Comment On Pop-up Potpourri: Se7en Deadly Messages

Unregistered and maybe first

First post? Eh, whatever.

I've come to realise that the amount of time to rent a truck (above) is approximately the same as the amount of time to get anything on DailyWTF, so I'll just post a few here that I found :)

http://insecurities.org/junk/that_must_be_it.png

http://insecurities.org/junk/non_microsoft.png

http://insecurities.org/junk/discjuggler.png

lol. i like the piss me off option..... (as i users had a choice!)

Anonymous:

Unregistered and maybe first

Damn WTF forum software ate two of my legitimate posts, and worked for First Post MacGoo here. Where's the justice, I ask ya?

Ahhhh, signed vs. unsigned numbers and non-arbitrarily lengthed variables......but that only explains 3 for 11 of them.

I liked the "Something just went wrong..." dialog in prose format especially since there was a typo where "result" was mispelled "resulst".

I like the "Please
read the following readme carefully" (OCD Commander).  Guess they
decided to have some fun with the OCD types...

I guess that's what Robert gets for trying to try Linux.

Just kidding all,  I used to see that in FireFox all of the time.

Sincerely,

Not Gene Wirchenko or Richard Nixon or David Hasselhoff or Germany or Norm MacDonald and I don't have Herpes!

Completely off topic, but I wonder what window manager Erich Kitzmüller is using. 's quite nice.

Matt Nelson sure learned his lesson when he tried to rent a truck from Penske. Everyone knows you should book at least two millennia in advance ...

Naughtius Maximus could see the Empire was in decline. The wisest course of action was to move. Unforuntunately, the delivery truck would not be invented for another 1900 years...

I used Penske to move... they probably were waiting on me to bring the truck back. 

I have gotten those $0.00 half.com emails before. I was like "Oh man, I gotta get my hands on some of that sweet sweet cash."

Anonymous:

Completely off topic, but I wonder what window manager Erich Kitzmüller is using. 's quite nice.

That's KDE with the DarkBlue theme.

Alex Papadimoulis:

 

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

Off topic, I've sumbled upon a site that ranks the popularity of programming languages. Click the link below; it might just surprise you.

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

With all the sincerety of a baboon's ass,

>BiggBru

Uh oh, maybe I pissed someone off by not signing up first.



As for i, I think your third link is a disgruntled programmer going to his next job and writting tip of the day.



Sincerly,

Who cares.



*can I have mayonaise with that*

ammoQ:

Anonymous:

Completely off topic, but I wonder what window manager Erich Kitzmüller is using. 's quite nice.

That's KDE with the DarkBlue theme.

I have to correct myself, the name is "Dark BlueIce v4 3.2.x by Lee Olson"

to be fair, in regards to the "communication error with programmer" message, StagCom is referring to a flash memory programmer...

still funny though

BiggBru:

IMO, every error message should be entertaining.
Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as
well try to make light of the situation.

I guess after some time those messages annoy you aswell. At least I would shout then: "HAHA, VERY FUNNY. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WRITE GOOD CODE NOT BEING A CLOWN, MORON!"





(please, god, let this post not be fckd up by the forum-software)

"...probably the resulst of poor programming..."

hmmm...probably.

Genuine message from orange (mobile phone) web site for managing accounts...

"...probably the resulst of poor programming..."

Hey at least he admits to it!

CAPTCHA = bozo?  Is someone trying to tell me something?

John Smallberries:

"...probably the resulst of poor programming..."

hmmm...probably.

ya that one jumped out at me too, summed it up nicely.

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

 

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

One of the worst suggestions possible; by giving some silly error message you are insulting the intelligent of the users of your program (by showing an obvious lack of respect for their time - I would not want to read some lengthy joke or rhyme, looking for a reason for the error) and come off as quite unprofessional.

sincerely,
Richard Nixon

ellion:

BiggBru:

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

I guess after some time those messages annoy you aswell. At least I would shout then: "HAHA, VERY FUNNY. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WRITE GOOD CODE NOT BEING A CLOWN, MORON!"

I have to agree. So I just lost 30 minutes of work because of a programmer error, and the programmer thinks it's a joke. Makes me want to scratch a joke in the hood of his car. Har har.

Just having to click "OK" to a crash message box annoys me. I don't see the point in putting up a crash message if it can't be helpful. You know what I would like to see when a program crashes? A big animated crack propagate quickly across the window, then the window is gone. What else is there to say?

--RA

It's not your fault. It's... Microsoft!

Richard Nixon:

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

 

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

One of the worst suggestions possible; by giving some silly error message you are insulting the intelligent of the users of your program (by showing an obvious lack of respect for their time - I would not want to read some lengthy joke or rhyme, looking for a reason for the error) and come off as quite unprofessional.

sincerely,
Richard Nixon

Meh. As a programmer, I want the error message to be clear, concise, and informative.

However, working in an environment where production times are very short, and we don't have the resources to thoroughly bugcheck code, I tend to put demi-humorous messages in for the errors. I do it because a) it's much easier for an unskilled user to remember "The baboon's ass error" than it is for them to remember "Active X exception 42" and b) So they are in a mildly better mood when the pick up the phone to yell at me.

ellion:

BiggBru:

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

I guess after some time those messages annoy you aswell. At least I would shout then: "HAHA, VERY FUNNY. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO WRITE GOOD CODE NOT BEING A CLOWN, MORON!"


(please, god, let this post not be fckd up by the forum-software)

Richard Nixon:

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

IMO, every error message should be entertaining. Since the user is probably mad at the program crashing, you might as well try to make light of the situation.

One of the worst suggestions possible; by giving some silly error message you are insulting the intelligence of the users of your program (by showing an obvious lack of respect for their time - I would not want to read some lengthy joke or rhyme, looking for a reason for the error) and come off as quite unprofessional.

sincerely,
Richard Nixon

I guess you guys have a pretty good point. After reading the same message 50 times, I'm sure it becomes much less entertaining. I'm sure the programmer had a blast writing it, though. [:)]

<sincereness> Sincerely, </sincereness>

>BiggBru

ammoQ:

ammoQ:

Anonymous:

Completely off topic, but I wonder what window manager Erich Kitzmüller is using. 's quite nice.

That's KDE with the DarkBlue theme.

I have to correct myself, the name is "Dark BlueIce v4 3.2.x by Lee Olson"

It exists for XP as well, called Corona (comes with styleXP, also available at  http://www.themexp.org/preview.php?mid=11359&type=vs&view=views&page=&cat=&name=Corona+is+now.zip [beware, themexp stuffs them with spyware! get a wise decompiler first. not sure if it's available elsewhere]).

Anonymous:

Genuine message from orange (mobile phone) web site for managing accounts...

I guess the following points you are supposed to agree to are the ones in the colon ":".
What if I only agree with points that sit at the bottom of the line?

Rank Amateur:

... I don't see the point in putting up a
crash message if it can't be helpful. You know what I would like to see
when a program crashes? A big animated crack propagate quickly across
the window, then the window is gone. What else is there to say?

But it is helpful!  It provides an error code, and an actual process to try and track down the problem.



What I don't like is Visual Studio's auto-relaunch... the program crashes when I'm shutting it down. 
So what does it do?  It pops up a "Send report to Microsoft"
box... click ok...  Visual Studio comes back up again, like a
whack-a-mole or something. Arrrgh!

Alex Papadimoulis:

And I thought my Internet connection was slow ... glad I don't have Robert Hesketh's provider ...

I've encountered this one before. Some web browsers use signed integers to count the number of bytes downloaded, so after you get past 2 gigs of your download the display ends up displaying negative numbers.

Anonymoose:

Rank Amateur:

... I don't see the point in putting up a crash message if it can't be helpful. You know what I would like to see when a program crashes? A big animated crack propagate quickly across the window, then the window is gone. What else is there to say?

But it is helpful!  It provides an error code, and an actual process to try and track down the problem.

What I don't like is Visual Studio's auto-relaunch... the program crashes when I'm shutting it down.  So what does it do?  It pops up a "Send report to Microsoft" box... click ok...  Visual Studio comes back up again, like a whack-a-mole or something. Arrrgh!

Hmm. Maybe it would be helpful to have a messagebox with buttons for "Restart VS" and "Oh, chuck it, I'm going home", or words to that effect.

An interpretable error code? Oh, well, that's different. I was thinking more of Aunt Tilly and MS Word. I admit I wrote a DMS script which had a crash message something like "Call tech support at <###-####> and tell them you have a Code <##>."

I also labeled the message box "System Bug!" which my boss didn't like because it meant admitting our script has a bug ...which of course would be true. Better than blaming the user.

User at training: "Hey, it crashed when I pressed Esc."

Trainer: "So don't press Esc."

Me: "Arrrrgh"

--RA

Anonymous:

Alex Papadimoulis:

And I thought my Internet connection was slow ... glad I don't have Robert Hesketh's provider ...

I've encountered this one before. Some web browsers use signed integers
to count the number of bytes downloaded, so after you get past 2 gigs
of your download the display ends up displaying negative
numbers.

That part is easy to understand.. but how do you get -531.-8?  Is
that actually a positive number? wtf!  The only thing i can think
of is they compute the decimal part seperately, but why?

Rank Amateur:

Hmm. Maybe it would be helpful to have a messagebox with buttons for "Restart VS" and "Oh, chuck it, I'm going home", or words to that effect.

Oddly enough, that's what the Gnome crash handler does - pops up a message with one button to restart the app and another to give up. I have to admit it is quite handy.

KDE's just has the one "OK" button which kills the app, but given the way they so love copying Windows there's a good chance it'll get changed to restart the application whether you want to or not :(

anonymous_:

Anonymous:

Alex Papadimoulis:

And I thought my Internet connection was slow ... glad I don't have Robert Hesketh's provider ...

I've encountered this one before. Some web browsers use signed integers
to count the number of bytes downloaded, so after you get past 2 gigs
of your download the display ends up displaying negative
numbers.

That part is easy to understand.. but how do you get -531.-8?  Is
that actually a positive number? wtf!  The only thing i can think
of is they compute the decimal part seperately, but why?

Duh! If you calculate them both separately, you can use integer math instead of floating point. Everybody knows that makes the program faster.

capcha=salad
capcha#2=pickles

He is probably uploading and not downloading.

Anonymous:

He is probably uploading and not downloading.

Yeah. He's uploading... with firefox's download manager. Which only says "download" twice.

That "-531.-8" happens because the speed is calculated from the download size. Since thie computer sees the downlooad size as negative, the speed is negative as well.

Holy Freaking A! Alex!? Can we please edit our posts for, like, one minute?

Our BA's specify the exact text of all our error messages (well all the
ones they can think of).  I wouldn't put it past one of them to
have a
message like "Communication error with Programmer" when an error occurs
that they could see coming because they knew the developer didn't
really understand the business rules, or had implemented a different
solution to the one they proposed.





And I really like the baboon's ass one.  It's a bit long but at least
it acknowledges that the user is actually a human being, as is the
developer.

Otac0n:

That "-531.-8" happens because the speed is
calculated from the download size. Since thie computer sees the
downlooad size as negative, the speed is negative as well.

WTF #2:  it gives the file size as -17665622 kB and also says "unknown file size".

woodle:

Otac0n:

That "-531.-8" happens because the speed is
calculated from the download size. Since thie computer sees the
downlooad size as negative, the speed is negative as well.

WTF #2:  it gives the file size as -17665622 kB and also says "unknown file size".

Oh, so you know what file size -17665622 kB really is? Well good for you mister fancypants.

For people who actually read the comments, here is a criminally awful error dialog I got yesterday:



This could be a useful dialog... if I were debugging the installer. As it is, the "OK" button should read "Who the fuck cares?".

Alex Papadimoulis:

In fact, some programs, like the one that Ashley Ross was using, are so complex that they actually require a programmer to sit there full-time at the server and respond to requests. I guess the programmer had to go to the bathroom, or something ...

Sorry, I have to cry "Foul" on this one. StagCom is a program to drive EPROM and IC Programmers:

StagCom (http://www.stag.co.uk/products/stagcom.htm)

So, if the software is unable to communicate with the PIC Programmer, such an error is totally acceptible.

The WTF here is the minus sign '-', just before the digit 8.

It should have been -531.8 and not -531.-8

Anonymous:

Sorry, I have to cry "Foul" on this one. StagCom is a program to drive EPROM and IC Programmers:

StagCom (http://www.stag.co.uk/products/stagcom.htm)

So, if the software is unable to communicate with the PIC Programmer, such an error is totally acceptible.

Heh - I guessed that was probably it.

-531.-8 is because ...
the speed is calculated using byte/sec, then divided by 1024...
.-8 comes from the remainder part...
In C, the % operator give a negative remainder when the number is negative

Alex Papadimoulis:

Continuing on, Erich Kitzmüller

found a bit of irony in this Error reporting dialog ...

Okay, so the real WTF here is that Mozilla is still using a Motif application somewhere, somewhy, somehow - after unceremoniously throwing all Motif crap away when building the XUL. It's Motif. Of course it doesn't work with all this newfangled new stuff like "fonts". Heck, Athena stuff at least fails tolerably (ie "if you can't find a good font, use the most unreadable you can find, but not the completely illegible one so the user won't be bothered to fix it"), but Motif is an eternal mystery from ages past that we should not dig up and, if we value our sanity, never try to comprehend.

My favorite error message:

Rank Amateur:

Just having to click "OK" to a crash message box annoys me.

When the image viewer "xv" puts up an error dialog, the dismiss button says "Bummer!".

woodle:

Otac0n:

That "-531.-8" happens because the speed is
calculated from the download size. Since thie computer sees the
downlooad size as negative, the speed is negative as well.

WTF #2:  it gives the file size as -17665622 kB and also says "unknown file size".

Um, no.

That is the "number of bytes completed so far" not "total file size".

 -dave-

Anonymous:

For people who actually read the comments, here is a criminally awful error dialog I got yesterday:



This could be a useful dialog... if I were debugging the installer. As it is, the "OK" button should read "Who the fuck cares?".

And why's that awful? If you were installing DX8.1 and it quit apparently doing nothing, wouldn't you wonder what's up?

You have to keep in mind that the MO for Windows programs is to give some sort of indication that they were successful, unlike the standard Unix "if you don't see output it worked" idea.

For the second one, I see this quite a lot as I like to have as a windows theme a dark blue background with white text - much more restful than staring at a white screen all day.  However, when applications use the user's windows text colour without using the user's background colour this is what happens. I use gold text now because of this precise problem.