Another round of the semi-annual link clearance. James Mickens section January 2014: This World of Ours I have seen a video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party,” and I have seen another video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party 2: Don’t Tell Mom,” and I hated both videos, but this did not stop me from directi...
Today's Little Program locates the × button in the corner of the window and displays a balloon tip pointing at it. We did this some time ago with the help of the message, which is new for Windows Vista. But what if you don't have that message available, say, because you're running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP or (gasp) Windows 9...
The rules of logic no longer apply when you cross the line.
Hacker News member citizenlow recalls the time I went over after hours to help out the Money team debug a nasty kernel issue. They were running into mysterious crashes during their stress testing and asked for my help in debugging it. I helped out other teams quite a bit, like writing a new version of Dr. Watson for the Windows 98 team or ...
Today is another example where the right thing to do is not to answer the customer's question but rather to solve the customer's problem. A customer liaison asked, "What do the registry keys X and Y do? We noticed that they are both read from and written to when you open a common file dialog. Just curious." I replied, "I'm curious as to your curi...
Each preschooler at my daughter's school was asked a few simple questions, and the answers were printed in the yearbook. Among other things, the preschoolers were asked to complete the sentence, "I like to play with (person)." This is the type of question that leads to tears and hurt feelings. Whatever. Their parents are going to be stuck with th...
Back in the old days, the "Run as administrator" menu option was placed on the extended menu. To get the extended menu, you hold the shift key when you right-click on the shortcut. In Windows 7, the "Run as administrator" option was moved to the primary menu, so you no longer need to hold the shift key to get it. Well, except that sometimes ...
Today's Little Program plays a sound when the Alt+Tab window appears and disappears. The program registers an accessibility event hook for the and events. The Start event fires when an Alt+Tab operation begins, and the End event fires when an Alt+Tab operation completes. As noted in the documentation, you can get spurious End events, so we k...
Feel free to stop using DDE. There was one customer who confessed that they were still using DDE, and they asked for help debugging a DDE problem. They found that sometimes, when their application was launched for DDE, it never received the message. Instead, the function returned . If launched from Explorer, the error message shown to the user ...
The great thing about open comments is that anybody can use them to introduce their favorite gripe as long as it shares at least four letters of the alphabet in common with the putative topic of the base article. xpclient "asks" why the Shut Down menu was removed from Task Manager. I put the word "asks" in quotation marks, because it's really a ...
