* * * * *
                                        
                 “It's mapped. I'm just not showing it to you.”
                                        
[Pool shots I] [1] [2] [Pool shots II] [3] [4] Kelly [5] 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 (Universal Serial Bus) 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 (Small Computer
Storage Interface) device, oddly enough).

[Pool shots III] [6] [7] [Pool shots IV] [8] [9] 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.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/thumb.p1010013.jpg
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/p1010013.jpg
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/thumb.p1010015.jpg
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/p1010015.jpg
[5] http://www.asperwood.net/
[6] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/thumb.p1010017.jpg
[7] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/p1010017.jpg
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/thumb.p1010032.jpg
[9] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/08/15/p1010032.jpg

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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