The Old New Thing

The real underground (and subway)

January 26, 2007 Jan 26, 2007 01/26/07
Raymond Chen
London's Transport Museum commissioned a gorgeous interactive map called The Real Underground which lets you see two of the many versions of the world-famous London Underground Map, as well as a street map, and switch among them to see how the two schematics agree with actual geography. I wasted way too much time playing with the Real ...

The /MAXMEM switch doesn't set the maximum amount of memory Windows will use

January 26, 2007 Jan 26, 2007 01/26/07
Raymond Chen
The Windows file has a switch whose name would lead you to believe that it sets the maximum amount of memory that Windows will use. But that's not what it does; the name is misleading. What the flag really does is set the maximum physical address that Windows will scan in search of RAM. If your physical memory map contains discontiguous ...

Not my finest hour: Where are my keys?

January 25, 2007 Jan 25, 2007 01/25/07
Raymond Chen
Tuesday was not my finest hour. Towards the end of the work day, I noticed that my coat was nowhere to be seen. I distinctly remember putting it on the back of my chair, but it's not there now. And where are my keys? After checking all the likely places (and several unlikely ones) in my office, I realized that we had gone out to lunch in my ...

Where did the Windows Vista wallpaper images come from?

January 25, 2007 Jan 25, 2007 01/25/07
Raymond Chen
Windows Vista needed some new wallpapers. Where to get them? Historically, they were purchased from a professional service, which is expensive since Microsoft would need worldwide rights to reproduce (not just use) the image, and not just for a few months, but for decades. Besides, there are a lot of good amateur photographers at Microsoft who...

Walking through packed snow and ice with a little more confidence

January 24, 2007 Jan 24, 2007 01/24/07
Raymond Chen
:: Wendy :: invited several her friends to join her in some tea two weeks ago, and during the conversation, LaCroix recommended a product called Yaktrax. It's a lightweight little mesh that straps to the bottom of your shoe and acts like miniature tire chains, but for your shoes. Two of my friends acted on this tip immediately ...

The undeletable Outlook folder, episode 2

January 24, 2007 Jan 24, 2007 01/24/07
Raymond Chen
I had another undeletable Outlook folder, and all my tricks for cajoling Outlook into letting me delete it failed. I already deleted all the items in it, emptied it of offline items, deleted all the failures from my Sync Issues folder, but still I couldn't delete the folder. But I came up with a new trick. I moved the folder out of its ...

Unexpected consequences of writing a book: Public appearances

January 23, 2007 Jan 23, 2007 01/23/07
Raymond Chen
One of the consequences of being a minor book author is that you can't be a private person any more; you're automatically a public personality. If somebody asks you for an interview, you can't just reject it as a matter of principle. You're now doing it not for yourself but in the service of your book. (Major authors might be able to get ...

The cost of continuously-visible affordances with dynamic states

January 22, 2007 Jan 22, 2007 01/22/07
Raymond Chen
Serge Wautier asks, "Why are the copy/cut/paste buttons not disabled when there's nothing to copy/cut/paste?", noting that the back/forward buttons do disable themselves when navigation is not possible in that direction. To get to this question, we'll first go back in time a bit to a world without toolbars. In those early days, these dynamic ...

2006 storm aftermath: A look back

January 19, 2007 Jan 19, 2007 01/19/07
Raymond Chen
It's been about a month since the windstorm that brought the Seattle area to a standstill. Puget Sound Energy has posted a recap of the storm, including what I consider to be a wonderful euphemism: We thank those customers who called to update us with valuable outage status information. Translation: "We would like to acknowledge all the ...