The Old New Thing

The Phantom Bug: Why doesn't MessageBox work from my WM_NCDESTROY handler?

May 20, 2008 May 20, 2008 05/20/08

Raymond Chen

Adrian McCarthy ran into a problem where didn't work when called from a handler. You already know how to solve this; you just have to connect the dots. See if you can do it on your own before the answer is revealed...

Bacalhau: The unofficial national dish of Portugal, and don't pass the salt

May 19, 2008 May 19, 2008 05/19/08

Raymond Chen

The unofficial national dish of Portugal is bacalhau, or dried salted cod. The story goes that there is a different bacalhau recipe for every day of the year. There are those who believes that the stories provide a gross underestimate. Bacalhau naturally dates back to the days before refrigeration: Drying and salting served to preserve the ...

Why is the function SHStripMneumonic misspelled?

May 19, 2008 May 19, 2008 05/19/08

Raymond Chen

If you wander through MSDN, you may stumble across the function . The correct spelling is mnemonic. Why is the function name misspelled? "It was like that when I got here." The function was originally written for internal use only, and the person who wrote the function spelled the word incorrectly. Still, since it was an internal function, ...

I assume it's cracking good, though I'm not the expert

May 16, 2008 May 16, 2008 05/16/08

Raymond Chen

I have many friends who are enamored of all things cheese, enjoying the subtle nuttiness of a fribble-frabble cheese or the elastic grassiness of an imported Rückwärtspilzhaus. To me, on the other hand, they all just taste like cheese. My friends would probably enjoy this weekend's Seattle Cheese Festival. (Word on the street is ...

If users can shut down the machine, it's not a security hole if they can shut down the machine

May 16, 2008 May 16, 2008 05/16/08

Raymond Chen

One great way to come up with a dubious security vulnerability is to take something completely innocuous and wrap it inside layer upon layer of obfuscation, and then you proclaim that the obfuscation is the vulnerability. Here's an example based on an actual dubious vulnerability report: Title: Native NT application can shut down computer ...

Selling your life for a quarter at a time

May 15, 2008 May 15, 2008 05/15/08

Raymond Chen

A year and a half ago, I stumbled across the essay Selling Your Life for a Quarter at a Time by Tim Barcz and found it quietly poignant. (Unfortunately, the spammers also found the essay and decided to fill it with garbage links. So much for poignant.) I tried to come up with a catchy tagline for this entry, but nothing worked. Coming up ...

Build a slide show out of search results

May 15, 2008 May 15, 2008 05/15/08

Raymond Chen

My colleague David Washington discovered how you can combine the Sidebar slide show gadget with search folders to end up with a slide show that is built out of search results. Pretty neat...

The dead desktop computer: From good, bad, and ugly back to dead

May 14, 2008 May 14, 2008 05/14/08

Raymond Chen

When last we left my dead desktop computer, it had returned to the world of the living with the assistance of the onboard video adapter. The screen was fuzzy because I was running my LCD monitor through the analog VGA cable. Performing an auto-adjust helped a little but it was still blurry. Still, it was within the realm of acceptability for...

Why always "Windows XP" and "Windows Vista" and not just "XP" and "Vista"?

May 14, 2008 May 14, 2008 05/14/08

Raymond Chen

When the Internet Explorer folks announced that they were going to call their next version of Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, many people responded to the awkward name by suggesting that it be shortened to Internet Explorer 7 XP and Internet Explorer ...

The Big Red Switch really was big and red

May 13, 2008 May 13, 2008 05/13/08

Raymond Chen

In this article on compatibility between the .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0, there is a passing mention of a setting nicknamed the "Big Red Switch". The power switch on the original IBM PC really was big and red. Well, orange-red. Here's a picture of the power switch on an IBM PC-AT. Decide for yourself what color it is. In ...