The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

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.

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