Comment On Pop-Up Potpourii: Mess O' Messages

Nice!

Geez, I wonder what they do when the SQL is actually INVALID?

Yes, I have had DEP trying to prevent Windows from damaging my system as well. Nice to know Microsoft is not biased towards its own software.

Dave Sussman also has his fair share of truly exceptional exceptions.

LMAO at the "To continue and probably annihilate Outlook click no."

I've put many similar messages in my code - while developing - but I always removed it when it went into production...I *hope* [:P]

Oh I get it, the WTF is that so many of the pictures are blurry or have tons of JPG artifacts or bad dithering!

Doesn't anybody proofread these?



A internal error... [an]

You are recommended to exit... [it is recommended that]

Subsequent errrors may happen...[well, if they're subsequent, they must have happened...]



 I also like "the .log file". Good thing there's only one of those on my machine.

John Smallberries:

Doesn't anybody proofread these?

Probably not.. a lot of the conditions for these errors were probably preceded by:



//this can never happen



And they probably never saw the eyes of the QA guys either.

I honestly can't find anything wrong with annihilating Outlook.



That last message is stupid, but still quite clear to me. It's just a stupid way of phrasing "unsupported file format."

John Smallberries:

 I also like "the .log file". Good thing there's only one of those on my machine.

In Eclipse the is really only one ".log" file per workspace (ignoring
backups.)  It's stored in {workspace home}/.metadata.  It's
name?  .log (no filename, just .log)

I've recieved an error from Installshield before: "Could create temp file".

Apparently, being able to create temp files stops installations from building

I think my favorite is the anilating Outlook one :-)

Another error message I got once with Exchange 5.5 was something like "The Directory Store couldn't be started because the Directory Store couldn't be started", or something like that. I'm not fully sure it was Exchange but I think it was.

Oh, and one of our map-generation tools has the best error message of all time. It's a shame I don't have a screen shot at the moment, but I'll try to describe it to you.

While the map data is processing, at various points, a message box with an OK button will appear. The text consists of a single, lonely comma. Clicking ok lets the program continue happily.

johnl:

Oh, and one of our map-generation tools has the
best error message of all time. It's a shame I don't have a screen shot
at the moment, but I'll try to describe it to you.
While the map data is processing, at various points, a message box with
an OK button will appear. The text consists of a single, lonely comma.
Clicking ok lets the program continue happily.

Well, that means it's now... OK.  Was there a cancel button? 
Too bad it was a comma.  At least with a question mark, you could
have had the OK button be one of the alternate ones with an exclamation
point.

Mung Kee:

In Eclipse the is really only one ".log" file per workspace (ignoring
backups.)  It's stored in {workspace home}/.metadata.  It's
name?  .log (no filename, just .log)

It has a filename -- .log.  Specific filename suffixes
(extensions) are just a convention.  In unix, hidden files are
traditionally prefixed with a dot.

Annihilate... now there's a word you don't see in dialog boxes every
day.  It's always pleasing when software developers seek to
improve the vocabulary of the user base.  Perhaps we should all do
something like that?  Instead of delete, we could
obliterate.  Instead of remove, we could eradicate.  I'm sure
there are others our esteemed WTF readers could add.

I always liked the error you get with Excel automation:



 Run time error '1004'. Method '~' of object '~' failed.

My personal favorite, from the Mac Classic era, was the dialog that
read:  "An unknown error occured because an error of type -47
occured."

My favorite "An internal error occured while showing an internal error"

Others I have seen:
-"Windows cannot connect to the 'Piece of Crap' network"

- "Error 524: Try being more creative"

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is:
"Cannot remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Blu3_coder:

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is:
"Cannot remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Yes, that's just hilarious. Ha, the computer said ass. How dirty! Oh,
and it said that the ass isn't empty! Boy oh boy, comedy gold if I've
ever seen it...



Hard to imagine that you and I are even of the same species.

And let's not forget the classic "Keyboard not found- Press F1 to continue"...

Richard Nixon:

Blu3_coder:

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is: "Cannot remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Yes, that's just hilarious. Ha, the computer said ass. How dirty! Oh, and it said that the ass isn't empty! Boy oh boy, comedy gold if I've ever seen it...

Hard to imagine that you and I are even of the same species.

Well Richard, at least we know that you can pick a nic correctly....Dick.

LOL at the last one - that's beautiful!

skicow:

Richard Nixon:

Blu3_coder:

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is: "Cannot
remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Yes, that's just
hilarious. Ha, the computer said ass. How dirty! Oh, and it said that
the ass isn't empty! Boy oh boy, comedy gold if I've ever seen it...

Hard to imagine that you and I are even of the same species.

Well Richard, at least we know that you can pick a nic correctly....Dick.

Have a good day.

The best error I have seen in windows is



"A network cable is unplugged."



Quite a descriptive and valid error message usually, but not when the
only network adapter you have is a wireless network adapter... Turned
out to be a driver problem

I don't know why, but that GoLive error just cracks me up. I think we
need more amusing "X could not be done because..." error messages.



"The document could not be opened because to be honest I never even tried. It's Friday."

skicow:

LMAO at the "To continue and probably annihilate Outlook click no."

I've put many similar messages in my code - while developing
- but I always removed it when it went into production...I *hope*
[:P]

Refreshing to see an honest warning in plain language, AND a chance to
go ahead anyway.  At least, that way it's still possible to
install the program and take your chances.  If it works -
great.  If not - oh, well.

"To continue and probably annihilate Outlook click no."


Personally, I think that's a great error. We need more of these types of "honesty in labeling" type dialogs. Just the other day, we were considering how to prevent our users from complaining about lost messages ... caused by them selecting a low threshold for their spam filters, and enabling a "delete spam" option as part of their spam filters.

I came up with this as the pop-up confirmation text:

"I acknowledge that I am a dumb-ass. If any legitimate messages get deleted as part of spam filtering, it is solely because I am a dumb-ass. If I complain, I unilaterally give you permission to blame it on the fact that I am a dumb-ass, and dismiss me and my complaint as having come from a dumb-ass.

[No, I am not a dumb-ass, don't enable these filter settings]

[Yes, I am a dumb-ass, enable these filter settings]"

Ever since, we have referred to confirmation pop-ups as "the dumb-ass button".

That's nothing.  I accidentally left a debug message in a program
that went to production.  The message simply said "oops".



I've recently run across this beauty though:




Something didn't quite work out ...
Name

I have two favorites.



One from the game "Oni",   The title was "Damn", the message: "Oni crashed."



The second was I came back after a weekend of leaving my computer on.
at work I had three "You are running out of memory, Windows in
increasing you virtual memory"  Followed by a "You have run out of
memory."

Richard Nixon:

Blu3_coder:

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is:
"Cannot remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Yes, that's just hilarious. Ha, the computer said ass. How dirty! Oh,
and it said that the ass isn't empty! Boy oh boy, comedy gold if I've
ever seen it...

One could at least use the funny version of the "making the computer say 'ass'" joke, which involves a Unix shell and the command:



% man ass

Anonymous:

And let's not forget the classic "Keyboard not found- Press F1 to continue"...

That does make sense, since there's no point in using a computer
(pre-mouse) without a keyboard. It doesn't usually work these days, but
it used to be you could just plug the keyboard in (or switch it on or
whatever) and hit F1 and be good to go.



Of course it still sounds silly. =p

Probably not.. a lot of the conditions for these errors were probably preceded by:

//this can never happen

And they probably never saw the eyes of the QA guys either.



That's why you usually have all
string literals in some resource file, and you give QA a dump (excel
will do) of the whole thing for them to proof-read. :D

The really great thing about the PlanPlus popup is that it never actually gets around to asking you a question...

foxyshadis:

since there's no point in using a computer (pre-mouse) without a keyboard.

You know, there were early touch screen computers before the mouse became popular. And there are other input devices besides mouse and keyboard. Especially on embedded systems.

Richard Nixon:

Blu3_coder:

My *Absolute* favorite of all time though is:
"Cannot remove folder ass: It is not empty"

Yes, that's just hilarious. Ha, the computer said ass. How dirty! Oh,
and it said that the ass isn't empty! Boy oh boy, comedy gold if I've
ever seen it...



Hard to imagine that you and I are even of the same species.

You're an ass.  No one likes you.  Please leave.



Unregistered hath spoken.

http://weblogs.asp.net/plip/archive/2005/08/02/421285.aspx

foxyshadis:

Anonymous:

And let's not forget
the classic "Keyboard not found- Press F1 to continue"...

That does make sense, since there's no point in using a computer
(pre-mouse) without a keyboard. It doesn't usually work these days, but
it used to be you could just plug the keyboard in (or switch it on or
whatever) and hit F1 and be good to go.



Of course it still sounds silly. =p

Even in those early days, PCs could be used as servers, for data
collection or other automated tasks that would work well all day long
without Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor.

On my machine at work I have a screen of Microsoft Visual Studio .Net
with the error "A Catastrophic Error has occured" [OK], and after
hitting OK the program didn't close or anything, everything kept
working fine.

One of my favourite errors of all time is this informative pop-up (yes, I really did get this):







Of course, this is also quite amusing (if a bit old):

The HTML worked on the preview but not the post - what a surprise! (And the edit timeout is shorter than the page load time)

My favorite dates back from the DOS days, involving a old optical WORM drive attached to the parallel (printer) port:



"Out of paper on Drive D:"

a great message i once got was (translated): ' please insert disk labeled %DO_NOTHING% and then press ok'



http://gallery.augsburger.name/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=998

Um... Of the 12 machines in my office, only 2 have keyboard, mouse and
monitor.  The others are all SSH.  I have a keyboard in my
desk solely to get around this message should it occur (in case I
forgot to shut it off in the bios, or there was no option.)  I
have some computers that completely annoy me because they refuse to
boot without a video card, so I have cheap video cards inserted in them
for that purpose only.  Machines that assume someone will always
be sitting in front of them are annoying because in my world, chances
are they are shoved on a rack somewhere with no one ever around unless
there is a drive failure.

RayS:

I don't know why, but that GoLive error just cracks me up. I think we
need more amusing "X could not be done because..." error messages.



"The document could not be opened because to be honest I never even tried. It's Friday."

Actually I think that's quite a sensible error message. It's like legalese - the average person doesn't understand "unsupported file format". They understand stuff like "you've given me the wrong type of file you plonker!"

You know, when I first saw the windows one, I thought: "this has to be fake". It has been years since I have owned a computer with windows on it, however. Now that I think about it, it's probably a good thing that windows protects your computer from Windows Explorer

foxyshadis:

Anonymous:

And let's not forget
the classic "Keyboard not found- Press F1 to continue"...

That does make sense, since there's no point in using a computer
(pre-mouse) without a keyboard. It doesn't usually work these days, but
it used to be you could just plug the keyboard in (or switch it on or
whatever) and hit F1 and be good to go.

Headless machines are, of course, a figment of someone's deranged
imagination, yes? At work, we have a room full of machines. It lacks
any keyboard. Or monitor. If there's a SERIOUS problem, one can be
dragged in.





And I'd just like to point out the best list of errors ever (you'll
have to copy-and-paste; I never did figure out how to reliably make
links in this thing):
http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/computing/c-errors.html

>I have no idea who sent in this next one

It was me. Originally published this and the VB Help one at http://www.livejournal.com/users/syarzhuk/328529.html

My two favourites:

[from Fox Pro, I think] Error 6 while attempting to report Error 6

and from VME/B on an ICL 2980, circa 1979:

A hardware or software error has been detected.

Well, that pretty much covers everything.

Anonymous:

My favorite dates back from the DOS days,
involving a old optical WORM drive attached to the parallel (printer)
port:

“Out of paper on Drive D:”

That’s just priceless.

I made quite a brillant one myself. Found this in my mailbox this morning, from an app I am developing:

An error occurred before all tasks could be run:
There are no tasks to run

The logs of all successful tasks can be found in the log viewer.

Drak