Comment On Pop-up Potpourri: Sixth Time is the Charm

Well, I hate you too!

1st!

Would I be the first one to reply?!

Alex Papadimoulis:

The following dialog box reminded Stephan of the ever popular cliché, A Number is worth a thousand words ...

 

An exception has been caught while processing the query "SELECT Life,Universe,Everything FROM earth":

42

gadamn captcha

Alex Papadimoulis:

Juha Nieminen was surprised to see that he could actually take a stroll around the planet before his 4GB-worth-of movies finished copying ...

 

Just over 637 days... they better be worth it!

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Alex Papadimoulis:

Ah the joys of the numerical comparison operator with signed datatypes of differing bit-length.

ROTFL!!! Very good sequence, thank you. This site really rocks!

Nice WTFs

OneFactor:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Ah the joys of the numerical comparison operator with signed datatypes of differing bit-length.

Hehe.  What's funny to me is that I'm pretty sure I know exactly who wrote that line of code.

Actually, the "I HATE YOU" response is part of the CVS protocol. It's
the servers way of saying "bugger off". The opposite is, of course, "I
LOVE YOU".



http://www.elegosoft.com/cvs/cvsclient.html

The "I HATE YOU" message is actually part of the pserver CVS protocol. The CVS server sends the string "I HATE YOU" whenever you try to login with wrong username/password. If you supply a correct username/password the server sends "I LOVE YOU" ;-) Who says protocol writers can't be allowed some fun?

Maurits:

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Sometimes if you hold down or repeatedly press a key during the BIOS load screen, it will return the keyboard error (At least that is what has happened on my Dell desktop)

I knew a VB programmer who included "On Error Goto" in every function, and in the body of the goto portion was simply a messagebox that displayed the ID # of the last record that was processed. The users were very confused why they'd occaisionally see error messages that simply said "10" or "2".

I've seen the Windows file transfer time problem before. It tends to happen on big files. I have a feeling the person who submitted that one did a little Photoshop to the image to change the filename though. You don't want to submit that error with the original name of "Hentai tentacle rape kitten schoolgirl flatulence seppuku porn teen angel cocaine HOT!!!!!! (pls upload or msg me for trade).mpg"

Alex Papadimoulis:

The following dialog box reminded Stephan of the ever popular cliché, A Number is worth a thousand words ...

Seems like someone forgot to use strerror()...this would otherwise give you the message "Input/Output Error"

Anonymous:

Actually, the "I HATE YOU" response is part of the CVS protocol. It's
the servers way of saying "bugger off". The opposite is, of course, "I
LOVE YOU".



http://www.elegosoft.com/cvs/cvsclient.html

And there I was thinking that somebody else was just having the sort of day I'm having today and accidentally left the message in the code.  Hey, am I the only person whose ever left a debug message explicitly insulting one of the QA team by name in the code?

Anonymous:

Anonymous:

Actually, the "I HATE YOU" response is part of the CVS protocol. It's
the servers way of saying "bugger off". The opposite is, of course, "I
LOVE YOU".



http://www.elegosoft.com/cvs/cvsclient.html

And
there I was thinking that somebody else was just having the sort of day
I'm having today and accidentally left the message in the code. 
Hey, am I the only person whose ever left a debug message explicitly
insulting one of the QA team by name in the code?

I just put the insult into the name of a function or variable. 
That way I don't have to worry about it ever being visible to the
customer ;)

Alex Papadimoulis:

Jan Vilimek was disappointed that the new hard drive was still too ... erm, small? ... to restore a database ...

 

Well, "937689088" is > "9223372045534229100" :)

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Juha Nieminen was surprised to see that he could actually
take a stroll around the planet before his 4GB-worth-of movies finished
copying ...

 

Just over 637 days... they better be worth it!

Nah, that's only because the default Windows colours aren't being
used.   Every pixel has to be recalculated for each part of
the animation.  :)

That last one really did make me laugh out loud - who knew that Java could be so evil?

Ok, I'll let it off since it's just a silly CVS error message.  Still funny though

Excellent observation!



> Insanity : (n.) Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.



Where did you get that saying? My
mom has said that for a long time, and I'm curious to know the source.
I always thought she just came up with it.



I once left "Danger, Will Robinson!" in an error message that should have never been encountered. Oops!

Maurits:

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Unless it's a PS/2 Keyboard. Then there's the whole "fry-the-motherboard" thing....

The insanity quote apparently came from good old Albert:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins133991.html

procyon112:

I just put the insult into the name of a function or variable.  That way I don't have to worry about it ever being visible to the customer ;)

mmyeah, not so much.  Remember way back when, Microsoft had trouble trying to explain the presence of a symbol whose name was "NSAKey"?  Some lunatics will dump the symbol table of your code and pore through it for interesting words, names, obscenities, etc.

I was bored at work one day and took to running QuickBooks through a debugger, I found the following message box is possible is an item in the db file is not set to 1...

http://www.red-stars.net/pictures/quickbooksdebug.gif

Alex Papadimoulis:

Juha Nieminen was surprised to see that he could actually take a stroll around the planet before his 4GB-worth-of movies finished copying ...

The next error (snapped by Chuck Caplan) is not really a pop-up. In fact, we've all probably seen it countless times. But really, this classic combination definitely belongs in the collection ...

He's gonna have to wait almost two years to watch his porn!

A couple years ago I was working for a consulting company on  a web app.  The app had the ability to handle custom error conditions which, along with the corresponding custom error message, which were stored in the database.  We had a "base" version of this app which was then supposed to be customized for specific client implementations.

I worked on the base system and created a bizarre error condition in the database that should never happen--when a client-specific version of the system was implemented, they would override this error condition.  As a result, I felt comfortable having the error message quote the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, boldly proclaiming "You have encountered an error.  No soup for you!"

Many versions of this app went into production with no problems over a six month time period.  Then I took a position at another company.  About three weeks later a client tester was testing their new implementation of the app and got the message.  All hell broke loose!  The client and my old account manager didn't find it too amusing, but my former developer colleagues found it hilarious.

Since then, I save such humerous quotes for comments in the code that have no possibility of ever being displayed. [:D]

Anonymous:

Maurits:

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Unless it's a PS/2 Keyboard. Then there's the whole "fry-the-motherboard" thing....

Huh?  this sounds interesting...

Anonymous:

Maurits:

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Sometimes if you hold down or repeatedly press a key during the BIOS load screen, it will return the keyboard error (At least that is what has happened on my Dell desktop)

Yea, if you hold down a key while it's booting up, it'll swamp the keyboard buffer, and the BIOS will read that (correctly) as a keyboard error...Maybe you've got a stuck key, or maybe you spilled coke on it and ALL the keys are freaking out, so it stops execution, and tells you to add a keyboard.

BiggBru:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Juha Nieminen was surprised to see that he could actually take a stroll around the planet before his 4GB-worth-of movies finished copying ...

 

Just over 637 days... they better be worth it!

Not too bad, this is only 2 years.  I have seen (unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot) it estimating more than 20 years.  Admittedly I was copying some big stuff over 802.11b.

I submitted the copying dialog snapshot. It happened to me in Win98
when I copied over 4GB of files from one directory to another, and it
showed the wacky time all the way through (the actualy copying just
took a few minutes). I swear the snapshot is original and unedited. And
no, it was not porn.

adajos:

A couple years ago I was working for a consulting company on  a web app.  The app had the ability to handle custom error conditions which, along with the corresponding custom error message, which were stored in the database.  We had a "base" version of this app which was then supposed to be customized for specific client implementations.

I worked on the base system and created a bizarre error condition in the database that should never happen--when a client-specific version of the system was implemented, they would override this error condition.  As a result, I felt comfortable having the error message quote the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, boldly proclaiming "You have encountered an error.  No soup for you!"

Many versions of this app went into production with no problems over a six month time period.  Then I took a position at another company.  About three weeks later a client tester was testing their new implementation of the app and got the message.  All hell broke loose!  The client and my old account manager didn't find it too amusing, but my former developer colleagues found it hilarious.

Since then, I save such humerous quotes for comments in the code that have no possibility of ever being displayed. [:D]

Yea, I had someone send me a screenshot of an error pop-up from a program I'd written. They wanted to know why this error code was, "This will never happen". You'd think I'd have known better. =P

procyon112:

I just put the insult into the name of a function or variable. 
That way I don't have to worry about it ever being visible to the
customer ;)

At one job, we had to support both Unix and VMS with the same code base.  One of the things that annoyed a lot of developers was that you had to use a different exit code in VMS or Unix (a "normal" exit is 0 in Unix, but 1 in VMS).  One developer defined a variable "brain_dead_vms" as either 0 or 1, and used that as his exit code.

Our biggest VMS customer called us up one day to ask if "brain_dead_vms" was an indication that we were going to drop support for VMS.  We assured him it was not, and put a big "#define brain_dead_vms exit_code" at the top of that developer's code.  Evidently these guys liked to dump the symbol table on our code every time we shipped them an update.

For reasons I no longer remember, we used to ship binaries to Unix customers, but for VMS installations we shipped the library files and linked them together on-site.  I don't think either Unix or VMS had dynamic library support back then.

Anonymous:

I was bored at work one day and took to running QuickBooks through a debugger, I found the following message box is possible is an item in the db file is not set to 1...

http://www.red-stars.net/pictures/quickbooksdebug.gif

Haha, that's classic! I put my name in it if I'm working in one place for a long time, because if someone hit's one of THOSE conditions, I want to know about it, but I take all that stuff out when I leave, so no one comes around to reproach me with it later.

Anonymous:

Anonymous:

Maurits:

It's been said before, but I'll say it again...

The "Press F1 to continue" includes an implicit PLUG IN THE KEYBOARD FIRST, THEN

Unless it's a PS/2 Keyboard. Then there's the whole "fry-the-motherboard" thing....

Huh?  this sounds interesting...

You're not supposed to connect/unplug PS/2 devices without first powering down:

One of the major headaches now is that PS/2 mice and keyboards are generally not hotpluggable (yerricde says the original PS/2 did this, but as with everything, clones seem to often screw it up). If you want to be absolutely sure that nothing fries when you switch PS/2 mouse or keyboard to another, you need to power the computer down! If you're really lucky, unplugging and putting thing back may work.

I think at one time I did fry my computer's mouse port, and later my display became a little corrupted with darkened lines in my screen (not tied to the monitor), and my microphone input doesn't seem to work. (I know, what a piece o' crap!) I don't know if any of that is related, or due to my pulling and plugging with abandon.

R.Flowers:

You're not supposed to connect/unplug PS/2 devices without first powering down:

You should also not let your pet bird chew on your mouse cord while the computer is powered up.  Trust me on this.

I believe that error messages should be short, descriptive and as informative as necessary.

But sometimes -- usually after 7 pm -- you have errors that you assume will only occur in development, and you have a little fun with them.

I wrote one such error message a few years ago.  I was writing an installer and had the problem that launching it from within the IDE with debug enabled would provide a different app domain than if I launched it in other ways.  So to hack the thing, I wrote a piece of logic that used a hard coded location for configuration files when the filename you used to launch the app wasn't the same as the filename variable of the application.  To inform me of this kludge, a modal info message was launched, featuring nothing but a a lyric from the Biz Markie song I was listening to at the time: "Oh, snap."

I got the installer working, and sent it off to the technical team, who were visiting a client site first thing in the morning.

Next day I'm awoken at 5 am.  It's the head of the technical team, and she has two words for me.  "Oh, snap?!?"  Seems
the client's CD Rom was pretty twitchy and had disconnected itself from the IDE bus shortly after loading the installer into memory.  Thus the launch location was no longer available, and my test was failing.

I realized the work around almost immediately.  I had the installer create the config files in my hard coded location.  Thank god the message was so short, descriptive and informative.

Hasn't Jan Vilimek heard of using Alt+PrtScr before?  Or at least crop the other windows, but Alt+PrtScr would remove the hassle of not including other windows, i mean every windows user knows that....            doom....oops that should be elsewhere

adajos:

I worked on the base system and created a bizarre error condition in the database that should never happen--when a client-specific version of the system was implemented, they would override this error condition.  As a result, I felt comfortable having the error message quote the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, boldly proclaiming "You have encountered an error.  No soup for you!"

Many versions of this app went into production with no problems over a six month time period.  Then I took a position at another company.  About three weeks later a client tester was testing their new implementation of the app and got the message.  All hell broke loose!  The client and my old account manager didn't find it too amusing, but my former developer colleagues found it hilarious.

I don't quite understand that.  Is "No Soup for you!" really offensive to anyone?  If I bought a piece of software and had a similar error message pop up, I'd chuckle a bit and move on.  I really don't understand how such a thing could upset -any-one.  ??

Satanicpuppy:

Yea, I had someone send me a screenshot of an error pop-up from a program I'd written. They wanted to know why this error code was, "This will never happen". You'd think I'd have known better. =P

Raise your hand if you have ever made an eror message like this.


*raiss hand*

R.Flowers:

...due to my pulling and plugging with abandon.

You and me, bro?  We are living on the edge.

Like dasmb, I write installers.  I just recalled writing an installation that, when selecting "change" was selected from Add/Remove Programs, demanded a password from the user.  The explanation on the dialog as to why this was happening was to make sure the customer was, and I quote "legit".  It got a few laughs, and a complaint from our overzealous HCI person, and I just said "I'm not sure what the actual text should be, so tell me and I'll change it".  No one ever told me so that's what it went out as.

I know, that was my impression at first too.  Then I got to thinking that if I had gotten my company to pay a consulting firm half a million or more dollars to deliver a system and got the impression that they weren't taking it seriously I might be irritated too.  At the time I was billing out at $230/hour and the PM and BA were closer to $400/hr.

Still though, sometimes you just have to laugh.

ptomblin:

procyon112:

I just put the insult into the name of a function or variable. 
That way I don't have to worry about it ever being visible to the
customer ;)

At one job, we had to support both Unix and VMS with the same code base.  One of the things that annoyed a lot of developers was that you had to use a different exit code in VMS or Unix (a "normal" exit is 0 in Unix, but 1 in VMS).  One developer defined a variable "brain_dead_vms" as either 0 or 1, and used that as his exit code

Along the same lines... I once worked on a set of internal APIS. One day as we neared shipping we were called on to help one of the API clients. Apparently they had designed themselves into a corner and needed some help. There were two possible solutions, they could rewrite the code to do the right thing. Or we could kludge something up for them. It work, but would be way less than ideal. They decided they didn't have the resources to do anything about it. And so our team was left with offering the kludge, or leaving the end users with a VERY bad design.
So we did the kludge, and do make the kludge work, a flag was passed into the API. Internally (I forget the EXACT name) the flag was something like "m_fBecauseMYUISucks." The variable name was a little ruder even.

Several months after I left the company, a friend was telling me that he went to a lecture on good comments/variable names. Apparently the company decided to start giving the source code to some customers, and decided to make sure the source code was, uhm, professional. And apparently my variable name was a shining example of how NOT to name a variable.

I beamed with pride! And just wished I remembered the exact name of the variable.

johnl:

The insanity quote apparently came from good old Albert:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins133991.html

Also attributed to Benjamin Franklin

 

Re. the third one -- ah yes, the good old Alderson Loop.



From the Jargon
File:

This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the proper code would be called.

"And there I was thinking that somebody else was just having the sort of day I'm having today and accidentally left the message in the code."

I left a messgae saying "Select a client first you idiot" in an inhouse app i wrote, i guess i forgot to take it out, i got a message from someone that was using (after i left) one guy wasnt impressed, but my friend that was still working there loved it.

Otac0n:

Satanicpuppy:

Yea, I had someone
send me a screenshot of an error pop-up from a program I'd written.
They wanted to know why this error code was, "This will never happen".
You'd think I'd have known better. =P

Raise your hand if you have ever made an eror message like this.

*raiss hand*

Yes, and I usually tell them that it was to make sure that whoever
ended up troubleshooting/debugging it would know that it was something
that was supposed to be impossible. That's important because it
suggests that there's a deeper logic bug involved, so hopefully they'll
know to look deeper and try to cure the disease, not just the symptom.



'Course, this kind of message is more appropriate in an error-log for
an in-house server app than a dialog for an end-user GUI app.

johnl:

Like dasmb, I write installers.  I just recalled writing an installation that, when selecting "change" was selected from Add/Remove Programs, demanded a password from the user.  The explanation on the dialog as to why this was happening was to make sure the customer was, and I quote "legit".  It got a few laughs, and a complaint from our overzealous HCI person, and I just said "I'm not sure what the actual text should be, so tell me and I'll change it".  No one ever told me so that's what it went out as.

legitimate?