Showing results for November 2003 - The Old New Thing

(Geek talk resumes on Monday.) The longstanding tradition of Norwegians telling Swedish jokes and vice versa, was recently refueled by a border story. A Norwegian man called Sweden on his mobile phone to tell them they had a forest fire. Not only did the firefighters not know about the blaze, they didn't recognize the name of the place on fire. ...

(It's a holiday in the States today and tomorrow, so I'm not going to talk about geek stuff. That'll resume on Monday.) If you pay a visit to Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service, you will find a wide array of online German learning materials, such as the daily news in slowly- and clearly-enunciated German (including tra...

The WM_GETDLCODE message lets you influence the behavior of the dialog manager. A previous entry on using WM_GETDLGCODE described the flag which controls whether edit control content is auto-selected when focus changes. I was going to write a bit about the other flags, but it turns out that Knowledge Base Article 83302 already covers this, so I...

Once upon a time, Windows was 16-bit. Thus begins the story of where the letters came from.

The command prompt is a drop target: Dropping a file onto it inserts the filename.

Here's a little script that opens the Run dialog. You can save it as "Run.js" and double-click it. The advantage of this approach over various others people have come up with is that this one is actually documented. (And therefore is less likely to break in the next version of the operating system.)

Windows XP added a new feature called Fast User Switching which lets you switch between users without having to log off. But this feature is disabled if your computer is joined to a domain. Why? There were several reasons, none of them individually insurmountable, but they added up to quite a lot of work for something IT administrators weren't ev...

In the root of every drive is a folder called "System Volume Information". If your drive is NTFS, the permissions on the folder are set so not even administrators can get in there. What's the big secret? The folder contains information that casual interference could cause problems with proper system functioning. Here are some of the things kept...

Answer: Your wallet is empty. Seriously, there is no way you bought an Itanium by mistake. They are expensive machines: The entry-level workstation available from HP (who co-developed the Itanium with Intel) goes for over $3000 and the entry-level server is over $13,000. And in addition to paying for the computer itself, you probably had to instal...

If you want to use the "Go To" or "Status Bar" options, you have to turn off word warp first. (Word wrap messes with line breaks.)