The Old New Thing

The Acorn Wand, key to a magical puzzle hunt

October 31, 2007 Oct 31, 2007 10/31/07

Raymond Chen

Puzzle hunts are a popular pastime at Microsoft. For the Microsoft Intern Puzzleday 2007, the puzzle design team decided upon a Harry Potter theme. Competitors ("students") formed teams ("study groups") as they attended classes at the Hogwarts campus at Microsoft. Of course, since this is Harry Potter, you need a magic wand, so the puzzle ...

It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Local execution

October 31, 2007 Oct 31, 2007 10/31/07

Raymond Chen

The security response team gets all sorts of reports, and a good number of them are from people who just get excited that they were able to do something unusual, even if it isn't a security vulnerability. Attached please find a security exploit in the ABC ActiveX control. If you save this Web page to a file and double-click it, it <does ...

Email tips from Adam Phillabaum

October 30, 2007 Oct 30, 2007 10/30/07

Raymond Chen

Adam Phillabaum of Doing Boeing (who kept the name even though he left Boeing and now works for PayScale) has his own tips for writing email. Recommended reading...

You can't change it, but you can hide it and add something that looks like it

October 30, 2007 Oct 30, 2007 10/30/07

Raymond Chen

Today we have another case of "Now you have two problems." The corporate customer already solved their problem halfway and needed help on the other half. The impossible half. We want to change the Add or Remove Programs icon in the Windows XP control panel so it runs our custom install management program instead of running the one built ...

Why doesn't Explorer show recursive directory size as an optional column?

October 29, 2007 Oct 29, 2007 10/29/07

Raymond Chen

"Why start up another program to see folder sizes, when they should just be right there, in Explorer, all the time?" The same reason \\ does not autocomplete to all the computers on the network: Because it would destroy corporate networks. Showing folder sizes "all the time" means that when you open, say, the root of a large server, ...

The King County Council race gets even stranger

October 26, 2007 Oct 26, 2007 10/26/07

Raymond Chen

I told you it was going to get weird. In the month since my last report, there have been a few developments in the county council race between an accused drunk (the incumbent) and a fringe candidate (the challenger). The Seattle Times tries to summarize the state of the race with a series of articles...

If you pass enough random numbers, eventually one of them will look valid

October 26, 2007 Oct 26, 2007 10/26/07

Raymond Chen

One customer traced a problem they were having to the way they were calling a function similar in spirit to this one: This function takes a clipboard format and looks for it on the clipboard. If found, it returns a copy of the data. Looks great, huh? The problem is that the customer would sometimes call the function as . The clipboard...

What's the deal with the EM_SETHILITE message?

October 25, 2007 Oct 25, 2007 10/25/07

Raymond Chen

If you look up the documentation on the and messages, they just say "not implemented". What's going on here? The and messages were added back in 2002 for the breadcrumb bar to use. Back in those days, the breadcrumb bar wasn't what you see in Windows Vista today, a series of buttons with drop-down arrows, each representing a level in the ...

What's the difference between LVM_HITTEST and LVM_INSERTMARKHITTEST?

October 24, 2007 Oct 24, 2007 10/24/07

Raymond Chen

One customer was confused by the two list view hit-test messages and . What is the difference between the two? The message tries to find the item the point is over. The message tries to find the item the point is next to. For example, suppose you have two 32×32 items, item zero at (0, 0) and item one at (0, 32). You use...

Superstition: Why is GetFileAttributes the way old-timers test file existence?

October 23, 2007 Oct 23, 2007 10/23/07

Raymond Chen

If you ask an old-timer how to test for file existence, they'll say, "Use ." This is still probably the quickest way to test for file existence, since it requires only a single call. Other methods such as or require a separate or call, which triggers another network round-trip, which adds to the cost. But back in the old days, the ...