Friday, August 15, 2003
“It's mapped. I'm just not showing it to you.”
Kelly and I found an interesting bug in Windows XP tonight (“Oh no! Not a bug in WinXP? Say it ain't so!”)
I had taken a few photographs tonight and Kelly was attempting to copy them from my camera to his computer. Normally, you just hook the camera up to the computer via a USB cable, which then appears as a storage drive to the system and you use the normal system to copy the images off (under Linux, the camera appears as a removable SCSI device, oddly enough).
When I hooked my camera up, it didn't show up on Kelly's Windows XP system. We knew the system recognized the camera since each time I hooked it up, Windows would make one sound, and when I disconnected the camera, Widows XP would make a different sound, so something was happening.
But we couldn't see it.
Some poking around, and it seems that Windows XP has a minor glitch
(“you don't say?”)—it will happily map a physical device (like my
digital camera) and a logical device (like a network share) to the same
drive letter (say, for example, F:
) and only the logical device
will be visible to the user.
Kelly remapped the logical device (his network share) to a different drive letter, and lo! We were able to access the camera.
And Windows XP is supposed to be the pinacle of Microsoft operating systems?
Scary.