Random amusement

Or just things that escape my comprehension:

Yay "Start to Shut Down" mentality. :) Actually, Raymond Chen's blog has very interesting answers to many, many questions of this nature:

• Why doesn't the side-docked taskbar rotate its text?
• What's with the blank disappearing taskbar buttons?
• Why hasn't the timezone map been highlighted since Win95a?

It comes as highly recommended reading, especially for coders, even if you don't agree with him. (And I've been glued to it for the past two days. Sigh. :b)

"People will pay for what they want,
but not for what they need."
— Bill Watterson

The ad to the right came up on Google this morning. It almost speaks for itself. :)

Meanwhile...

I was playing around the other day, and managed to get a test program to do partial transparency in win98. I say "partial" because nothing underneath (Winamp, etc) updates! Argh@! I even tried using WS_EX_TRANSPARENT, but quite frankly it seems to be broken—yup, repaints go through my window, but they wind up on top of it and I don't get a chance to redraw...

Note that dragging the window basically works, and the even cooler part is (with slightly more effort) you could do blurring/refraction effects, if you wanted, not just transparency! The only remaining problems are a few glitches (my own controls drawing UNDER me? WTF?) and the damn redraws, and I'm not sure if I'll tackle it because it requires hacking the painting/graphics subsystem—for a single app! Whoops! I'm sure that could be shared into a DLL, though, so maybe someday, sigh. (Yay madCodeHook. It's fun stuff!)

Aaaanyway, enough toying with LJ. I'm off to find something else to do before someone IMs me and ruins my chance, hehehee. : )