hosed by Bill

[cellio]

Bill is your friend. Trust Bill. Are you happy, citizen? (I'm sorry; it's been too long and I can't remember the whole thing now.)

So, more about my long sad tale of hardware woe some other time, maybe, but at the end of the day yesterday I had a fresh drive with a fresh OS and my old drive as a secondary drive, and I began the process of getting all the applications I care about loaded and configured. Ned (the system guy) had already installed Outlook for me, and he said my saved mail folders had been restored. (I specifically asked about precautions here before they touched my machine, and between a full backup and keeping the old drive this should have been safe.) Well, the file he had copied wasn't the right one; it was an old backup and I was only seeing the (unpopulated) default Outlook folders. Fine; we'd just copy the file again. Except neither of us knew where Outlook keeps that file. So after being told by Jack (the senior system guy) that it would be something.pst, we searched the drive for *.pst, using Windows search. (I didn't yet have Cygwin, and thus grep, installed.)

Nothing. So we manually browsed the disk looking for hints, and found nothing relevant. We told Jack there was a problem and he would have to restore from backup.

This afternoon, before doing that restoration, he came by. He searched, using Windows search, and using the exact same query. (In fact, search remembers your previous N queries and it was sitting there for him, as proof that we weren't making this up.) And bing, it found the file down under "documents and settings" somewhere. We copied the file, and all was fine with the world.

Except that Ned and I wanted to know why the f--- the search had worked for Jack today when it didn't work for us yesterday. We speculated about the backup having been run, but Jack had said he had not restored anything yet.

So we explored the land of "documents and settings" some more. (The target is d&s/user-name/local settings/application data/blah blah blah.) We noted that none of what we were looking at had been there yesterday. Eventually, I asked Ned "what does it mean that some of the directory icons are grayed out?". (Really "yellowed out"; the yellow folder icons were just a bit paler. Didn't even notice it at first.) It suddenly occurred to me that those might be "hidden files"; this morning, when restoring stuff to my machine, I had changed the Windows default of "do not show hidden files" to "show everything" for Windows Exlorer. We set it back to the default, and everything we were looking at disappeared. Repeated the search, and got yesterday's results.

In other words, Windows has a notion of "hidden files" (turned on by default) that even hides those files from search, and nothing in the search dialogue gives you any freakin' hint that this is happening. And Outlook data is deemed to be "hidden". I would have forgotten about the hidden-files setting entirely, except that the jikes (or maybe CVS) installation required me to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and I wasn't finding it. That led me to inspect the options in Windows Explorer more carefully.

Bah. Nailed by a cryptic interface yet again!

Whoever did the mood icons for the set I'm using sure got "frustrated" right. :-)

Comments

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

Machines are animate. I firmly believe this. It is the only reasonable explaination why I have such a hard time, sometimes, making things work. My computers will not work right if they don't have a name. I tried dialing the operator on a touch tone telephone once for over thirty minutes and could not get the operator. Between gales of laughter my lovely Lady Wife would take the phone, dial the operator and show me that it was me, and not the phone, that was having a problem. On the other hand, my old yeller car worked for my every time (well, mostly every time) but absolutely refused to work for her (She said it only ran because I THOUGHT it ran). She had it towed away as a menace to society while I was pulling my second tour in Korea. Be nice to the computer and give it a name (new master hard drive, new name required...probably).

[cellio]

Ah, that could be it. My machine has a name (the same name it had before, actually), but it's a dry, boring name. You can't really expect a machine to feel all warm and fuzzy about "cellio-pc", now can you? (No, I didn't pick that.) Maybe it wants a classier nickname.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.
I knew about the don't-see-hidden-files option, but thought that that was the only effect hiddenness had. This is good to know.

On the other hand, why are files hidden at all? If it's only to prevent them being listed in a directory and crowding out all the actually important files, then sticking them in a subdirectory would seem to be almost as effective. If it's to prevent the user from messing with them, why aren't they better hidden? attrib and dir /ah have existed almost forever, and Explorer just makes changing file attributes easier. Maybe they should be called warranty-voiding files... if you touch them, customer support stops speaking to you. :)

[cellio]

And I would have expected "hidden" to be reserved for key parts of the OS or its configuration. Saved mail should not be hard to find. Sheesh. They really ought to either do a better job of hiding files or give it up, as you said.