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Random weirdness page 5


After rebooting, BBEdit’s list of previous searches and replaces was again wiped. I hit cmd-opt-= (replace all) on a document before realising my search parameters were reset. I got this:

But 271 what? The document contained 3901 bytes, of 591 words on 96 lines. No changes were actually made (since in effect it replaced every instance of nothing with nothing) but where did it get a figure of 271 from? Personally I wish these dialogs would be modeless to begin with.

For a while, I decided to try out Outlook Express 5’s abilities at handling IMAP. In the end I abandoned using it for regular mail access again since it was causing the kernel to leak a lot of memory. But what was more annoying is how it handles creating folders. At first, they don’t appear, and refreshing the folder list causes your inbox to appear to duplicate:

The effect is mostly harmless (rather like the human race) but the side effect is that it flushes the cache of the inbox, so all mail must be downloaded from the server again. And it is quite easily repeatable:

The following situation really puzzles me. After installing a the drivers for an HP all-in-one copier/scanner/printer, this item was also placed on the desktop:

At least, I assume it was. Thanks to the fact that Windows supports weird and impenetrable shortcuts, there was no easy way to see where it was pointing without a hex editor. (With the possible exception of a script I found that reveals shortcut targets with more of the ease of cmd-R on the Macintosh.)

Talking about Macintosh, we always used to have a nice Startup Items folder where we could list items to be run on boot. Now, we have a screwy set-up where you have no undo if you accidentally delete something. And if you try creating an entry for a Windows share, it tends to come back scrambled:

The following is quite curious. MSN Messenger uses PNG images for its display pictures; it would seem as though the following image has a corrupted alpha channel:

Except that what would Microsoft ever be doing creating images with alpha channels? Did gaim add and corrupt a spurious alpha channel itself?

My Psion is set to default to UK English when installing software from a multilingual install package. When I installed nSISUtil, it’s own version of the story was that my machine was set to French (!):

Reverting it to English caused all installation attempts to complain that the install package was corrupt until I finally went back to nSISUtil, set my language back to French and then set it to English via the operating system. This was after having already reset the machine…

The following example is especially peculiar. It is a series of builds of HTTP Werkzeug. The third file has the older icon and can be taken to be a control:

Notice the subtle colour variations in the others? The icon has to be converted from Mac to Windows colours, but REALbasic 3’s palette conversion is effectively non-deterministic and can require multiple compile attempts until it coughs up an icon with the correct colours.

Finally, notice the stray cursor in this Windows Update window?