Bug of the moment 2010-07-02

I discover a lot of bugs by accident. For example, I must have hit ctrl+R instead of Win+R during an installation of Autodesk DWG TrueView. To my surprise, I discovered that the extractor (looks to be WinRAR-based) uses the shortcut ctrl+R to switch all subsequent log entries to right-aligned text, and ctrl+L to return to left-aligned text:

Note that the extractor also offered a typically braindead default extract path of C:\Autodesk\…, because everyone wants to clutter up the root of their hard drives with temporary files. I wish I could simply enter %temp%\Autodesk\… but naturally it was not prepared to expand the path and dutifully created a folder named “%temp%”. I used C:\WINDOWS\Temp simply because it was quick and easy to type!

I also still don’t understand why Windows XP doesn’t empty the various temporary directories on boot and on login. I don't know about Mac OS X, but Mac OS 9 and earlier would transfer the contents of the Temporary Items folder into the Trash folder on boot, to keep it clean. I don’t know whether Vista or 7 are better in this respect, because finding years worth of detritus in the various temporary directories gets old after a while.

Posted 2nd July 2010 – Comments and questions?