On Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled, when you right-click a program and select Run as Administrator, the elevation prompt contains a particular snippet of warning text and a corresponding color-coding. Here are what the four colors mean. You can learn about the philosophy behind UAC in this Channel9 interview. Pre-emptive snarky...
The Improbable Research blog alerted me to a news report on the effect of dandruff and other cellular material on climate (full report).
The great thing about Marketing is that you get to use words and phrases that normal human beings never use. Here's an example from over a decade ago: XYZ fit the installed base of web browsers we were targeting, and worked well in an awareness space. I have no idea what an "awareness space" is. The punch line? This sentence came from a person ...
The function takes a pointer to a buffer () and a size (), and that size is the size of the buffer, in bytes. No really, that's what it is. The application compatibility folks found one popular game which wasn't quite sure what that parameter meant. The programmers must have thought it meant "The size of the version resources you want to loa...
Last summer, one of my colleagues thought it would be fun to have an informal "lunch chat with Raymond" as a special treat for our summer interns. One of the interns reacted to the invitation a bit unexpectedly, asking meekly, "Is he going to yell at us?"
There are two ways to make a vertical toolbar. You can use the common style, or you can use the extended style which is specific to the toolbar. Why are there two ways of doing the same thing? Because we messed up. Whoever created the extended style didn't realize that there was already a perfectly good way of specifying a vertical toolbar (na...
Scott Hanselman let me know he was going to be in town, and after some negotiation with the company PR department (who probably get the massive heebie-jeebies from this whole blog thing), I was able to accept his invitation to appear on his weekly podcast, HanselMinutes. We sat down for a little chat, and a few weeks later, I became Show #56. ...
Commenter Mike Petry asked via the Suggestion Box: Why can you dereference a COM interface pointer and pass it to a function with a Com interface reference. The call. The function called. I found some code written like this during a code review. It is wrong but it seems to work. You already know the answer to this question. You mere...
I'm out today to volunteer with grading student essays. The topic the students were given is one that I suggested: "You have been chosen to design a new elective for your school. Describe what it would be." In a few weeks, you'll learn what the students wrote, but my question for you is what you would propose in your essay. You can answer the ques...