, 2009 06/24/09

Raymond Chen

Everybody has probably heard about some project where management decided to motivate testers and programmers by rewarding testers for finding bugs and programmers for fixing them. In the absence of high ethical standards, this can devolve into the situation known to Dilbert fans as I'm gonna write me a new minivan. I experimented with this...

Why does a flashing taskbar result in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode?

June 22, 2009 Jun 22, 2009 06/22/09

Raymond Chen

Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn't know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so I went spelunking ...

Sure, I can get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages, but why do they keep streaming in?

June 17, 2009 Jun 17, 2009 06/17/09

Raymond Chen

I wrote some time ago that the window manager generates spurious messages in order to let programs know that the mouse has entered the window even if the reason was a window hierarchy reshuffle rather than a physical motion of the pointing device. But some people have noticed that that explanation fails to account for all the messages that...

Why does Explorer use the term KB instead of KiB?

June 11, 2009 Jun 11, 2009 06/11/09

Raymond Chen

Although the International Electronic Commission established the term kibibyte for 1024 bytes, with the abbreviation KiB, Windows Explorer continues to use the abbreviation KB. Why doesn't Explorer get with the program? Because nobody else is on the program either. If you look around you, you'll find that nobody (to within experimental ...

Foreign languages can be used as a secret code, but it’s not always a good secret code

June 10, 2009 Jun 10, 2009 06/10/09

Raymond Chen

Some years ago, I went out to dinner with a group of friends to a Chinese restaurant, and when the check was delivered to the table, one of my friends looked at it and handed it to me. "It appears to be written in some sort of secret code." It was written in Chinese. I pointed out that they probably chose the worst possible code in the ...

Mixed messages from the IT department regarding email safety

June 9, 2009 Jun 9, 2009 06/9/09

Raymond Chen

TipTalk wrote some time ago about the urban legend of the Reading Pane. In the conclusion, the article mentions the "read all standard mail in plain text" setting. And that reminded me of a story. Some time ago, the IT department sent out a message to all users on the subject of email safety. The gist of the message was that for increased ...

Why isn’t there a separate British English version of Windows?

June 8, 2009 Jun 8, 2009 06/8/09

Raymond Chen

My friend ::Wendy:: asks why there is an American English version of Windows but not a British English version. I am not the expert on this subject (Michael Kaplan might be a bit closer), but I can speculate on the reasons for this. This is all conjecture, so who knows how accurate it is. (Actually, most of what I write is conjecture; I ...

Bonus chatter about that virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes

June 5, 2009 Jun 5, 2009 06/5/09

Raymond Chen

Last year, I wrote about a virus that is responsible for the top six Explorer crashes, by a wide margin. I learned later how the authors of this XYZ Virus operate, and it happens to answer a question posted by commenter SteveL as to why these virus writers are so incompetent that they crash so much. First, the virus authors infect your ...

I’m sorry, you don’t have permission to know where this shortcut file should show up in the Explorer window

May 28, 2009 May 28, 2009 05/28/09

Raymond Chen

Commenter Gabe suggested that the shortcut file should contain a bit that indicates whether the target of the shortcut is a folder, so that shortcuts to folders can sort with real folders. "That would allow them to sort properly without doing any additional work beyond that required to see its icon." (Commenter Josh agreed that "The ...