The Baby Bunny Mini-Lecture: Part 1
Scenario 1:
It's a cool early summer evening. The full moon casts its pale glow on the dewy grass. You are a child, out playing in the yard. Suddenly you stop...there's something there, over by the lilac bush. You creep closer. Much to your delight, it's a quivering little baby bunny! (Baby bunnies are known to be lethally cute. One alone can bring down an entire battalion.) Gleefully you scoop up the tiny creature and run inside to show your parents.
Who are immediately horrified.
"Go put it back - NOW," they command.
"Oh, but it's not that I mean to keep it, I just want to play with it for a bit..." you whine.
"If you handle it any more it will smell more like a human than a bunny and its mother will reject it and it will die," they proclaim sternly. "She will look at it and say 'you look like my baby bunny, and wiggle your nose like my baby bunny, but you don't smell like my baby bunny, so you must not be my baby bunny. You are declared excommunicate and anathema.*'"
Oooh, cold hard Discovery Channel reality. Dispirited, you return the baby bunny to the spot near the lilac bush and spend the night fending off bad dreams about mother rabbits with nasty, big, pointy teeth...
Scenario 2:
It's mid afternoon at the office. The last project ended two weeks ago and the budget for the next one hasn't been approved yet. Shareware.com beckons. You heed its siren call. Twenty downloads and installations later you, your Internet connection, and your hard drive are spent. You decide to relax by playing your all-time favorite game (downloaded and installed between projects a few months ago). You start the application, but instead of the familiar alien landscape of Planet Tngtsiojsthsas you see this instead:
A cold chill slinks up your spine and back down. This application worked just fine at lunch....You check the application's program folder...oh, wait, that's right, to save disk space you cleaned up all those VB runtime files and dumped just one into the system folder. You check the system folder. Hmmm. That's odd...it says there's a vbrun300.dll right there. THEN WHY WON'T MY GAME WORK???
Relax, you've just been Baby BunniedT.
Yes, there is a file named vbrun300.dll (the baby bunny), but to the game application (the mother rabbit), it's an imposter. Vbrun300.dll looks like a valid VB3.0 runtime library, and wiggles its nose like a valid VB3.0 runtime library, but it doesn't have the same functions with the same input and output parameters as a valid VB3.0 runtime library, so therefore it is not a valid VB3.0 runtime library.
Wow. So how does something like this happen? By now, your synapses, dulled by the M&Ms you've been compulsively munching, are starting to connect the dots, or rather, the downloads. Your perfectly good vbrun300.dll has apparently been overwritten by a not so good vbrun300.dll. And, you know, this senseless tragedy could have been prevented by two things:
- keeping all dlls necessary for the application in the application folder
- using an installation program other than "unzip these files and place them where our readme.txt tells you to"
*The Richard Burton/Peter O'Toole movie Becket is a favorite of mother rabbits.
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