The Old New Thing

How do I delay the automatic logon process?

October 16, 2007 Oct 16, 2007 10/16/07
Raymond Chen
To solve some problems you need to place one foot outside the box. We have a number of kiosk machines that are networked wirelessly. Each machine is configured with automatic logon so that things return to normal after power is restored after an outage. The problem is that the wireless switch takes a long time to recover from a power failure...

Nicolas Bourbaki, perhaps the biggest inside joke in mathematics

October 15, 2007 Oct 15, 2007 10/15/07
Raymond Chen
If you've studied advanced mathematics, you've certainly read or at least heard about the books and papers of the great French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki, whose works in the 1930's set out a rigorous formulation of modern mathematics. Except he never actually existed. The name was created as a front for a group of renegade French ...

Why aren't shortcuts as easy as unix links?

October 15, 2007 Oct 15, 2007 10/15/07
Raymond Chen
Commenter dingo asks, "Why are shortcuts so hard to manipulate? Why can't they be as easy as unix links?" Well, if you want something like unix links, then you can just create a hard link. Creating them is about the same difficulty ( vs ) and manipulating them is the same since you don't actually manipulate a hard link. You just use it like a...

Not the best way to start out a form letter

October 12, 2007 Oct 12, 2007 10/12/07
Raymond Chen
Special Welcome Back Offer From the President of The Wall Street Journal Online Dear Do Not Edit These Fields, My name is Todd Larsen and I'm the president of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE... Pre-emptive snarky comment: I got a lame form letter from Microsoft once...

No good deed goes unpunished: Free code samples

October 12, 2007 Oct 12, 2007 10/12/07
Raymond Chen
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or free code either. Many years ago, I wrote some samples for the SDK as a favor, and at each major SDK release, I am reminded that no good deed goes unpunished. I can tell when a major SDK release is coming, because I get a piece of mail that goes something like this: Hi. You are on file as the owner ...

Unlikely excuses: A faulty microchip

October 11, 2007 Oct 11, 2007 10/11/07
Raymond Chen
Last year, a talking action figure was discovered to utter a curse word. A spokesperson for the store said that the problem might be a faulty microchip. Huh? What microchips fail by saying curse words? I mean, I can see the voice chip failing by generating static or chopping up the audio so as to become unintelligible, but what are the odds...

Whose idea was it to make Ctrl+Backspace delete the previous word?

October 11, 2007 Oct 11, 2007 10/11/07
Raymond Chen
James Manning mentioned in a footnote to a blog entry on PowerShell and WMI that he considers the Ctrl+Backspace shortcut key a Windows-ism. Where did this shortcut key come from? From a fan of the Brief editor. A few people in the early days of the Internet Explorer group used the Brief editor, which uses Ctrl+Backspace as the shortcut ...

Microspeak: Actionable

October 10, 2007 Oct 10, 2007 10/10/07
Raymond Chen
The word actionable has as its primary meaning "providing grounds for legal action", but in the world of management, it is the secondary meaning "capable of being acted upon" that is more common. Something that is actionable provides a specific demand for action. Although I'm not necessarily a big fan of the word itself, I definitely ...

Why does ICE16 complain about product names longer than 63 characters?

October 9, 2007 Oct 9, 2007 10/9/07
Raymond Chen
If you merge in the Internal Consistency Evaluators into your MSI package, you may run into error ICE16, complaining that the product name is longer than 63 characters. Why is this so bad? Well, it isn't really, at least not any more. The original Windows 95 version of the Add/Remove Programs control panel did limit product names to 63...