The Old New Thing

Another celebrity knitter: Tracey Ullman

October 3, 2007 Oct 3, 2007 10/3/07
Raymond Chen
Tracey Ullman joins the roster of celebrity knitters with her book Knit 2 Together: Patterns and Stories for Serious Knitting Fun. (She also gets to add to the pile of books whose titles are of the form Catchy title: Long boring subtitle...

Don't assume the first person to run your program is an administrator

October 2, 2007 Oct 2, 2007 10/2/07
Raymond Chen
One "optimization" I've seen from some programs is to defer a bunch of system configuration work to the first time the program is run or the first time a feature is requested instead of doing it at install time. The problem with this is that the first person to run your program is not guaranteed to be an administrator. For example, there is ...

Suggestion Box 3, short answers (part 1 of who knows how many)

October 1, 2007 Oct 1, 2007 10/1/07
Raymond Chen
Some suggestion box topics turn into daily entries. Others deserve just a sentence or two. Here are the short answers. Can you shed some light on RPC_E_CANTCALLOUT_ININPUTSYNCCALL? This one is kind of bizarre, because the person who asked the question linked to the answer! What form do application hacks usually ...

2007 Museum Day, courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine

September 27, 2007 Sep 27, 2007 09/27/07
Raymond Chen
It's the end of September, which means that once again, it's time for Smithsonian Magazine's annual Museum Day, so search for a participating museum near you and get your free admission card. One of the participating museums is the Museum of History & Industry, known to locals by its initials, MOHAI. Whenever I go past the museum ...

Why did the shortcut template change in Windows Vista?

September 27, 2007 Sep 27, 2007 09/27/07
Raymond Chen
Since Windows 95, when you right-dragged an item and selected "Create Shortcut", you got "Shortcut to X". But in Windows Vista, the name is now "X - Shortcut". Why is that? Two reasons. The first reason is globalization. The template "Shortcut to X" made X the object of a preposition. In some languages, this may ...

The first day at Microsoft: A fender-bender

September 26, 2007 Sep 26, 2007 09/26/07
Raymond Chen
This is the first of what might be a series of stories on the subject, So what happened on your first day at Microsoft? Some facts may have been altered to preserve the anonymity of the subject, but the essense is true. Our first storyteller is "Employee X": At the end of my first day, I back out of my parking space and accidentally ...

Microspeak: Going forward

September 25, 2007 Sep 25, 2007 09/25/07
Raymond Chen
The jargon phrase going forward has largely replaced the more mundane equivalent from now on. It appears that I'm not the only person who is bothered by this phrase. Sample usages: Notice that the phrase going forward usually adds little to the sentence. You can delete it from all of the sentences above and nobody would notice a difference...