Bug of the moment 2008-08-02

On Friday night, I downloaded a copy of the basic drivers for an HP Officejet 6210. The installer executable was not so much suitably misnamed, as hopelessly misnamed:

Some people then wrap the program in a folder with a useful name on it, but I simply rename the file itself to something meaningful:

(It beats me why HTTP doesn’t take spaces in addresses, since all you would have to do is write “GET HTTP/1.0 /this is/a path/with spaces in”. if_everyone_wrote_like_this-it_could_soon_become_quite_confusing-_more%20so%20if%20we%20had%20to%20put%20up%20with%20this%20all%20day%20long%21)

I ran the installer:

This confused me. I know that I titled the file “basic driver pack” but I didn’t think that this is what HP called it. They had a fancier name for the download. Yet, according to the window above, the package was named precisely as I’d named the file.

Wait a minute …

Yes seriously.

(Apologies for the default Windows colour scheme. Just be grateful I got rid of the Luna theme for that machine’s Administrator account. I still don’t know why desktop and Explorer settings (theme, colours, desktop background, folder settings etc) are lost when you switch between computers on folder-redirected Windows 2003 domain accounts; ah, I know: NTUSER.DAT isn’t stored on the server, which again goes against monolithic configuration.)

Posted 2nd August 2008 – Comments and questions?