The Old New Thing

When you ask somebody to take a look, you need to tell them what you want them to find

February 19, 2008 Feb 19, 2008 02/19/08

Raymond Chen

Here's a message I received some years ago, paraphrased: From: X Subject: FW: Bug 161803: Program Q uses undocumented resource which we changed in Vista Raymond, can you take a look? ------- Original message ------- From: Y Subject: Bug 161803: Program Q uses undocumented resource which we changed in Vista It appears that ...

What's with all those spam ping-bots?

February 18, 2008 Feb 18, 2008 02/18/08

Raymond Chen

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?

February 18, 2008 Feb 18, 2008 02/18/08

Raymond Chen

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...

Joshua Roman groupies may have to set up their frequent flyer accounts

February 15, 2008 Feb 15, 2008 02/15/08

Raymond Chen

Cellist Joshua Roman has quite a dedicated following here in Seattle, but those Joshua Roman groupies may have to dust off their frequent flyer cards, because the young cellist is resigning his position at the end of the season in order to pursue a solo career. There has been quite a bit of turmoil at the Seattle Symphony in recent years. ...

There's more to switching stacks than just loading a new stack pointer

February 15, 2008 Feb 15, 2008 02/15/08

Raymond Chen

Sometimes people think they can switch stacks by just loading a new value into the register. This may seem to work but in fact it doesn't, because there is more to switching stacks than just loading a new value into . On the x86, the exception chain is threaded through the stack, and the exception dispatch code verifies that the exception ...

Bands of Valentine minstrels roaming campus

February 14, 2008 Feb 14, 2008 02/14/08

Raymond Chen

One of the minor Valentine's Day traditions at Microsoft is the charity fundraiser based on identifying targets and embarrassing them in front of all their colleagues. In exchange for a charitable donation to the American Heart Association (get it?) an a cappella group will travel to an office or conference room of your designation (...

Follow-up: Politically motivated armed robber being sent back to the U.S.

February 13, 2008 Feb 13, 2008 02/13/08

Raymond Chen

The accused armed robber who is using political asylum as his defense has been re-apprehended and will not fight being returned to the United States. I guess he needs to update the "About Me" section of his blog...

Controlling which devices will wake the computer out of sleep

February 13, 2008 Feb 13, 2008 02/13/08

Raymond Chen

I haven't experienced this problem, but I know of people who have. They'll put their laptop into suspend or standby mode, and after a few seconds, the laptop will spontaneously wake itself up. Someone gave me this tip that might (might) help you figure out what is wrong. Open a command prompt and run the command powercfg -devicequery ...

Thank you, people sitting behind me, for explaining what the conductor is doing

February 12, 2008 Feb 12, 2008 02/12/08

Raymond Chen

I didn't get a chance to thank you after the concert, but I did want to express my appreciation for the running commentary you provided during the performance of last week's concert of Debussy, Schönberg and Brahms. Most people wait until the break between pieces, some may even dare to exchange information in whispers during the ...

If you ask whether I'll be at a conference, the answer is usually No

February 12, 2008 Feb 12, 2008 02/12/08

Raymond Chen

It seems that whenever there is a technology conference, there's a decent chance that somebody will ask me via email or a comment whether I'm going. The default answer to Are you going to this conference? is No. You may find it hard to believe, but going to conferences around the world is not part of my job. My job is to sit in front of a ...