The Old New Thing

How to get your laptop to resume from standby in under two seconds

February 22, 2007 Feb 22, 2007 02/22/07
Raymond Chen
One of my colleagues recently posted the story of the work he did to get laptops to resume quickly. The fun part was implementing the optimizations in the kernel. The not-fun part was finding all the drivers who did bad things and harassing their owners into fixing the bugs. One some laptops, he could get the resume time down to an ...

With what operations is LockWindowUpdate not meant to be used?

February 22, 2007 Feb 22, 2007 02/22/07
Raymond Chen
Okay, now that we know what operations is meant to be used with, we can look at various ways people misuse the function for things unrelated to dragging. People see the "the window you lock won't be able to redraw itself" behavior of and use it as a sort of lazy version of the message. Though sending the message really isn't that much ...

Mandarin Chinese gaining popularity in public schools

February 21, 2007 Feb 21, 2007 02/21/07
Raymond Chen
NPR reports that Mandarin Chinese is gaining popularity in public schools. (But please oh please don't take pronunciations lessons from the student at time code 3:25. His first tone was clearly a second—falling victim to the classic mistake of applying English tone shaping to Chinese syllables.) On the other hand, some of those ...

With what operations is LockWindowUpdate meant to be used?

February 21, 2007 Feb 21, 2007 02/21/07
Raymond Chen
As I noted earlier, the intended purpose of can be captured in one word: dragging. The simplest case of is used by the window manager when you move or resize a window and "Show window contents while dragging" is disabled. When you start the move/size operation, the window manager locks the entire desktop so it can draw the dotted-rectangle...

Crush Finder experiment gets off the ground at Princeton

February 20, 2007 Feb 20, 2007 02/20/07
Raymond Chen
And who says these college students aren't getting anything done? The Princeton University student government announced, among other things, a web site wherein students could list up to five other people they have crushes on, and if two people list each other, the web site puts the two potential lovebirds in touch with each other. The site ...

How is LockWindowUpdate meant to be used?

February 20, 2007 Feb 20, 2007 02/20/07
Raymond Chen
Now that we know how works, we can look at what it is for. Actually, the intended purpose of can be captured in one word: dragging. But we'll get to that a little later. The purpose of is to allow a program to temporarily take over the responsibility of drawing a window. Of course, in order to do this, you have to prevent the window ...

What does LockWindowUpdate do?

February 19, 2007 Feb 19, 2007 02/19/07
Raymond Chen
Poor misunderstood . This is the first in a series on , what it does, what it's for and (perhaps most important) what it's not for. What does is pretty simple. When a window is locked, all attempt to draw into it or its children fail. Instead of drawing, the window manager remembers which parts of the window the application tried to draw...

News flash: Professional athletes do it for the money

February 16, 2007 Feb 16, 2007 02/16/07
Raymond Chen
This weekend is NBA All-Star Weekend 2007, because just having a game isn't enough; you need to make it a weekend-long festival. Tyrus Thomas, invited to paricipate in the slam dunk contest, which comes with a top prize of $35,000, was quoted as saying I'm just going to go out there, get my check and call it a day. ... I'm just into the ...

Why don't I use any class libraries in my sample code?

February 16, 2007 Feb 16, 2007 02/16/07
Raymond Chen
As a general rule, I avoid using any class libraries in my sample code. This isn't because I'm opposed to class libraries, but rather because I don't want to narrow my audience to "people who use MFC" (to choose one popular class library). If I were to start using MFC for all of my samples, I'd probably lose all the people who don't use MFC...

There's not much luggage space, unless you dump the snow

February 15, 2007 Feb 15, 2007 02/15/07
Raymond Chen
Every year, Road and Track magazine reviews a strange vehicle in their April edition. Last year, it was the 1949 MG TC. But my favorite is their 2005 review of the Zamboni 500. [T]he Zamboni leaves the line with alacrity (revved to its 3000-rpm redline), rockets up to 9.7 mph and then stays at exactly that speed for the full 200-ft. ...