Comment On Pop-up Potpourri: Mayday Edition

not first

These make TheDailyWTF worth existing.

Alex Papadimoulis:

After reading this fairly helpful error message, Brian Bull changed his mind and decided to Switch instead of Relocate. What would you have clicked in this case?

I think I would've unplugged my computer at this point. Or called the bomb squad.

>BiggBru

You'd think that it'd be easy to free up 0 megabytes, but John had a real hard time with it ...

 

Talk about a zero footprint application!

Alex Papadimoulis:

...this extra-long Crystal Reports error that Jon received several times ...

Tic Tac Toe, I win!

I like the smiley one, hmm I wonder why they want you to use internet explorer!!!! [6]

Alex Papadimoulis:

Nathan Dunn was disappointed to find that the MySpace videos really weren't worth the plane trip across the Atlantic ...

 

Why is this a WTF?

Alex Papadimoulis:

I suppose we'll wrap up with this extra-long Crystal Reports error that Jon received several times ...

 

The dreaded Tic-Tac-Toe Error of Death!!

Bus Raker:

You'd think that it'd be easy to free up 0 megabytes, but John had a real hard time with it ...

 

Talk about a zero footprint application!

Wow, it's a real Zen Koan.  (You know, like the one hand clapping question...)
If you free up zero MB by not deleting anything, have you really freed it?

As an alternative view, how can you _prove_ that you freed up zero MB?

Good thing I got no plans this weekend... I'm going to be in a quandry.

lizardfoot:

Alex Papadimoulis:

I suppose we'll wrap up with this extra-long Crystal Reports error that Jon received several times ...

 

The dreaded Tic-Tac-Toe Error of Death!!

The real WTF is that the next player to put their X or O down will win.

I don't think the subversion client one is a WTF. It actually helps newbies not to do a stupid error and explains things very well...

Alex Papadimoulis:

That's just a fun way for a Star Trek-loving programmer to say "something got screwed with you undo/redo history and if you perform this edit, anything could happen".

The only thing that's missing from this dialog is the question "Really perform the relocate? [Yes] [No]". The rest of the blurb is actually fairly useful because it warns you of bad stuff that might happen that otherwise you probably wouldn't have known about. I didn't know that relocates could be that harmful though -- if you relocate to the wrong URL, nothing stops you from relocating back, so the message might be a little overreacting.

Zakhooi :D.

 

*insert obligatory Yoda joke here*

Alex Papadimoulis wrote:

Nathan Dunn was disappointed to find that the MySpace videos really weren't worth the plane trip across the Atlantic ...

Why is this a WTF?

Because of the part "please go to the United States" part?

The reason TortoiseSVN gives you such a stern warning is that when it comes to SCM, the first rule is always "do no harm".  You're dealing with peoples livelyhoods when you mess with their source code.  Giving a stern warning like that is actually a damn good thing, plus, when you see that much text, you don't automatically just click "yes", you read it first - at least I did the first time.

I've actually been seeing that message an awful lot lately as in the last few months MY SVN repo has done the following:

Dev Machine http, then onto remote server https, then back to dev machine http, then switched to apache ssl, so now dev machine https.

In all those times of relocating I've had it fail once, but all I needed to do was run a cleanup (I'd deleted a directory directly instead of through TortoiseSVN) and it was good to go.

It's nice that the TSVN and SVN devs take data integrity so seriously.

RiX0R:

The only thing that's missing from this dialog is the question "Really perform the relocate? [Yes] [No]". The rest of the blurb is actually fairly useful because it warns you of bad stuff that might happen that otherwise you probably wouldn't have known about. I didn't know that relocates could be that harmful though -- if you relocate to the wrong URL, nothing stops you from relocating back, so the message might be a little overreacting.

Yep - the error message looks to be fairly accurate, though it requires a bit of knowledge of the terminology to understand fully. IIRC, svn switch --relocate, which is the command-line equivalent of this, just changes the repository URL (so it'd better be the same repository, or interesting things could happen), whereas ordinary svn switch is basically like svn up, but changes branches at the same time.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Bárður H. Joensen was happy to see this non-error from Macromedia Dreamweaver for a change ...

wait...does this mean that Dreamweaver is expecting an error?
oh man...[8-)]

Anonymous:

The reason TortoiseSVN gives you such a stern warning is that when it comes to SCM, the first rule is always "do no harm".  You're dealing with peoples livelyhoods when you mess with their source code.  Giving a stern warning like that is actually a damn good thing, plus, when you see that much text, you don't automatically just click "yes", you read it first - at least I did the first time.

I've actually been seeing that message an awful lot lately as in the last few months MY SVN repo has done the following:

Dev Machine http, then onto remote server https, then back to dev machine http, then switched to apache ssl, so now dev machine https.

In all those times of relocating I've had it fail once, but all I needed to do was run a cleanup (I'd deleted a directory directly instead of through TortoiseSVN) and it was good to go.

It's nice that the TSVN and SVN devs take data integrity so seriously.

The problem isn't the wording, it's that you don't really know what you're yes-ing or no-ing to. If they added another line saying "Are you sure you want to relocate?" it would be fine. As it is, you have to guess, after being told that guessing wrong will make someone kick your puppy.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Simley Central sure chose an odd place to advertise their website. This is just yet another reason that J Lennox should switch back to IE ...

The real WTF here is that somebody's still using an ad-supported version of Opera...

My first post here, and I'm not sure if I got all the quote/html right. Why isnt' there a way to preview posts?

Alex Papadimoulis:

In case you were wondering why time moved backwards for a few minutes several weeks ago, it was because Jason decided to click the Apply button in eMagic's Logic Platinum ...

Actually, Alex, I was more concerned about losing that hour due to Daylight Savings Time.  Logic Platinum could be onto something.

After reading this fairly helpful error message, Brian Bull changed his mind and decided to Switch instead of Relocate. What would you have clicked in this case?

 

Yes or No to what?

"Do you really want to do Relocate?" or maybe "Is the above correct advice?"

Simley Central sure chose an odd place to advertise their website. This is just yet another reason that J Lennox should switch back to IE ...

Share my mood?  "Hey, technical support, your Website is broken."

You'd think that it'd be easy to free up 0 megabytes, but John had a real hard time with it ...

Possibly, less than one MB was required, but the program rounds.  Not too friendly.  The programmer of the code should swap code with the next programmer.

Dave was surprised how precise CD-burning programs are getting really specific these days ...

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Ooo and I HATE those "Explain" buttons.  They just take you to a web page explaining something along the lines of "The retry button will retry and the cancel button will cancel."

I WANTED MORE INFORMATION, NOT THE SAME INFORMATION.  Really now, how about some new info, like which disk you were trying to access or something helpful.

The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.

xrT:

wait...does this mean that Dreamweaver is expecting an error?

Maybe, it is.  I have written code where I expect an error can occur.  If the error occurs, I handle it.  If another error occurs, I bail with a message about an unexpected error.

I think that Dreamweaver is getting overly excited over no error occurring though.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Anonymous:

I don't think the subversion client one is a WTF. It actually helps newbies not to do a stupid error and explains things very well...

I admit to having never used Subversion, so I am not qualified to be a Subversion newbie yet.  Still the question arises: how would this error message help me?  I have no idea whether Yes or No is safe.  For that matter, I have no idea whether either of them is safe.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Gene Wirchenko:

xrT:

wait...does this mean that Dreamweaver is expecting an error?

Maybe, it is.  I have written code where I expect an error can occur.  If the error occurs, I handle it.  If another error occurs, I bail with a message about an unexpected error.

I think that Dreamweaver is getting overly excited over no error occurring though.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Dreamweaver: "What is this successful operation?"

Kirk: "Successful operation is the greatest thing in the world..."

Gene Wirchenko:

Alex Papadimoulis:

In case you were wondering why time moved backwards for a few minutes several weeks ago, it was because Jason decided to click the Apply button in eMagic's Logic Platinum ...

Actually, Alex, I was more concerned about losing that hour due to Daylight Savings Time.  Logic Platinum could be onto something.

After reading this fairly helpful error message, Brian Bull changed his mind and decided to Switch instead of Relocate. What would you have clicked in this case?

 

Yes or No to what?

"Do you really want to do Relocate?" or maybe "Is the above correct advice?"

"Did this message scare you? [Yes][No]"

Gene Wirchenko:

xrT:

wait...does this mean that Dreamweaver is expecting an error?

Maybe, it is. I have written code where I expect an error can occur. If the error occurs, I handle it. If another error occurs, I bail with a message about an unexpected error.

I think that Dreamweaver is getting overly excited over no error occurring though.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

"Error: Unexpected lack of error"

Gene Wirchenko:

Anonymous:

I don't think the subversion client one is a WTF. It actually helps newbies not to do a stupid error and explains things very well...

I admit to having never used Subversion, so I am not qualified to be a Subversion newbie yet. Still the question arises: how would this error message help me? I have no idea whether Yes or No is safe. For that matter, I have no idea whether either of them is safe.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

I use svn regularly - I've even used this command, correctly - and I'm not entirely sure either. (I use the *nix command-line client, which, like most *nix programs, assumes you know what you're doing.) I'm guessing "No" cancels the operation, and the message really ought to be [OK][Cancel], or even better [Continue][Cancel]. (Not sure why they didn't do that; it probably wouldn't be difficult.)

So the TortoiseSVN dialog isn't really an error like the post says, but just a big warning about the operation you're about to perform.  So it's missing a question, but that's just grammar.

No WTF.

The real WTF is the degrading WTF quality on DailyWTF.

HitScan:

Anonymous:

The reason TortoiseSVN gives you such a stern warning is that when it comes to SCM, the first rule is always "do no harm".  You're dealing with peoples livelyhoods when you mess with their source code.  Giving a stern warning like that is actually a damn good thing, plus, when you see that much text, you don't automatically just click "yes", you read it first - at least I did the first time.

I've actually been seeing that message an awful lot lately as in the last few months MY SVN repo has done the following:

Dev Machine http, then onto remote server https, then back to dev machine http, then switched to apache ssl, so now dev machine https.

In all those times of relocating I've had it fail once, but all I needed to do was run a cleanup (I'd deleted a directory directly instead of through TortoiseSVN) and it was good to go.

It's nice that the TSVN and SVN devs take data integrity so seriously.

The problem isn't the wording, it's that you don't really know what you're yes-ing or no-ing to. If they added another line saying "Are you sure you want to relocate?" it would be fine. As it is, you have to guess, after being told that guessing wrong will make someone kick your puppy.

OMG I am laughing my ass off - thanks for the friday funny

Good lord, people.  Please, please don't save screen shots as
JPEGs.  The first and fourth screen shots caused me enough eye
strain to give me a headache.  Save your screen shots as PNGs!



For those who don't know, JPEG is a "lossy" format, which means it
saves inexact data, which is why there's all that "noise" around the
text in the image.  Most other formats save every pixel exactly.

True....

 

Also, I showed this to a coworker (not to be confused with a cow worker), and he said his favourite error message is the one when you boot up a computer and have no computer...

"No keyboard found, please press F1 to continue."

 

[^o)]

RiX0R:

Alex Papadimoulis:

*insert obligatory Yoda joke here*

Naw... that'd be "Gotten, information was not!", or "Not gotten, information was.". Yoda doesn't abbreviate :) Now, Stallone on the other hand...

CAPTCHA = appreciate. No, I don't.

> The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.



Wow, I must be dense... I've been staring at the smiley central ad and
I don't get it at all.  Why is this funny?  They don't
support Opera, but there are lots of sites that don't support Opera,
right?  He navigated to smileycentral.com (I can see that in the
address bar).  What am I missing?

makomk:

Gene Wirchenko:

Yes or No to what?

"Do you really want to do Relocate?" or maybe "Is the above correct advice?"

"Did this message scare you? [Yes][No]"

Yes.  ...  Oh, no.  Now, I am really scared.

Gene Wirchenko:

xrT:

wait...does this mean that Dreamweaver is expecting an error?

Maybe, it is. I have written code where I expect an error can occur. If the error occurs, I handle it. If another error occurs, I bail with a message about an unexpected error.

I think that Dreamweaver is getting overly excited over no error occurring though.

"Error: Unexpected lack of error"

I have had that, too.  I wrote a quick and dirty program that read a text file.  When it hit EOF and tried to read, that would throw an error.  My error routine simply closed the file and rethrew the error.  Any other error would result in the same.  I simply wanted to be sure that the file was closed.

Given a file not of infinite size, the program would have to throw an error sooner or later.  It did not.  Flaky compiler.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Anonymous:

> The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.



Wow, I must be dense... I've been staring at the smiley central ad and
I don't get it at all.  Why is this funny?  They don't
support Opera, but there are lots of sites that don't support Opera,
right?  He navigated to smileycentral.com (I can see that in the
address bar).  What am I missing?

"Smiley Central(tm)
Share your mood with someone today."

The sharing is a bit difficult.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

If GAIM truncated an away message of 0 bytes, what is the final size?  Half a nibble?

Does that make GAIM truly a "TWO BIT" application?

If you try to fail and succeed, what have you done?

ParkinT:

If you try to fail and succeed, what have you done?

1) You have covered all bases by doing both.

2) The statement is also ambiguous since it can be read as "fail and succeed" being what you are trying to do.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Gene Wirchenko:

ParkinT:

If you try to fail and succeed, what have you done?

The statement is also ambiguous since it can be read as "fail and succeed" being what you are trying to do.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

That paradox is partially why the statement is funny.

 

Sincerely,

Thom

Anonymous:

> The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.



Wow, I must be dense... I've been staring at the smiley central ad and
I don't get it at all.  Why is this funny?  They don't
support Opera, but there are lots of sites that don't support Opera,
right?  He navigated to smileycentral.com (I can see that in the
address bar).  What am I missing?

I think it's implied that they navigated to that smileycentral.com site from that banner ad that you see in the browser.  If Opera ad space is purchased directly from Opera (I dunno if that's true) then it's a wtf, otherwise, not so hilarious.

Anonymous:

> The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.



Wow, I must be dense... I've been staring at the smiley central ad and
I don't get it at all.  Why is this funny?  They don't
support Opera, but there are lots of sites that don't support Opera,
right?  He navigated to smileycentral.com (I can see that in the
address bar).  What am I missing?

Because, judging by the image in the banner (as this is the ad-supported version of Opera), this company PAID to advertise to Opera users.  Users who clicked on the ad went to a "use IE, losers" page.  That's more of a business WTF, but it's a WTF.

graywh:

So the TortoiseSVN dialog isn't really an error like the post says, but just a big warning about the operation you're about to perform.  So it's missing a question, but that's just grammar.

No WTF.

The real WTF is the degrading WTF quality on DailyWTF.

The missing question is simply bad grammer?  Which of the two button you choose depends on the answer to the missing question, so I'd say its omission qualifies as a bit more than a grammatical error.

"You are about to do an unbelievable amount of harm to your system.

[MissingQuestion]Since this is most certainly not what you intended, do you want to change your mind?[/MissingQuestion]

[YES][NO]
"

Anonymous:

> The Smiley Central ad is hilarious. What a waste of advertising money.

Wow, I must be dense... I've been staring at the smiley central ad and I don't get it at all.  Why is this funny?  They don't support Opera, but there are lots of sites that don't support Opera, right?  He navigated to smileycentral.com (I can see that in the address bar).  What am I missing?

I don't get it either. Maybe the Smileys come by default with IE and so telling people to get IE so they can download smileys is redundant?

Oh dear, so many people not getting the WTFs, then complaining that TDW has gone downhill -_-


 o <-- the point

 ?
._.
-+-      <---- you
 |
/ \


Let's go through them one at a time... (not that it'll help, since a couple have already been explained, only to have the next post ignore them and make the same mistake...)

The tortoiseSVN one isn't a WTF because of the message, it's a WTF because of the choice of answers -- "Warning: The relocate command can do bad things [Yes] [No]"

The smiley central one isn't a WTF because they don't allow opera in -- it's a WTF because they've bought advertising in opera's advertisement toolbar, which sends opera users to their site

The myspace one isn't a WTF because it's got some location-specific content, but that it lists "travel thousands of miles at your own expense to see this video" as a perfectly serious suggestion.

Someone mentioned that in the noughts and crosses error whoever went next would win -- I see two places where there are two X's with a gap between them, but nowhere with two O's...

Speaking of WTF, WTF is with WTF-forum's post formatting? It seems to break randomly, and in the oddest of ways...

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

After reading this fairly helpful error message, Brian Bull changed his mind and decided to Switch instead of Relocate. What would you have clicked in this case?

I think I would've unplugged my computer at this point. Or called the bomb squad.

>BiggBru

If I had to wager, I'd click "no" because I think it implicitly asked "are you sure you want to relocate?".  But I'd be really worried because the default was "yes" and maybe the programmer was trying to default me to the safe choice. I'd probably type the message into Google and see what came up.

If it were up to me, I'd unplug the network cable and then the computer.

Gene Wirchenko:

Anonymous:

I don't think the
subversion client one is a WTF. It actually helps newbies not to do a
stupid error and explains things very well...

I admit to
having never used Subversion, so I am not qualified to be a Subversion
newbie yet.  Still the question arises: how would this error
message help me?  I have no idea whether Yes or No is safe. 
For that matter, I have no idea whether either of them is safe.

Me, I've seen this once, an it did actually help me. It told me what I
was doing and that I was doing the right thing - I really wanted to
relocate. As pointed out before, a question at the end would make it
perfect though.

makomk:

RiX0R:

The only thing that's missing from this dialog is the question "Really perform the relocate? [Yes] [No]". The rest of the blurb is actually fairly useful because it warns you of bad stuff that might happen that otherwise you probably wouldn't have known about. I didn't know that relocates could be that harmful though -- if you relocate to the wrong URL, nothing stops you from relocating back, so the message might be a little overreacting.

Yep - the error message looks to be fairly accurate, though it requires a bit of knowledge of the terminology to understand fully. IIRC, svn switch --relocate, which is the command-line equivalent of this, just changes the repository URL (so it'd better be the same repository, or interesting things could happen), whereas ordinary svn switch is basically like svn up, but changes branches at the same time.

 

This is an error message? I thought it was a quiz.

 

I HATE dialogs that have buttons that don't match possible answers, or even worse don't have a question at all.

chrismcb:

makomk:

RiX0R:

The only thing that's missing from this dialog is the question "Really perform the relocate? [Yes] [No]". The rest of the blurb is actually fairly useful because it warns you of bad stuff that might happen that otherwise you probably wouldn't have known about. I didn't know that relocates could be that harmful though -- if you relocate to the wrong URL, nothing stops you from relocating back, so the message might be a little overreacting.

Yep - the error message looks to be fairly accurate, though it requires a bit of knowledge of the terminology to understand fully. IIRC, svn switch --relocate, which is the command-line equivalent of this, just changes the repository URL (so it'd better be the same repository, or interesting things could happen), whereas ordinary svn switch is basically like svn up, but changes branches at the same time.

 

This is an error message? I thought it was a quiz.

 

I HATE dialogs that have buttons that don't match possible answers, or even worse don't have a question at all.

s/error message/warning/, but yes it is one - however much it may look like an ESP test.

the Very Stupid Thing about the Tortoise dialog, though, is that it comes after you've asked for a relocation and entered the new location of your repository.

This means that if you pick the "wrong" choice then you're kinda fucked: if you click Yes (as the implied question is "Do you want to relocate?" indeed) the relocation starts immediately.

In fact, would they so much as swap the dialogs (first this one then asking for the new location) the workflow would become much more interresting and this message would actually be useful. They could swap it to a regular alert message too, since you'd have the ability to pick whether you'll really relocate or not right at the next dialog.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Nope. Absolutely nothing wrong with this error message. Concisely, politely, and in plain language, it tells you what the problem is, and exactly how to solve it. Textbook usability.

We are unable to send your message to Josef Stalin because he is dead. Please reanimate him then try sending the message again.

--Rank