“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] /boston/2003/08/15/thumb.p1010013.jpg

[2] /boston/2003/08/15/p1010013.jpg

[3] /boston/2003/08/15/thumb.p1010015.jpg

[4] /boston/2003/08/15/p1010015.jpg

[5] http://www.asperwood.net/

[6] /boston/2003/08/15/thumb.p1010017.jpg

[7] /boston/2003/08/15/p1010017.jpg

[8] /boston/2003/08/15/thumb.p1010032.jpg

[9] /boston/2003/08/15/p1010032.jpg

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