The Old New Thing

Things I've written that have amused other people - The Old New Thing

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 7

July 22, 2010 Jul 22, 2010 07/22/10
Raymond Chen
A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary would suggest. And I wasn't convinced that it was a good idea, sort of like asking for advice on how to catch a baseball in your teeth or pick ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 5

September 22, 2009 Sep 22, 2009 09/22/09
Raymond Chen
A question was sent to an internal discussion list for users of the XYZ tool: From: Q To: XYZ Users The GHI function in the JKL tool doesn't work for me. «description of problem deleted» I responded with this message: To: Q, XYZ Users The JKL tool is not part of XYZ. You should contact the author of the JKL tool. The ...

Things other people have written that have amused me, Episode 2

September 8, 2009 Sep 8, 2009 09/8/09
Raymond Chen
Somebody posted a time-saving tip and concluded with "You'll save yourself at least 5 minutes per year." I jokingly wrote back, "I already do XYZ which does this automatically, and besides, saving 5 minutes per year isn't much anyway. I spend that much time picking my nose." The response: "Yeah, but now you can do both nostrils...

Things other people have written that have amused me

July 23, 2008 Jul 23, 2008 07/23/08
Raymond Chen
I occasionally post things I've written that have amused other people, but today I'm going to share something Betsy Aoki wrote that amused me. On one of our internal mailing lists, somebody wondered why we don't use email spam filters to attack comment spam and trackback spam. My point was that the goal of email spam is very different from ...

You just have to accept that the file system can change

November 9, 2007 Nov 9, 2007 11/9/07
Raymond Chen
A customer who is writing some sort of code library wants to know how they should implement a function that determines whether a file exists. The usual way of doing this is by calling , but what they've found is that sometimes will report that a file exists, but when they get around to accessing the file, they get the error . The lesser ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 4

August 10, 2007 Aug 10, 2007 08/10/07
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues pointed out that my web site is listed in the references section of this whitepaper. It scares me that I'm being used as formal documentation because that is explicitly what this web site isn't. I wrote back, I really need to put a disclaimer on my web site. FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY Remember, this is a blog. ...

Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 3

March 6, 2007 Mar 6, 2007 03/6/07
Raymond Chen
In an internal discussion of the women blogger conference known as BlogHer, somebody asked, "Why isn't there a BlogHim?" I replied, Isn't that the plural of the word "blog" in Hebrew? This got quite an amused response from the Hebrew-speaking (or at least vaguely Hebrew-aware) members of the mailing list. Not bad for having studied Hebrew ...