Reasons to be miserable give my brain a pain

[venta]

A secon technical appeal. Apologies to those who don't give a toss about these things.

(I've tried a very brief google on this, but to no avail. I'm just asking in case anyone knows off-hand, otherwise I'll go back to ransacking the dustier corners of the web.)

Yetersday, I tried to open a non-existent file in emacs. This isn't usually a problem, it creates the file, and away you go (so long as the directory it's in exists).

However, I got an error message telling me that the directory ("My Documents") was read-only. Strange, I thought. My Documents, Properties, well so it was. Uncheck the box, apply, save, try again.

Nope, still read-only. My Documents, Properties, yup, it's read-only again.

How can I ask Windows XP to actually believe me that yes, I'd really like to create documents in that folder from time to time ? (I can create documents by clicking in the directory, and saying New -> Text document.) I'm fairly sure Windows XP let me create documents by opening them in emacs pre-Service Pack 2. Win 2K doesn't seem to have a problem with me doing it, either.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You're bringing up the properties pane, and under Attributes, it has "Read Only: <shaded square>" or "Read Only: <tick>"?

The shaded square means that some of the contents are read only, and the tick means that the folder iteslf is read only. (I don't know what happens if the folder is read-only, but the contents are writable).

Which doesn't explain why emacs is complaining, but it's the simplest explanation for the icon not changing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

It's a shaded square, so that'd explain that, yes.

I guess it's come security feature to stop me from opening files with anything so seditious and unreliable as GNU software :(

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, to add further clarification:
if I open up the properties pane for my own "My Documents", I get the shaded square.

If I navigate to the parent folder in emacs
( C-x f C:/Documents and Settings/p0023009 )
then I get to view a "unix style" directory listing, which includes

  dr-xr-xr-x   2 p0023009 root        0 Feb 25 11:41 My Documents

So my emacs seems to think it's read only too! But it does still let me write to it...
Confused now!

[venta.livejournal.com]

At work (on Win 2K) I get:

drwxrwxrwx 2 wootten 0 0 Feb 25 11:48 My Documents

The box in the properties pane for "My Documents" is an unticked ticky-box.

And it does let me open files.

So that's all OK. It's just XP that's barking.

Incidentally, for strict accuracy I'm using XEmacs, not emacs.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

my suggestion?
stop using Windows for Playgroups and switch to 2k, unless you know of a unix variant that will reliably run everything you want (if so, tell me?)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Why's that ? Beyond this particular case, what's your reasoning behind thinking Fisher-Price Windows particularly inferior to 2K ?

I use 2K at work and XP at home, and don't see much in the way of difference for the things I use it for.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Ditto: I used to run 2k Server on one machine at home, and have found XP (pro) to be much easier to use. Largely because I work as Admin on XP ;-)

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

your problem is a symptom of the big problem I have with XP
'Windows knows best'
'you didn't want control over this did you?'

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

2K is just as horrible and controllish, unfortunately. (I use Win98, Win2K and WinXP most days and can confirm all three are bad, evil and wrong !)

Anyway, if you think XP was bad when it came out, SP-2 takes me to new heights of pain. For example, yesterday it popped up a security warning when I tried to browse my homepage (a file on my local drive which I wrote myself in plain HTML 4.0 !). It warns me about the presence of an "ActiveX plug-in or script". I click on the little bar to tell me more and it gives me the following options:

* Preach at me about security.
* Let the 'bad' content run itself.
* Continue viewing the page with the 'bad' content blocked and the irritating warning bar.

Both of the options I wanted were nowhere to be seen:

* Tell me what the alleged 'bad' thing is, preferably by highlighting the page source, but any diagnostic info would be a start.
* Let me leave the 'bad' content blocked but reclaim the screen real estate sucked up by the warning bar.

</rant>

[wimble.livejournal.com]

To help protect your computer, Windows Firewall has blocked some features of this program.

Your computer administrator can unblock this program for you.

Name: blah, blah, blah.
Publisher: blah, blah, blah

So, which features? I presume they're network sockets, but it doesn't actually say that. And which network sockets? Oooh, couldn't tell you that, sir. Well, can I open some of them and not others? Ooh, more than my jobsworth, sir!


venta: you didn't need this thread did you?

[venta.livejournal.com]

you didn't need this thread did you?

Don't mind, so long as you play nicely.

And, since I rarely do anything advanced with Windows, I was genuinely curious as to whether there was really much difference between XP and 2K.

I'm just happy because XP has finally got round to doing tab completion in the DOS box Command Prompt, without the need for a registry hack.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Command Prompt: that thing I used to have to use before I installed Cygwin. Mmm, shelly goodness.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Last time I used CygWin it was an utter bunch of @rse. Have they sorted it out now ?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The install system is still "wha?" (especially if you come back to it, to install something extra, after you've forgotten how you did the original install).

But if you want to run your well know shell command tools on your Windows box, or have a free X server, it certainly does the job.

I may not have tried whatever you were trying though. So I may not have tested your @arse.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Depends what kind of arse.

As a command line, the main thing wrong with it is that the shell doesn't recognise "c:" as the root of the c drive (presumably because they'd have had to shoehorn a bunch of extra code on top of the Red Hat distros they use). So if you want tab completion, you have to use /cygdrive/c/, by which time you often almost might as well have typed the whole thing.

The default terminal doesn't have sensible clipboard controls, which sucks quite a lot, but presumably you can get graphical terminal windows that behave better. I know that you're exceedingly sensitive to this kind of thing, though, so to that extent it is still arse unless you can find a better terminal.

I've also not tried installing anything from source, so I don't know how that goes. GNU provide Windows binaries for most of their command line tools, so there's generally no need in my experience.

network sockets

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ports, rather...

Re: network sockets

[wimble.livejournal.com]

true. Too much watching netstat on my linux boxes ;-)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

But that's a symptom of the big problem I have with Windows, not just XP.

(Or, alternatively: "yes, you can control this. Just change this registry setting, which is only documented on some vary hard to find Microsoft Knowledge Base page.")

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Very true, but I find XP to be by far the worst offender.
Plus, big red start button. unforgivable, and I know this is something that it lets you change, but all the same, you'll always know it was there.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Actually, since I'm by no means an 'advanced' Windows user, I don't particularly mind the hand-holding and find it useful occasionally.

big red start button

Eh ? I don't believe I have one of those, and I don't remember having ever had.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

or is it green?, i dunno! Whatever, fisher-Price is right!

[wimble.livejournal.com]

There's the small red button on the Start Menu. Labelled "Shutdown". Which was always a pretty dumb combination of instructions.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the good old uncheck the box, apply, restart? It probably won't work, mind, but might be worth a try.

(I just tried to open a .wav from My Documents in Notepad to see if it did the same thing, and it didn't, but it came up partially in Japanese. I call that a good experiment.)

Have you found this page yet, which may or may not be helpful?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I did try restarting, yes, and that didn't seem to have much effect. Though if, as someone suggested above, the shaded box only means "some items in this directory are read-only" then I wouldn't expect it to help much.

I should try opening a text file in notebook, actually, to see whether it's Windows being mad, or emacs being bad.

Thanks for the page reference - I'll have a proper read through that (even if it's not directly relevant, it's probably stuff I should know!) sometime when I'm not pretending to be working.