The Old New Thing

The social skills of a thermonuclear device - The Old New Thing

You can read as well as I can, or maybe not

July 2, 2013 Jul 2, 2013 07/2/13
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, somebody will ask for help on a distribution list, and it turns into a really annoying case of hand-holding. From: X I'm using the XYZ toolset to do some document management, and I want the server to run a script whenever somebody tries to modify the master template, so it can run validations before accepting the update, ...

If you're asking somebody to help you, you want to make it easy for them, not harder

November 6, 2012 Nov 6, 2012 11/6/12
Raymond Chen
A customer liaison asked a question that went roughly like this: From: Liaison My customer is having a problem with the header file winfoo.h. The environment is Windows Vista German SP1 with Visual Studio 2008 Professional German SP1 and Windows SDK 6000.0.6000 German. When they try to include the file in their project, they get an error ...

The day I stole Joe Belfiore's mouse

September 18, 2012 Sep 18, 2012 09/18/12
Raymond Chen
He's now the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for Windows Phone, but back in the old days, Joe Belfiore was the head demo-monkey/cheerleader for the Windows 95 user interface design. A team-wide meeting was held to show off the new interface that they had developed. Wow look, we have a Start menu (though it wasn't known by that name yet), a ...

Management fallacy: If I send people email, then they will work harder

June 30, 2010 Jun 30, 2010 06/30/10
Raymond Chen
A project many years ago neared the conclusion of one of its project milestones. Things were getting down to the wire, and upper management was concerned that the project may not reach the milestone on schedule. To ensure success, they decided to send email. From: Senior Manager Subject: READ NOW!!!! More than one bug Please see the ...

The best way to prove somebody incompetent is to make up stuff and then point out that it's idiotic

June 23, 2010 Jun 23, 2010 06/23/10
Raymond Chen
One way to show that somebody is incompetent is to tell them that something they're doing is stupid, even when it's not what they're doing. Take for example this comment saying that it's stupid for copy and paste to use data objects which can allow code to execute. Um, we were talking about drag and drop, not copy and paste. And in fact, the ...

A decidedly Canadian response to the shambles that was the running portion of the modern pentathlon in Beijing

February 12, 2010 Feb 12, 2010 02/12/10
Raymond Chen
Living so close to the United States-Canada border means that there's a lot of friendly teasing of the many Canadians in our midst. It's a good thing Canadians as a whole seem to have a pretty good sense of humor about it. (Well, except the Quebecers. Those humorless grumps.) The final stage of the modern pentathlon is supposed to be a cross-...