Comment On Pop-up Potpourri: Arcade Edition

Oh that was funny. Let me wipe the tears from my eyes.

Alex Papapasomething:

Why is this golf game running a standard version of Windows, as opposed to the slimmed-down embedded version?

It's strange the things that run on standard Windows sometimes.



Perhaps one of my scariest pop-up experiences was when I was looking at
the Arrivals/Departures monitor at the airport and a standard Windows
error dialog popped up.  Thankfully I wasn't the one flying that
day.

Ytram:

It's strange the things that run on standard Windows sometimes.

Yep

The Golf One: That is rich.

VirtualDub: Nggh. Somewhere I have run into a similar error. I remember
it resulted in premature ageing and hairloss., then I picked up a
different program.



"Error: Operation Completed Successfully" is almost cliché ...

Error code 0 getting expanded to "Success" is so... 1980s. (Should I
post a screenshot from my Commodore 64 showing 0,OK,0,0? Nope, some
people who have been programming longer than I have would beat that
anyway...)



(As a side note, funny to see weird svn errors, just after I spent this
morning trying not to make Eclipse crash when checking stuff out of
svn. Glad to know Eclipse just crashed rather than trying to mystify me
with errors like this... Great version control system, the clients are
just a bit weird at times still. :) )



As for VirtualDub's errors, well, concatenating two videos is black art
and its idea of "the files have to have exact same encoding settings"
vastly transcends mortal definitions.

Anonymous:

Ytram:

It's strange the things that run on standard Windows sometimes.

Yep

Sweet. That should be a WTF article in and of itself.

And why/how is .NET's System.OutOfMemoryException being conveyed by a client-side JavaScript error in an HTML file?

Alex Papadimoulis:

And finally, there's this message that Stewie got when trying to join two AVI files together. It just wasn't his day ...

Someone did == on floating point numbers.  tsk tsk tsk...

I wish I had a screen shot for when The Core Media Player crashes
(although for some reason it keeps running half the time without
problem).  It says the program has BOK'ed and has a picture of a
helmet saying "Born to Crash" (a la Full Metal Jacket).

heh, funny stuff.

 here are a couple I've been saving for just this occasion.



here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.



 

 

and another not so obvious one



 

oops..

 try this one:

  <img src="http://img45.imagevenue.com/loc180/th_f6a_ReBootError.JPG" alt="image hosted by ImageVenue.com">

forgive me..

 one more try.

Why was there no error handling to keep the message from the player, or for that matter, crash the entire game?



Because the error came from the Javascript interpreter in an  embedded instance of IE. It's hella hard to trap those.



Why is this golf game running a standard version of Windows, as opposed to the slimmed-down embedded version?


Because the "slimmed-down embedded version" doesn't support decent 3D
acceleration, recent non-PDA chipsets, or anything close to a DirectX
implementation, I'd guess.



Why does the golf game use web pages?


The same reason many, many PC games do--no UI to write. If you're
careful about how you embed them, no one is ever the wiser. We were
doing this back in 1996...



Why does the golf games web pages need Javascript?



Probably to get around the inherent limitations of HTML, which make it hard to do responsive, "live" user interfaces.



It is a funny screenshot, but it's not that surprising that they developed it this way.

Ok..

 I guess I should create an account so I can edit posts instead but..

 maybe next time

I think that Golf one is the one that they have at the bars where they are linked to a central server.  Your high scores are uploaded to a server and the winner wins some money or something.  So it is possible that it submits the scores through HTTP in the background.

 

Also, this is by far the worse captcha thing I've seen on this forum.  Even I, a human the last time I checked, can't read that:

 

Anonymous:

Also, this is by far the worse captcha thing I've seen on this forum.  Even I, a human the last time I checked, can't read that:

Oops, that didn't work.  Basically it was red text on red background. 

Anonymous:

Ok..

 I guess I should create an account so I can edit posts instead but..

 maybe next time

Ha Ha, yeah - create an account and then you'll be able to edit posts; SURE!

In Windows, an operation completing successfully IS unexpected!!

And in Soviet Russia, the operation completes you!!

It raises a rather deep philosophical question: how could a file without a name exist?

This is common in UNIX where files and names are independent.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Next up is Gerard Aalbers, who
came across this error in the IDE while developing an embedded
application for a microcontroller. using MPLab IDE. It raises a rather
deep philosophical question: how could a file without a name exist?

It depends on the filesystem.  It can happen in UNIX.  If an
open file is deleted, the directory entry is released but not the file
itself.  When the file is closed, the space will be
reclaimed.  Until then, the process with the file open can
continue to use it, even writing to it.  This is great for
temporary files as they will be automatically deleted when the program
ends.



(Mind you, the above can not happen.)



It is also useful for upgrades.  Overwrite a program with a newer
version.  Anyone using the older version still has access to
it.  Anyone starting the program gets the new version.  When
the last user using the older version exits from it, it will be deleted.



Sincerely,



Gene Wirchenko

Anonymous:

Why was there no error handling to keep the message from the player, or for that matter, crash the entire game?



Because the error came from the Javascript interpreter in an  embedded instance of IE. It's hella hard to trap those

I think the "Disable script debugging" option in IE was turned off by
default for a while, which allows these messages to come up.



There's a UI WTF right there-  you have to enable the disable
option, rather than disabling an enable option.  Sure, they're
syntactically the same, but the second doesn't make yourself ask a
question like "now do I not want it not to not show up?"

Anonymous:

heh, funny stuff.
 
here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.

 
 

 

Is this actual size?

Anonymous:

Why was there no error handling to keep the message from the player, or for that matter, crash the entire game?

Because the error came from the Javascript interpreter in an  embedded instance of IE. It's hella hard to trap those.

IE (even embedded instances) has supported Javascript try/catch/throw statements since IE5 was first introduced. This may predate IE5, but somehow I doubt it.

 

bc someone forgot to go to the options and turn off display javascript errors.                          

Heh. My BIOS complains that 'There is no keyboard present." and then
invites me to "Press F12 to continue.". Wish I still had the pic ....

kipthegreat:

Alex Papadimoulis:

And finally, there's this message that Stewie got when trying to join two AVI files together. It just wasn't his day ...

Someone did == on floating point numbers.  tsk tsk tsk...

It's a little more complex than that.  They're actually comparing
fixed-point binary numbers which do differ in one or more bits. 
But the error message display, for inscrutable reasons, converts the
numbers to single-precision FP, a form in which they look identical.



Getting VirtualDub to do an append frequently requires the use of a hex
editor to make the file headers match.  This is an example of a
case where just a few minutes' more
work on the part of the programmer would have resulted in an almost
uncountable decrease in headaches for users.  It's not that
VirtualDub would have to do any more conversion work than it's already
doing for the actual append operation; small differences in sampling
rates, or most of the other header fields in fact, are totally
irrelevant to the output 99.9% of the time.  Writing code to
recognize this fact is not that hard!  But someone decided to do a
binary whole-structure comparison of the AVI headers, in addition to
the above-mentioned sampling rate comparison, instead of taking the few
extra minutes to write code that reflected reality a little more
closely.  Grrrr...

I think I understand the "an unnamed file was not found" error.



The program is probably converting a blank filename into "an unnamed file".

RFlowers:

Anonymous:

heh, funny stuff.
 
here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.

 
 

 

Is this actual size?

No, Im trying to link the readable one .. but User error has intervened.



lets try again:



http://img43.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc289&image=b12_fileError.JPG

*shrug*

Anonymous:

RFlowers:

Anonymous:

heh, funny stuff.
 
here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.

 
 

 

Is this actual size?

No, Im trying to link the readable one .. but User error has intervened.



lets try again:



http://img43.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc289I=b12_fileError.JPG

*shrug*

Well.. I'm no scientologist or anything.. but I it's possible to just type the error message you're trying to show us..

kipthegreat:

Anonymous:

RFlowers:

Anonymous:

heh, funny stuff.
 
here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.

 
 

 

Is this actual size?

No, Im trying to link the readable one .. but User error has intervened.

lets try again:

http://img43.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc289I=b12_fileError.JPG
*shrug*

Well.. I'm no scientologist or anything.. but I it's possible to just type the error message you're trying to show us..

 

It says "Cannot remove folder LOCALHOST: The filename or extension is too long."

Anonymous:

kipthegreat:

Anonymous:

RFlowers:

Anonymous:

heh, funny stuff.
 
here we go check this one out it is my personal favourite.

 
 

 

Is this actual size?

No, Im trying to link the readable one .. but User error has intervened.

lets try again:

http://img43.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc289I=b12_fileError.JPG
*shrug*

Well.. I'm no scientologist or anything.. but I it's possible to just type the error message you're trying to show us..

 

It says "Cannot remove folder LOCALHOST: The filename or extension is too long."

I'm totally dissapointed.

First one: I wonder what would've happened if you could select yes or no... I've seen an even more interesting error on an arcade machine before, but can't find the picture I had of it at the moment. The message was the standard "this program has perform an illegal operation" error. It was an IPF in the kernel (Win98). The machine had a joystick with 2 buttons which turned out to be configured as the default system pointing device. I closed the error dialog and it dropped out of the game and onto the desktop, letting me explore the machine a bit ;)

2. Perhaps they were using a standard "AlertDialog()" function for every single message that always had "Unexpected error" in the title, be it an error or an informative message?

3. if(strlen(filename)==0) { strcpy(filename, "an unnamed file"); } (or something alone the lines of that...)

4. Programmer couldn't think of anything else to say.

5. Bad display: 30.000305 vs. 30.000302 would've made sense.

Actually, for #2, I think I've seen this bug elsewhere.  Basically,
it's where one of the winsock functions is returning that there is an
error (setting the socket to SOCKET_ERROR), but when you check
WSAGetLastError, it returns 0, which a lot of libraries map to "The
operation completed successfully."

stevekj:

kipthegreat:

Alex Papadimoulis:

And finally, there's this message that Stewie got when trying to join two AVI files together. It just wasn't his day ...

Someone did == on floating point numbers.  tsk tsk tsk...

It's a little more complex than that.  They're actually comparing
fixed-point binary numbers which do differ in one or more bits. 
But the error message display, for inscrutable reasons, converts the
numbers to single-precision FP, a form in which they look identical.



Getting VirtualDub to do an append frequently requires the use of a hex
editor to make the file headers match.  This is an example of a
case where just a few minutes' more
work on the part of the programmer would have resulted in an almost
uncountable decrease in headaches for users.  It's not that
VirtualDub would have to do any more conversion work than it's already
doing for the actual append operation; small differences in sampling
rates, or most of the other header fields in fact, are totally
irrelevant to the output 99.9% of the time.  Writing code to
recognize this fact is not that hard!  But someone decided to do a
binary whole-structure comparison of the AVI headers, in addition to
the above-mentioned sampling rate comparison, instead of taking the few
extra minutes to write code that reflected reality a little more
closely.  Grrrr...

You can always go to virtualdub.org and post in phaeron's blog (or email him) nicely demanding slightly better concatenation, or at least a "Are you SURE you want to do this? (May throw off sync or crash!)" message. Might as well before he starts working on 7.x, which is going to be a long way down the line.

However, I'm reminded of a wtf caused by AVI. Internally, it stores the framerate as the ratio of two 32-bit numbers, and they can both be huge if the writing program thinks it needs every drop of precision for some reason. A program to convert them to mkv/mp4, which attach a timecode to each frame rather than a global fps, would multiply the two fps values together for something, and occasionally people reported horribly broken output files that skipped around until they crashed. Turns out it was all because it used a 32-bit multiply rather than 64-bit. =p

There's a lot of similar wtfs that I could bring up having worked with video tools forever. You should see the sources to some. =p But they're not really 'pro' so they don't count.

I love #4. =D

llxx:

5. Bad display: 30.000305 vs. 30.000302 would've made sense.

Really? For a 150 minutes long movie 0.03 seconds is such a big deal
that one cannot afford to do the conversion, disregarding the
discrepancy.

Anonymous:

Ytram:

It's strange the things that run on standard Windows sometimes.

Yep

Well, in all fairness, that ship doesn't run on standard Windows, it sails. And not even that, actually.

stevekj:

Getting VirtualDub to do an append frequently requires the use of a hex
editor to make the file headers match.

  At some point I got used to this. I often had to append several
avis together, all sampled with the same framerate in the original
program, but due to whatever reason the actual framerate written to the
avi files differed from each other by tiny amounts (like 0.01 fps or
whatever). What I did was to open the avis in a hex editor, search this
framerate in each, calculate their average and then write this average
to all of them. After that virtualdub agreed to append them. There was
never any audio/video desync problem (the difference caused by this
manual modification was probably much less than a frame even in long
videos).



However, as you say, virtualdub could support doing exactly this
automatically. That is, it could look that "hey, the framerate settings
of these avis differ only by a tiny bit; I'll ask the user if he wants
me to average these framerate settings automatically and append the
videos".

kipthegreat:

There's a UI WTF right there-  you have to enable the disable
option, rather than disabling an enable option.  Sure, they're
syntactically the same, but the second doesn't make yourself ask a
question like "now do I not want it not to not show up?"

Welcome to the Microsoft world. I have always been under the
imopression the have a team of psychologists working on this specific
part of their UI to make it as unintuitive as possible. This carefull
mix of positive questions and negative questions. E.g. IE's "Do not
cache secure items" which is checked by default. Bastards. Name it
"Cache secure items" and uncheck it by default.



The file associations bit is maybe even worse...



Fabian

Ytram:

Perhaps one of my scariest pop-up experiences was when I was looking at
the Arrivals/Departures monitor at the airport and a standard Windows
error dialog popped up.  Thankfully I wasn't the one flying that
day.

Well, it's only the display part, of course. Some Dutch (train) stations have big displays showing departures, and quite regularly it has a familiar shade of blue, with an NT kernel fault, complete with register dump. Makes you really trust them.

The framerate in AVI is a fraction of two 32bit numbers. Maybe the
values of the fractions were identical, but one of the fractions was
not normalized. VirtualDub does not normalize and keeps original values
from some compatibility reasons.

Even better than that, I saw a Windows 98 Installation screen on one of those boards... and I was flying that day.

Here's a good one I ran into in Seaside, Oregon:

Click the images to see larger versions, or see:

http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/47170728


http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/47170729

Hmm...



This forum does not allow preview, and it does not allow you to edit your posts.



Now that is a real WTF!

It doesn't even have to be a blank file name.  Its an error I
always see with vc++ 6.0 code when you try to use CFile/CStdioFile
functions on a file that doesn't exist.  Apparently people didn't
know about CFileFind or PathFileExists() and just assumed a file was
there.

it is a very old story, you can insert a keyboard at this point and then press f12 to continue, not really that amazing.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Probably, you just entered "an unnamed file" as filename. That file doesn't exist, so it displays this error.
The same way, you also can get messages like "Are you sure you want to delete everything on your computer?" if you've got a file named "everything on your computer".

And by Subversion, you mean Visual Source Safe from within Visual Studio. Subversion works quite well as do the Explorer and the Studio plugins (TortoiseSVN and Ankh respectively).

Ytram:

Alex Papapasomething:

Why is this golf game running a standard version of Windows, as opposed to the slimmed-down embedded version?

It's strange the things that run on standard Windows sometimes.

Not sometimes - this is the norm, not the exception. Pretty much
anything that has any kind of GUI at all and is not safety-critical
runs on standard Windows. I know for a fact that the only ATMs that
don't run Windows are those that still run OS/2 - AND they also use
webpages for the GUI!

So true!

Anonymous:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Probably, you just entered "an unnamed file" as filename. That file doesn't exist, so it displays this error.
The same way, you also can get messages like "Are you sure you want to delete everything on your computer?" if you've got a file named "everything on your computer".

Lemme try again :)

So true!