• Steve the Cynic (unregistered)

    I've never posted Italian messages.

    (first attempt, trying someone's hint about previewing first)

  • nothingspecial (unregistered)

    COMMENT NOT FOUND

  • Fist (unregistered)

    A purple monkey dishwasher is just something a technitian needs to do his job. Don't worry about it.

  • (cs)

    Actually those are Unicode values expressed as decimal escape codes. In UTF-8, Łą is 0xc5 0x81 0xc4 0x85.

  • Indrora (unregistered)

    The first error is one that's a problem with the Starbucks POS system. It attempts to look up the name of who was working your register. However, if it cant find you because you have a name like John Smith or Jose Garcia (or you've only worked there less than a year or so) it simply says "NOT FOUND".

    Now given the fact that most people dont work at Starbucks for more than about a year, or if they do they're either desperate or stupid, there's a lot of "NOT FOUND"s.

    As for the Purple Monkey Dishwasher, it sounds like someone was writing their dialogs in Pig Latin so that they'd be sure to translate all of the localizable strings. Its a trick Microsoft uses, and there are occasionally strings in MS products that still have flakes of Pig Latin.

  • (cs)

    "I installed Windows Vista-" Well, there's your problem.

  • whatever (unregistered)

    FYI, "purple monkey dishwasher" is a Simpsons quote.

  • (cs)

    A+ for Simpsons reference. F for having it on an error message in a production system.

  • Ha (unregistered)

    "cancled and tryied"

  • Ann Onymous (unregistered)

    "the result of this latter activity doesn't reassure me that I've gained anything."

    Microsoft have clearly decided to go for extra geek kudos with the obscure minus-one-based indexing scheme.

  • P. Edant (unregistered)

    Not only is CSN not an acronym he's heard of, it's not an acronym at all. lrn2acronym

  • (cs)

    Obviously what the receipt is trying to tell you is that the price of the coffee is $4.04!

  • SR (unregistered)

    Re: Purple Monkey Dishwasher. In the days of writing ColdFusion webapps with just a fancy text editor (i.e. not a proper IDE) I'd leave "banana" to bookmark somewhere in a file I wanted to get back to after checking/tweaking elsewhere. I chose "banana" as I could be pretty sure it wouldn't be present as a variable name or whatever. I never had one leak out to production, though.

    If that's what the original code-monkey was doing he should know there are things such as comments. If not, WTF?

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Ceci n'est pas un cafe

  • Bruce W (unregistered) in reply to whatever
    whatever:
    FYI, "purple monkey dishwasher" is a Simpsons quote.

    It's from "The PTA Disbands"

  • (cs)
    Dave Cartwright:
    "I installed Windows Vista. Then I installed the first Service Pack. Then I installed the Service Pack that comes after that" [ ... ]
    Ah, I can see his problem here. He meant to install the service pack that comes after that one, but he accidentally went and installed the service pack that comes before that one instead. A simple mistake, easily made!
  • QuixoticCoder (unregistered)

    Purple Monkey Dishwasher! A sublime Simpsons reference right there in the code. I have to believe it was intentional that it ended up in production.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    "ATTENTION: Only enter leave requests for the current calendar year."

    That must make it a bit difficult if you want to request leave for January 2nd (or January 1st, if you live in a country where the first is not a public holiday).

  • Bim Job (unregistered) in reply to SR
    SR:
    Re: Purple Monkey Dishwasher. In the days of writing ColdFusion webapps with just a fancy text editor (i.e. not a proper IDE) I'd leave "banana" to bookmark somewhere in a file I wanted to get back to after checking/tweaking elsewhere. I chose "banana" as I could be pretty sure it wouldn't be present as a variable name or whatever. I never had one leak out to production, though.

    If that's what the original code-monkey was doing he should know there are things such as comments. If not, WTF?

    Banana seems to be quite popular.

    Back in the days of supporting a client application on Win 3.1, a colleague used to search for "Unexpected Error" in various DLLs -- I think it was "Unexpected Error;" there were so many to choose from -- and replace it with "Unexploded Banana." Oh, how we laughed.

    Right up to the point where the banana exploded.

    What is an "Expected Error," anyway?

  • Incourced (unregistered) in reply to Ha
    Ha:
    "cancled and tryied"

    occoured cencle plesae

  • Milan Cermak (unregistered)

    I know what CSN is. It is an acronym and it stands for Czech State Norm. And for that error message... AFAIK there is no Norm for database sequences. User should create one for sure.

  • Anna Krzysztof (unregistered)

    I guess I didn't have to pixelate my last name after all.

  • anon (unregistered)

    "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" makes sense. Users won't remember things like "ERRNO 472", but they'll remember "the computer said something about a purple monkey dishwasher", and whoever's giving support can know exactly what error message it is.

  • Code Monkey's Manager Rob (unregistered) in reply to SR
    SR:
    Re: Purple Monkey Dishwasher. In the days of writing ColdFusion webapps with just a fancy text editor (i.e. not a proper IDE) I'd leave "banana" to bookmark somewhere in a file I wanted to get back to after checking/tweaking elsewhere. I chose "banana" as I could be pretty sure it wouldn't be present as a variable name or whatever. I never had one leak out to production, though.

    If that's what the original code-monkey was doing he should know there are things such as comments. If not, WTF?

    Code Monkey doesn't like bananas.

    Code Monkey like Fritos Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew Code Monkey very simple man with big warm fuzzy secret heart Code Monkey like you

  • (cs) in reply to Bim Job
    Bim Job:
    What is an "Expected Error," anyway?
    One that you've put in code to handle. E.g. when opening a file, you might expect ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND to be possible; if you get ERROR_OUT_OF_PAPER, that's an unexpected error.
  • (cs)

    Wired left the closing semicolon off their numeric character references.

  • (cs)

    IE used to (still does?) allow the semicolon to be left off, but this was always considered a bug, and didn't work elsewhere.

  • BigFriendlyDave (unregistered)

    Was a a technitian a citizen of Tenochtitlan?

  • P. Edant (unregistered) in reply to Bim Job
    Bim Job:
    What is an "Expected Error," anyway?

    Anybody who unit tests their code should know that

  • (cs)

    Keep comments nice plesae...

    ...and, plesae, definitely no pointing out obvious typos!

  • (cs)

    The first company that figures out how to make deliveries into the distant past will make an absolute fortune. I'd use them, at least if they continued trading rather than just sending their past selves this week's winning lottery numbers.

  • Observer (unregistered) in reply to Indrora
    Indrora:
    As for the Purple Monkey Dishwasher, it sounds like someone was writing their dialogs in Pig Latin so that they'd be sure to translate all of the localizable strings. Its a trick Microsoft uses, and there are occasionally strings in MS products that still have flakes of Pig Latin.

    Do you have any idea what Pig Latin is? Or is this a troll that I didn't get?

  • Bim Job (unregistered) in reply to Sir Twist
    Sir Twist:
    Bim Job:
    What is an "Expected Error," anyway?
    One that you've put in code to handle. E.g. when opening a file, you might expect ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND to be possible; if you get ERROR_OUT_OF_PAPER, that's an unexpected error.
    Why is ERROR_OUT_OF_PAPER an unexpected error? It's certainly meaningless in context, but it's hardly unexpected. We're back to booleans again; either an API call works, or it fails. Subsidiary information like "File not found" or "Out of paper" is advisory only, is generally tied to an error string, and is (IMHO) entirely to be expected. Programmers write junk, just like anybody else.

    Stuffing "Unexpected Error" into a dialog box is just plain wrong. Even "Error 4021" amongst other glories of Microsoft APIs is preferable. Not only does "Unexpected Error" confuse and insult the user, but it also skates over the fact that the programmer should damn well do something about the error, expected or not.

    I mean, can you imagine the equivalent for "Expected Error?"

    "I just knew that wasn't going to work..."

  • (cs)

    Crosby Stills & Nash, perhaps? But there's only a select few who can create that.

  • Willie Makeit (unregistered) in reply to Bim Job
    Bim Job:
    Not only does "Unexpected Error" confuse and insult the user, but it also skates over the fact that the programmer should

    More that his employer fails quality assurance forever. Coders make mistakes. Always assume they have done. Many's the argument I've had with various managers that I, as programmer, am [i]least qualified to declare that the thing actually works. A bug like this escaping into the wild is not the fault of the developers, it's shoddy process on part of the house

  • Willie Makeit (unregistered) in reply to Willie Makeit

    ...and I fail BBCode forever :-(

  • Mac This (unregistered)

    Here's another nice one:

    The operation could not be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -10814).
    Apparently the first -10813 errors were entirely expected and par for the course. Damn Windows cryptic messages... except... oops... this one comes from that holier-than-thou always-nice-and-intuitive Mac OS X!

    http://zotline.com/shownote.zot/NoteNum/4222.html

    OK So I guess the WTF "Submit" button does a Preview now...

    ... 5th try...

  • Alex (unregistered)
    "clearly, these break Notes 7.0 so badly that it causes the error message to error."
    Nothing can break Notes. It's always been broken.
  • der_Cthulhu (unregistered)

    CSN is the standard name for "need help"-tickets in SAP R/3 systems.

  • Centricity (unregistered)

    Well, actually, he forgot Poland.

  • IronMensan (unregistered)

    When did 2000 become the distant past? Last time I checked it was still less than a decade ago. Have been in hypersleep?

  • SR (unregistered) in reply to Mac This
    Mac This:
    Here's another nice one:
    The operation could not be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code -10814).
    Apparently the first -10813 errors were entirely expected and par for the course. Damn Windows cryptic messages... except... oops... this one comes from that holier-than-thou always-nice-and-intuitive Mac OS X!

    http://zotline.com/shownote.zot/NoteNum/4222.html

    OK So I guess the WTF "Submit" button does a Preview now...

    ... 5th try...

    Such anger for a Friday!

    (Still relaxed on 3rd attempt)

  • SR (unregistered) in reply to IronMensan
    IronMensan:
    When did 2000 become the distant past? Last time I checked it was still less than a decade ago. Have been in hypersleep?

    It's the distant past for an 8-year-old.

  • Mac This (unregistered) in reply to SR
    SR:
    Such anger for a Friday!
    I'm angry every day. It comes from living in a world crammed full with garbage masquerading as software. In other words, pretty much everything I didn't write myself. Now get off my lawn. And take your tricycle.
  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to IronMensan
    IronMensan:
    When did 2000 become the distant past? Last time I checked it was still less than a decade ago. Have been in hypersleep?

    Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!!!

  • jimicus (unregistered) in reply to Peter

    Or you want to take leave over the year-end, or your contract demands you give a certain amount of notice for annual leave...

  • (cs)

    Here, Jason, let me AcronymFinder that for you...

    http://www.acronymfinder.com/CSN.html Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (French) Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear (Spanish: Nuclear Safety Council) Comcast SportsNet (TV channel) Centrala studiestödsnämnden (Swedish: state education grant and loan program) Crosby, Stills, and Nash (band) ... (more...)

  • NameNotFoundException (unregistered) in reply to Bim Job
    Bim Job:
    Sir Twist:
    Bim Job:
    What is an "Expected Error," anyway?
    One that you've put in code to handle. E.g. when opening a file, you might expect ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND to be possible; if you get ERROR_OUT_OF_PAPER, that's an unexpected error.
    Why is ERROR_OUT_OF_PAPER an unexpected error? It's certainly meaningless in context, but it's hardly unexpected.

    You should not forget that programmers work with APIs. Suppose a function is defined to return (int)0 for success and (int)1 for ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND. Other return values are not defined but surely indicate an error. Then, if the function screws up for some reason, returning 2, the 2 would signify an unexpected error condition.

    Showing "Unexpected error" is quite acceptable in this situation. It is a situation which neither user nor programmer knows how to handle because it hasn't been encountered yet. It hasn't been speced either, so what should the programmer do about it? Do you expect them to have prophetic gifts?

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" makes sense. Users won't remember things like "ERRNO 472", but they'll remember "the computer said something about a purple monkey dishwasher", and whoever's giving support can know exactly what error message it is.

    I too had hoped it was some ingenious system for translating error codes to cute phrases that would be remembered and reported by non-technical users out of novelty factor. Kind of 'viral' error reporting (in the less undesirable sense of course), if you will.

    Was a little disappointed to learn that it was just a Simpson's quote. ;/

  • monkeyPushButton (unregistered) in reply to SR
    SR:
    IronMensan:
    When did 2000 become the distant past? Last time I checked it was still less than a decade ago. Have been in hypersleep?

    It's the distant past for an 8-year-old.

    Mandatory XKCD reference http://xkcd.com/647/[image]

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