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First I found that a '<' or '>' character in the first argument (lpfilename) for Windows API function "FindFirstFile" will be treated as a wildcard.

So I wrote a little program "mydir" to explore the behaviour and to also to illustrate that.

The program showed that '<' behaves somewhat like '*'. And when I try to compare the result of 'mydir' and the Windows 'dir', I realized that 'dir "C:\<" returns a list of items too:

C:\>dir "C:\<"
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 0071-B039

 Directory of C:\

09/17/2007  10:59 PM    <DIR>          Development
10/07/2007  10:50 PM    <DIR>          Program Files
10/02/2007  12:31 PM    <DIR>          ProgramData
09/28/2007  06:49 PM    <DIR>          Projects
09/09/2007  11:01 PM    <DIR>          tmp
08/24/2007  08:29 PM    <DIR>          Users
10/17/2007  07:45 AM    <DIR>          Windows
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               7 Dir(s)  25,505,480,704 bytes free

One may call it undocumened feature, I call it bug because I learned it the hard way. My program broke when I assumed calling FindFirstFile with a '<' in the file name will return INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE, as such file is not expected to exist.

The moral of the story is, never ASSUME.

Since Windows Vista no more supports outlook express and I like to read e-mail "offline", I started to use Outlook for my hotmail account.

Setting up hotmail in Outlook is not difficult. But it didn't take long for me to notice that mails disappear under the mouse point as it was clicked. Initially, I thought it comes from my clicking the delete button one too many times while casually deleting mails. As I become more careful and delebrate in using the delete button, I came to realize the mail vanishing under the mouse point could not be caused by inadverdent pressing of the delete button. This got me worried.

It turned out, the mail didn't just vanish. They're moved to the Junk E-Mail folder as soon as it is been clicked on. It's an annoying little feature of Microsoft Outlook to do the junk mail filtering at this time, and could inadverdently causing non-junk mail to be deleted.

IE7 may loss internet connectivity after network disruption. Only after running ipconfig /renew will be able to fix it.

The new Samsung SyncMaster 204B LCD display arrived a couple of days ago. It is intended to replace the 6 year old Dell P991 CRT monitor. As a novice Linux user, I fired up YaST to configure the system for the new display after I hooked up the new monitor. I dutifully typed in the root password into the following window:

Then used "Graphics Card and Monitor" under "Hardware" to launch SaX2, changed the Monitor to "--> LCD 1600X1200@60HZ", then clicked the "OK" button. The following message box popped up:

The screen blanked out momentary then came back with another pop up window indicating the test failed (This error can not be reproduced right now).

The same thing occurred in repeated attempts. Somewhat irritated, I pressed "Save" button anyway. Nothing seemed to be broken initially. But soon I realized that the keyboard is not working anymore. In fact, there're some indication that the keyboard was associated to an invisible console attached to the system, e.g. if the login sequence of the root user was typed in, followed by the "init 6" command, the system's hard drive started to spin.

After googling for "suse lost keyboard" for a bit, I decided the most promising solution was to run SaX2 as a root user. My plan was to root into the fail save mode. Remember I'm a novice to Linux. I didn't know what to expect with the fail save mode. I only hoped that SaX2 can be started without to much playing around.

To my delight, the fail safe mode presented a console login. After logged in as the root, SaX2 was easily started by typing in sax2. The program even offer a setting that it believed to be appropriate. And the keyboard returned.

Epilogue: As I'm writing about this ordeal, one of the most worrisome to me in my history of working with Linux, I tried to reproduce the problem. I actually though it's a bug with SUSE Linux. But the problem is not reducing anymore. After all, it probably is a result of some kind of file corruption. Now it made me uneasy again, recalling that I just rebuilt one hard disk of the two disk RAID in the system.

The description of another bug with Mircrosoft Moeny 2006 shows yet another bug. Notice that despite that a split was enterred after the "Reinvest Dividend", the split was not applied to the transaction, when both event occurred on the same date.

Notice this bug was discoverred after a reproduction of the earlier bug. All transcation was deleted from the same account and re-enterred during the reproduction of that bug. It's not clear if the bug will occur had the transcations was enterred freshly in an account.

The application displayed the following popup modal dialog window presenting incorrect information to the user:

The bug was discovered in the process of entering the following transcation:

Date	Transaction		Dollar Amount	Share Price	Shares This Transaction	Total Shares
04-12-2005	2004 Partic Cont -ACH		$3,000.00	100.01	29.997	29.997
11-04-2005	Div Reinvest 3.5138		105.40	97.96	1.076	31.073
11-04-2005	Reverse Stock Split		0.00	101.47	-1.076	29.997
11-18-2005	Exchange To Prime MM		3,048.90	101.64	-29.997	0.000

The split on 11-04-2005 was initially entered mistakenly at the rate of 10147 for 9796 before the "Exchange to Prime MM" on 11-18-2005 was enterred as a sale transaction. The mistake in the split ratio led to extra shares remaining in the account.

To correct the error, the erratic split was first removed using the "Update Price" dialog:

Then an attempt to enter a split with the correct conversion ratio was made:

But the application was not able to accept the transaction. Instead, it pops up a dialog as shown earlier.

Background: a) the account was newly created; b) the investment, Target Maturities Trust: 2005 was also new for this Money file.

Generates Invalid RSS Feed When an & is used in the Category name directly without using & instead.

Sent the following feedback to Blockbuster customer service:

My monthly membership renewal date was 13th. Around 11:30PM on 12th, I canceled the membership via the website. Here are some confusing information I was shown while I was on the website:

1. Before I proceeded to cancel the membership, I check the maybe the billing history page. It showed that the last time billed as January 13, and the next bill date as March 13. Why the month of Feb was skipped?

2. While I was working on canceling the account, I get a pages says that the effective date will be Feb 13th. Yet after the page presented after the cancellation went through says something like I can continue to use the service until April 12.

3. The cancellation notice I received via e-mail states that "...your membership will be canceled as of Monday, February 13, 2006. We must receive all BLOCKBUSTER Online DVDs by Tuesday, April 11, 2006 in order for you to avoid additional charges." Do you really allow people to keep the DVDs for two month after the cancellation?

Or there's a bug in the software that runs the website.

For these lucky ones among us who has a computer with Acrobat 6.0 pre-installed. If acrobat suddenly stopped working (hung at the splash screen and consuming about 42% of CPU time forever), I found the solution from the Internet, to quote:

Me again - I found the real solution, finally, after removing 6.0 and installing 5.0 (twice) and finding that I still couldn't start it - giving a message about not being able to open a temp file. This led me back to one of the previous replies about 65000 odd temp files. I had checked in Documents and Settings but checked again and discovered that I had the 65000 (FFFF overflow in hex) no. of temp files in C:\Temp and so it was exactly that same problem that it couldn't read them or create a new one. I dutifully removed them all and hey presto Acrobat 5.0 works beautifully and I won't be going near 6.0 ever again.

Makes me feel pretty good about all the sloppiness’ I left in the software code I wrote.