Bug of the Moment

Bug of the Moment episode 155

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:54:52 GMT

Random assortment 4

I was always puzzled by why PKZIP in MS-DOS used forward slashes instead of backslashes when displaying paths on screen. I didn’t realise that officially forward slashes are allowed (DOS and Windows swing both ways), although just you try actually using them anywhere. What I also did not realise is that Web addresses also allow backslashes:

Often when Pidgin starts, this happens:

I don’t know why MSN gives me so much grief in Pidgin; blame Microsoft? (Abort/Retry/Cancel)

A strange bug I’ve been seeing in Winamp 5 for some time now – most of the standard file formats supported by Winamp don’t actually show up in the file chooser dialog box:

.mid files do show up, but tracker formats, .wav and .mp3 do not. What I do have installed is AdPlug, an OPL2 emulator plugin, but there is absolutely no way to get it to play basic MIDI files, such as old video game music that needs to be heard on the original synth chip.

Some stupid online test has no idea what to make of progress:

Nothing more homely and fitting, with a virtual DOS, than a virtual DOS crash:

Someone’s site code chokes over the use of animated GIFs for product screenshots, resulting in a ridiculously scrambled image until you view the full-size image:

Finally, a little bit of irony, from Firefox and from Firebug:

Bug of the Moment episode 154

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:59:08 GMT

I am not a shortcut

There are several really annoying things about having a ~~roaming profile~~ profile-with-folder-redirection on a Windows domain, one of the least well thought through things I have ever seen from Microsoft.

The Recycle Bin does nothing. Once a file is gone, it’s gone. (There’s Volume Shadow Copy, if you want to wait ten minutes for the Previous Versions tab to unfreeze and show anything, assuming the file was last saved before the most recent checkpoint.) Worse, Microsoft’s delete confirmation dialog is painfully unintelligent: unlike Apple’s, it either prompts for every deletion, or none, regardless of whether the item is going to go into the Recycle Bin or be deleted immediately. Mac OS only prompts you when the deletion will be instantaneous and fatal, trusting the user to have enough intelligence to know what the Trash is there for.

Your standard profile folders don’t exist at the command line. Windows has junction points now, so why isn’t C:\Documents and Settings\Daniel\Desktop a shortcut or, better, junction point for the folder on the server that contains my real desktop? A shortcut is actually no use as cmd.exe cannot do network paths anyway. For that matter, cmd.exe cannot cd into shortcuts to directories, nor are shorcuts valid in paths in graphical applications, unlike both Linux and Mac OS. For certain irritating software like Famatech Radmin that refuses to implement the Shell Namespace Extensions (not even locally) you have to manually type in the network share path to the users folder on the server and then navigate to your desktop that way. The more I spend time around Windows, the more I realise how much sense the UNIX model makes, in this case, the ability to make a folder path point anywhere and to anything.

And my favourite: Horrible icon badges on all my files. Here’s a folder on my computer with a shortcut in:

Here is another. This time, one of the items has a wobbly badge on it that Microsoft failed to extend up to Tiles size:

Why has only one folder got the wobbly badge? Who knows – typically erratic behaviour. I couldn’t prove my point using the above folders for this precise reason: sometimes, the wobbly badge won’t draw when it should, although I’d really prefer it not draw anywhere at all. So here is a third folder:

Now, tell me which file is a shortcut and which is not? Hint: the tooltip should help you. Yes, Microsoft’s short-sighted design makes it impossible to tell which files are shorcuts. It also means that when I have a folder full of icons I’ve designed, I can’t examine them properly due to them all having wobbly badges covering my design over. For this reason, all my icons live in C:\Documents and Settings\Daniel\Icons to ensure that Offline Files won’t sticker them all. (It also means that they won’t be backed up…)

There are also visual bugs with the wobbly badges when used in thumbnails mode:

All in all, I would almost kill to get these horrible badges off all my files. They’re an eyesore, they’re faulty, they’re erratic and they interfere with using Explorer. If this were a Macintosh, I would simply open System or System Resources and paint out the contents of the icon so that it draws nothing, but I cannot for the life of me find the DLL responsible so that I can fix it, not that it would help as Windows would only come along later and put back the original copy.

I just noticed that the shortcut badge is also not redrawn for Tiles mode but using Tweak UI it’s possible to select a new shortcut badge or redraw them entirely. I wish the same was true for the Offline Files badge.

Addendum

Like anything, the answer is easy to find if you know the precise terminology to use. Windows doesn’t have icon badges, it has icon overlays; according to Remove ICON Overlay for Offline Files, the offending Registry key is “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\Offline Files”.

On Telcontar.net, I’ve always used the <meta name="keywords" ...> tag to specify synonyms for key terms on the page to help people find my pages even if they used different terminology. For example, on the 32-bit Windows cursor images page, my meta keywords list includes “cursor shadow, pointer shadow, drop shadow, mouse shadow, mouse cursor…” because of the variety of ways to describe the drop shadow displayed under the mouse cursor. Sadly, it seems that Web page metadata is now ignored by search engines due to people abusing it to rack up hits. Any good thing will be ruined by abuse.

Bug of the Moment episode 153

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:33:31 GMT

My first Vista screenshot, part of the so far unseen collection from David Joffe (of Microsoft Crash Gallery fame). It does date back to May 2007, but Vista being current I thought I’d share it here anyway, as it’s just so strange. Do you notice anything wrong with this picture? (Aside from David saving it as a JPEG!)

I’ve already commented on Apple’s dodgy efforts to create a swanky window manager, such as disappearing windows and confusion as to what state the screen is meant to be in. However, it’s pretty rare for a Mac to be confused as to what a window actually looks like, with this bizarre exception.

In this case, Winamp is not a single window, but an associated collection of windows. I don’t know precisely what’s troubling Vista, but it’s unable to get a normal picture of the window associated with the taskbar button. However, what it has ended up with, extraordinarily, is the Winamp classic skin. If you look closely, the instance of Winamp in the thumbnail shows the same song and song position as the modern skin, so it’s running live.

What sort of combination of nonsense could produce a phenomenon like this? How could, and why would Winamp be running two skin engines at the same time, and what’s stopping Vista just picking a window and drawing a thumbnail of it?

I asked David if he could replicate it, and send a PNG image, but he replied, “Unfortunately not :/ I finally deleted that piece of cr-p Vista off my laptop and reinstalled XP!” Too bad; I do have the latest Winamp, but I’m still using Windows 2000 and XP.

Bug of the Moment episode 152

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:21:06 GMT

My attention was recently drawn to the fact that a document I produced in Word 2003, was not opening nicely in Word 2007:

I don’t have any reason to believe that the document is actually corrupted. This is how Word 2003 sees the file:

Note the page count, and the mangled buttons that don’t scale with a narrower scroll bar size:

The document is one page long, but a design flaw in Word forces a blank page after any table that finishes at the bottom of the page. (This sort of nonsense is why in the past I did any document creation in Publisher: it did what it was told.)

This is how it renders in Word 2007:

At the top of the picture you might notice something odd about the page count. Somewhere along the line, the document has grown another 118 pages. OK, no, make that another 1 358 pages:

The document seems to be of infinite length:

Attempting to scroll this now monstrous 3 666-page document caused Word to hang. When a graphical program in Windows XP hangs – that is, stops responding to messages – Windows tasks Explorer with the bizarre responsibility of replicating the program. It’s no secret that Windows doesn't have a real window manager, so a hung program’s window is going to get stuck on the screen and be unable to be moved or minimised, and the close button will get ignored.

To get around this, Explorer takes a screenshot of the area of the screen where the affected window is located (no matter what's drawn in that rect), hides the real window, and puts its new replica window in its place, with a new title bar that includes the magic phrase “Not Responding”. (Someone on The Daily WTF pointed this out to me; you can verify it using the window selector in Process Explorer or Winspector.)

Since the abominable new window appearance of Office 2007 – confusingly designed to resemble an inactive Mac OS X window – is nothing to do with Windows itself, Explorer doesn’t have any idea how to handle the situation:

Bug of the Moment episode 151

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:27:57 GMT

What can I say? Give a man a shiny Macintosh and he still produces work that looks like it came from Windows Paint: