The Old New Thing

The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and France?

Recently-unearthed documents reveal that back in the 1950's, France proposed merging with United Kingdom into a single country or at least joining the Commonwealth. Apparently, Churchill proposed a similar alliance in the 1940. It too was rejected. (Other coverage. There's a secret joke in that article: Check out the URL.) Apparently, the ...

Microspeak: Assorted babble

Here are some phrases I jotted down during a meeting. I don't even know what meeting it was. (They were jotted on some scratch paper.) These don't count so much as Microspeak as they do just assorted management babble. Sometimes I wish management would speak in plain English. But then the rest of us might realize that they don't know what ...

Nobody actually talks the way they do in training videos, do they?

I'm watching a training video and it starts off with patently unrealistic dialog. I'm struggling with X. Maybe you can help me out with a different perspective, or some information that I'm not aware of. An opening line like that pretty much demands bad acting. You can tell that this dialogue was designed by a committee. Nobody actually ...

Wait a second, I thought we stopped doing this back in 2003

It looks like Verizon's default DNS server for their customers is redirecting all failed DNS queries to their own site, calling the feature Advanced Web Search. Fortunately, they have instructions on how to opt out. The short version: Go to your DNS settings and change the last octet from .12 to .14...

There can be more than one (or zero): Converting a process to a window

A common question I see is "How do I find the window that corresponds to an ?" This question comes pre-loaded with the assumption that there is only one window that corresponds to an , which is true for only the most rudimentary of Win32 programs. Even a simple program like Notepad has more than one window with the same , as Spy quickly ...

What's with all those spam ping-bots?

Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What's the deal with those pingback-bots? It's all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking. Step one: Register a bunch of...

Why does Explorer show a + sign even if there are no child folders?

Mike Williams asked in the Suggestion Box why Explorer shows a + sign next to a folder even though it doesn't have any children. Mind you, this wasn't a suggestion; it was just a random question. I don't enjoy answering random questions about specific details of user interface elements since, as it turns out, I did not write every single user...