The Old New Thing

Now it looks like I speak far more languages than I actually do

October 27, 2006 Oct 27, 2006 10/27/06
Raymond Chen
The folks over at TechNet Magazine have done something really cool: They've started translating all their articles into Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. (But no Swedish.) You can change your language on the fly with the combo box in the corner. (MSDN Magazine is doing the same thing. It's ...

Let the dead computer scavenging commence!

October 26, 2006 Oct 26, 2006 10/26/06
Raymond Chen
Now that my old computer is up on bricks in the virtual front yard, the scavenging has begun. I got a piece of email from one of my colleagues saying, "Say, you aren't using that PC-2100 memory any more are you?" Why no, in fact, I wasn't. Christmas comes early. (He offered to buy the memory off of me, but since I had already written the old...

Non-resolution of the dead home desktop problem

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, I told of attempting to upgrade my home computer and failing. I ultimately gave up and returned the parts to the store, telling them that I thought the IDE controller on the motherboard was dead. They refunded my money after a false step where they refunded me more than I paid for the components in the first place! (I bought the ...

Offline mode silently prevents you from streaming media content

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Raymond Chen
Into Windows Media Player (version 9 if you're keeping score at home), I type the URL of an MP3 file (poor man's podcast) and get the error message "The download of the specified resource has failed." On this dialog there two buttons: Close and Web Help. Close closes the error dialog, of course. Web Help does nothing. Turns out the real...

Invalidating the null window redux

October 24, 2006 Oct 24, 2006 10/24/06
Raymond Chen
The people who work on the next generation of the window manager, known as the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), told me that their original plan was to get rid of the compatibility hack that says that invalidating the null window invalidates the entire desktop, but by an amazing coincidence, two days after I posted that article, they received a...

More tales of dead computers: My home desktop

October 24, 2006 Oct 24, 2006 10/24/06
Raymond Chen
Yes, I said that my next dead computer story would be the AlphaServer, but late-breaking news has forced me to shuffle the order a bit. My home computer has been circling the drain for several months. (The Northbridge fan would buzz and sometimes spin really slowly.) When the motherboard finally stopped powering on, I knew its time was up. ...

Quick and dirty Hallowe'en costume for physics geeks

October 23, 2006 Oct 23, 2006 10/23/06
Raymond Chen
When I was considering with some friends what I could be for Hallowe'en this year, one of the ideas that emerged in a fit of brainstorming was "Schrödinger's cat". To dress up as Schrödinger's cat, or more accurately, the Schrödinger cat thought experiment, you just need a cardboard box and a heavy marker. Use the marker to ...

Psychic debugging: Why doesn't my program show up when I call ShellExecute?

October 23, 2006 Oct 23, 2006 10/23/06
Raymond Chen
This question came in from a customer (paraphrased): If I run my program from the command prompt, it works great, but if I run it from my launcher via , it never appears. See how good your psychic powers are at solving this problem before I give you the second question that gives away the answer. Any luck? Here's a second question ...