Stephen’s Scribble Pad

By Stephen 　http://smmeyer.com/scribble/?p=42

A funny thing happened today, but wait let me start at the beginning. Yesterday I was playing around with visual styles for Micro$oft Windoze XP and was toying with changing font sizes, trying to get bigger taskbar icons etc, i.e. generally trying to squeeze water out of a bloody stone. Lo and behold, without installing anything “foreign”, just using the plain old Display control panel to select new fonts, font sizes, icon sizes, DPI settings etc, “something” managed to break so that CSS styles wouldn’t render properly. This affected both my browsers FireFox 2 and internet exploiter 6. It was also noticeable in Windoze Help and Support Centre and various html based help files. Dreamweaver also couldn’t render it’s “syntax coloring” at all. Since I needed to spend my time productively working on a website built with CSS this was a bit of a problem as the code was hard to read and I couldn’t preview my work. What could have happened? I don’t know.

The problem sorted itself out with system restore, however that brilliant piece of Micro$oft technology managed to delete documents from two folders I created in root to store all my documents. The folders and sub-folders are still all there but they are vacant. Nobody is home. “Surely this is an optical illusion”, I thought, “maybe I just need to refresh my file browser”. Yeah right!

Micro$oft says that System Restore “enables administrators to restore their PCs, in the event of a problem, to a previous state without losing personal data files (such as Word documents, drawings, or e-mail) “. Perhaps they had fine print there about “oh it has to be in the original My Documents or else, blah blah blah…” , however since I am allowed to move the My Documents special folder to point to a folder of my choice that should have meant my files were safe, shouldn’t it?

I only moved the files there because we are all limited to file names of 256 characters and unfortunately that includes the full path which Micro$oft so cleverly reduced to 208 by wasting 48 characters (in my case) just to get to the root of the My Documents storage location, i.e. “C:/Documents and Settings/*******/My Documents/”. The fun starts when your sub-folders and the eventual file name take up the remaining 208 characters and THEN for example, Micro$oft Word creates a backup and slaps “Backup of ” to the front of the file name. Suddenly your file name becomes longer than 256 and the message “path could not be found” pops up when you try to open it. [mmm, shouldn't we just tell the users "we can't make a backup because the file name would be too long".... naaah, let them suffer]

I was only trying to defer the inevitable by moving everything into a folder named “C:/Documents/” (a mere 13 characters) and pointing to that as the My Documents folder, thereby saving 34 chars to allow for more descriptive folder / file names in my directory structure. Now, apparently I have sinned in doing so and the built-in retribution daemon has zapped my files.

DISCLAIMER: NO TRADEMARKS WERE SERIOUSLY HARMED DURING THE TYPING OF THIS POST