• (cs)

    WTH kind of cab needs an electronic payment system?

    And more, WTH kind of cabbie would even think it was a good idea?

    FFS last time I took a cab anywhere, the cabbie just told me at the end of the journey what the damage was and I handed him a suitable amount of readies.

    FFS!

  • feck (unregistered)

    You can even pay for cab with BitCoins nowadays.

  • xilban (unregistered)

    I've always heard Free Realms could be played with no strings attached.

  • (cs)

    I used to maintain a suite of (thankfully, internal) applications, one of which, when confronted with any error at all in its operation, would emit to the screen these immortal words:

    oh bugger
    

    One of my missions was to replace this with rather more meaningful and enligtening communications.

    Remember, children: never put rude words in your code. You never know who will end up seeing it.

  • Yazeran (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    I used to maintain a suite of (thankfully, internal) applications, one of which, when confronted with any error at all in its operation, would emit to the screen these immortal words:
    oh bugger
    

    One of my missions was to replace this with rather more meaningful and enligtening communications.

    Remember, children: never put rude words in your code. You never know who will end up seeing it.

    Well at least that one was more benign (at worst the user would get a chuckle out of it) than the one from the article.

    Furthermore it saved the user from trying to remember some random address that windws spits out when it has a bad day... In your case then KNEW that they did not have to remember any details for the bug report and thus saved the users form having a bad conscience... :-)

    Yours Yazeran

    Plan: To go to mars one dya with a hammer.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    WTH kind of cab *needs* an electronic payment system?
    Probably none, they will surely run without it?
    Steve The Cynic:
    And more, WTH kind of cabbie would even think it was a good idea?
    Those self-employed cabbies who think that driving around at night in the wrong neighborhood with a wallet full of cash is a bad idea?
  • faoileag (unregistered)

    From a developer point of view I really like the MySQL error message on dota2.com's website. It contains all the information one needs to debug the application:

    • name of method
    • name of attempted action
    • description of error
    • the value that caused the db error
    • and the column name which caused the db error. And the expletive is telling me that the original developer thought that this error would occur only rarely, if at all.
  • * (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that you linked one image to google instead of hosting it normally.

  • Yazeran (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    From a developer point of view I really like the MySQL error message on dota2.com's website. It contains all the information one needs to debug the application: - name of method - name of attempted action - description of error - the value that caused the db error - and the column name which caused the db error. And the expletive is telling me that the original developer thought that this error would occur only rarely, if at all.

    Yep, in that you are correct, and sometimes 'cant happen' errors crop up no matter how hard you try to make sure that the code can never get there.

    I have experienced the same with a reservations system i designed some 5 years ago. Inside some stored procedures i had a 'trap' for the case where the end date was before the start date (something which the application should make sure could never happen). and the error message in that case was somewhat funny: 'Space time discontinuity error, you can not end before you start'. Imagine my surprise when it showed up in the logs sometimes regardless...

    Yazeran

    Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer.

  • Keyboard Goop (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    WTH kind of cab *needs* an electronic payment system?

    Any cab that wants customers in a non-third-world country?

  • blarple (unregistered)

    TRWTF is exposing your raw error messages (and a bit of juicy info about your database) for all the world to see.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Yazeran
    Yazeran:
    'Space time discontinuity error, you can not end before you start'.
    Nice one :-) For me it was "Don't know what to do" in the final else clause of an if...else chain which I thought exhausted all possible values before reaching the else. Turned out I was wrong ;-)
  • (cs)

    It seems quite appropriate to me. It is the History Channel, after all, and they're using Win 9x.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    I used to maintain a suite of (thankfully, internal) applications, one of which, when confronted with any error at all in its operation, would emit to the screen these immortal words:
    oh bugger
    

    One of my missions was to replace this with rather more meaningful and enligtening communications.

    Remember, children: never put rude words in your code. You never know who will end up seeing it.

    And it's not just the screen; you don't want to even include swearing in traces that are only ever dumped out the debug serial port, as a company I once worked for discovered the time that an engineer went on-site with a customer and plugged his laptop into the faulty kit with the customer peering over his shoulder...

    (Insert obligatory link to ohloh searches for obscenities here.)

  • Krunt (unregistered) in reply to feck
    feck:
    You can even pay for cab with BitCoins nowadays.

    After recent events involving the IRS and the FBI, I suspect that is no longer possible.

  • Wfd (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood

    I have a somewhat important support tool that I use but didn't create that has one error...

    Argggh!

    I've seen the code, it "knows" what the problem is.

  • dsasfd (unregistered)

    TRWTF is SVN.

    Someone had to say it...

  • Qazwsx (unregistered) in reply to Yazeran
    Yazeran:
    Yep, in that you are correct, and sometimes 'cant happen' errors crop up no matter how hard you try to make sure that the code can never get there.
    The Android SDK has a specific log command for that kind of situation: (tr) wtf.

    Of course, the real wtf is Akismet's opinion of my comment.

  • emaN ruoY (unregistered)

    Not just any BSOD, but a Windows 95/98/ME BSOD!

  • (cs) in reply to Qazwsx
    Qazwsx:
    Yazeran:
    Yep, in that you are correct, and sometimes 'cant happen' errors crop up no matter how hard you try to make sure that the code can never get there.
    The Android SDK has a specific log command for that kind of situation: (tr) wtf.

    Of course, the real wtf is Akismet's opinion of my comment.

    So I followed the link...
    public static int wtf (String tag, String msg) Added in API level 8

    What a Terrible Failure: Report a condition that should never happen. The error will always be logged at level ASSERT with the call stack. Depending on system configuration, a report may be added to the DropBoxManager and/or the process may be terminated immediately with an error dialog.

    Parameters

    tag Used to identify the source of a log message. msg The message you would like logged.

    WTF indeed.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    I suspect the ones with bullet proof glass between the passengers and the driver. Don't even need a slot in the glass to let bills/change through.

  • anonymous (unregistered)
    <!-- <p>"WOW! Lenovo is the best deal out there - I mean, just LOOK at those SAVINGS!!," <strong>Robin</strong> boisterously exclaimed. </p><blockquote><p><a href="#Pic-6"><img border="0" alt="" src="https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.jpg" /></a></p><p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote> -->
    The correct URL for the image is https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.png.
  • AHorseWithNoName (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that that's a Windows 9x BSOD

  • (cs)

    Has anyone ever seen that Tortoise SVN 'Cleanup' command do anything useful?

    I'm pretty sure it's implementation is to roll a dice to decide whether to: a) further corrupt your working copy making the problem worse, b) crash, or c) tell you to run 'cleanup' again.

  • (cs) in reply to AHorseWithNoName
    AHorseWithNoName:
    TRWTF is that that's a Windows 9x BSOD
    No it isn't, for reasons I already explained.

    (Insert 'perfectly normal for a small embedded device with no file system' meme here.)

  • 30into (unregistered) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    Has anyone ever seen that Tortoise SVN 'Cleanup' command do anything useful?

    I'm pretty sure it's implementation is to roll a dice to decide whether to: a) further corrupt your working copy making the problem worse, b) crash, or c) tell you to run 'cleanup' again.

    I once saw it actually clean up a mess in my SVN, but that must take an insanely high dice roll.

    Also, I rarely carry cash on me, especially not enough to pay for a long cab journey, so being able to pay on plastic is handy.

  • aninim (unregistered)

    The reflection in the eye should read from right to left, just like in a normal mirror. (Unless the eye is reading the BSOD from a mirror of course.)

    It's not that the BSOD is the pun, it's that someone thought it a good idea to photoshop it in.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    <!-- <p>"WOW! Lenovo is the best deal out there - I mean, just LOOK at those SAVINGS!!," <strong>Robin</strong> boisterously exclaimed. </p><blockquote><p><a href="#Pic-6"><img border="0" alt="" src="https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.jpg" /></a></p><p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote> -->
    The correct URL for the image is https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.png.
    Come to think of it, why was that one commented out anyhow?
  • (cs) in reply to dsasfd
    dsasfd:
    TRWTF is SVN.

    TRWTF is people who think TortoiseSVN is Subversion, followed closely by people who think "svn" is an acronym and should be written in block capitals.

    Of course in this case TortoiseSVN is just echoing the cleanup message from Subversion, but Real Programmers who use the svn command-line client have a better chance of killing a hung client process or fixing a corrupted working copy (the most likely causes of the "Subversion keeps requesting cleanup" problem).

    And to answer another poster's query: yes, I've seen the Subversion cleanup command do precisely what it's supposed to do, which is release locks on working copies that were left by a client that was aborted during processing.

  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    anonymous:
    <!-- <p>"WOW! Lenovo is the best deal out there - I mean, just LOOK at those SAVINGS!!," <strong>Robin</strong> boisterously exclaimed. </p><blockquote><p><a href="#Pic-6"><img border="0" alt="" src="https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.jpg" /></a></p><p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote> -->
    The correct URL for the image is https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.png.
    Come to think of it, why was that one commented out anyhow?
    I expect someone noticed it wasn't working but didn't have the time or energy to figure out why. An example of debugging by deleting-rather-than-fixing.
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    anonymous:
    anonymous:
    <!-- <p>"WOW! Lenovo is the best deal out there - I mean, just LOOK at those SAVINGS!!," <strong>Robin</strong> boisterously exclaimed. </p><blockquote><p><a href="#Pic-6"><img border="0" alt="" src="https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.jpg" /></a></p><p>&nbsp;</p></blockquote> -->
    The correct URL for the image is https://thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e84/Pic-6.png.
    Come to think of it, why was that one commented out anyhow?
    I expect someone noticed it wasn't working but didn't have the time or energy to figure out why. An example of debugging by deleting-rather-than-fixing.
    I've seen it happen enough times now that I went ahead and edited my TDWTF GreaseMonkey script to check for such errors and insert the correct image when it happens.

    Wonder if I'm the only one?

  • (cs) in reply to MichaelWojcik
    MichaelWojcik:
    but Real Programmers who use the svn command-line client have a better chance of killing a hung client process or fixing a corrupted working copy (the most likely causes of the "Subversion keeps requesting cleanup" problem).

    Honestly mate, you've gotta be kidding. In terms of actual productivity, there is no way even the most proficient greybeard using the command-line client for "svn" (notice i didn't capitalize it this time) would be more productive than a mediocre engineer using a GUI. It's just not a winnable argument. Lack of decent tooling was the worst thing about GIT (or Git or git... cause that's not an acronym either) during the early days.

    Having previously worked at a place which had the funds to cough up for Perforce, anything else feels like the dark ages.

  • Dhamp (unregistered)

    Actually the BSOD one makes a lot of sense from a legal standpoint.

    In the same way that no-one on film or TV has a valid phone number or IP address.

  • programmer (unregistered) in reply to Yazeran

    I did something like that in an university assignment. It was a BTree, with stealing, nodes merging and all those performance extras. We did large test, inserting, removing and searching for a few thousand random keys. It was incredibly fast (in comparison to what the other students handed in) and the error message: "You idiot thought this would be unreachable. N00b!" Never showed up in my test. Naturally, when the professor tried it, it did happen.

    However, he could not figure out what the problem was (he could not even reproduce it), so we agreed on cosmic beams and I got a really good grade.

  • Klimax (unregistered) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    Has anyone ever seen that Tortoise SVN 'Cleanup' command do anything useful?

    I'm pretty sure it's implementation is to roll a dice to decide whether to: a) further corrupt your working copy making the problem worse, b) crash, or c) tell you to run 'cleanup' again.

    In (T)SVN 1.6 and below ,I don't know. Since 1.7 it works as designed (deterministic) and either since 1.7 or 1.8 it will cleanup old unused pristine files in .svn/pristine. (I modified it further to include "analyze" before "vacuum". (They use SQLite 3) WTF are Git's commands, because to figure out minimum set of commands and paramters to achieve same or similar goal (like repack and cleanup) is nearly impossible, because either something will be missing or will be superfluous.

    Mostly, the only time when cleanup fails, is corrupted database or some other similar failure.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Klimax
    Klimax:
    caffiend:
    Has anyone ever seen that Tortoise SVN 'Cleanup' command do anything useful?

    I'm pretty sure it's implementation is to roll a dice to decide whether to: a) further corrupt your working copy making the problem worse, b) crash, or c) tell you to run 'cleanup' again.

    In (T)SVN 1.6 and below ,I don't know. Since 1.7 it works as designed (deterministic) and either since 1.7 or 1.8 it will cleanup old unused pristine files in .svn/pristine. (I modified it further to include "analyze" before "vacuum". (They use SQLite 3) WTF are Git's commands, because to figure out minimum set of commands and paramters to achieve same or similar goal (like repack and cleanup) is nearly impossible, because either something will be missing or will be superfluous.

    Mostly, the only time when cleanup fails, is corrupted database or some other similar failure.

    "cleanup pristine files"

    Oxymoron of the day.

  • J (unregistered) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    Has anyone ever seen that Tortoise SVN 'Cleanup' command do anything useful?

    I'm pretty sure it's implementation is to roll a dice to decide whether to: a) further corrupt your working copy making the problem worse, b) crash, or c) tell you to run 'cleanup' again.

    Yes, I have. If an update, commit, or other operation is killed unexpectedly, I've seen cleanup get the WC back to a usable state. (Whether or not killing the operation should ever leave the WC in an unusable state in the first place is another conversation entirely.)

    However, I have seen this error. It is Tortoise's fault. In my experience, it can be fixed by running cleanup from the SVN command line.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    However, I have seen this error. It is Tortoise's fault. In my experience, it can be fixed by running cleanup from the SVN command line.
    In other words, TRWTF is Tortoise.

    First of all, they thought that the semantics of the merge operation were too confuuuuuuuusing. So instead of the previously last merged version and the intended newly last merged version, they changed it to the first and last new versions. Basically, they moved the fence posts from the way "standard" SVN does it because they thought it was to haaaaard for drooling Windows users to comprehend. So now there are two ways to do it, and you have to know which one is in effect.

    And then there's the "Show differences in unified diff" feature when doing a check-in. I guess none of the Tortoise devs ever use that (preferring the multi-pane diff over the patch-style diff), because it randomly fails to work. If you use the multi-pane diff a few times, the patch diff may even start working again.

  • Indrek (unregistered)
    Charles MacArthur:
    "SVN keeps recommending that I clean up, but refuses to actually clean up."

    No, SVN is recommending that you execute the 'Cleanup' command. It has failed you for the last time.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Indrek
    Indrek:
    Charles MacArthur:
    "SVN keeps recommending that I clean up, but refuses to actually clean up."

    No, SVN is recommending that you execute the 'Cleanup' command. It has failed you for the last time.

    > kill 'Cleanup'
    Error: pentobarbital is unavailable

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    WTH kind of cab *needs* an electronic payment system?

    And more, WTH kind of cabbie would even think it was a good idea?

    FFS last time I took a cab anywhere, the cabbie just told me at the end of the journey what the damage was and I handed him a suitable amount of readies.

    FFS!

    And what's the deal with technology having so many buttons? Back in my day, all things had one button. And it always did what you wanted it to do!

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    From a developer point of view I really like the MySQL error message on dota2.com's website. It contains all the information one needs to debug the application: - name of method - name of attempted action - description of error - the value that caused the db error - and the column name which caused the db error. And the expletive is telling me that the original developer thought that this error would occur only rarely, if at all.

    And it's a greeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaat idea to spit that out to the user.

  • bambam (unregistered) in reply to Dhamp
    Dhamp:
    Actually the BSOD one makes a lot of sense from a legal standpoint.

    In the same way that no-one on film or TV has a valid phone number or IP address.

    Tell that to Hoda.
  • (cs)

    TortoiseSVN can't make a cleanup stick for me, either. I've got red exclamation marks on my folder icons, but all the files in those folders are green checkmarks. I run cleanup and the folders all go green, then turn red again about 4 seconds later. That's not a WTF, that's just broken code.

  • Brian (unregistered)

    Sprinkled throughout the product I maintain:

    throw new InvalidProductManagementException
        ("Tell <name> to worry about the thing we'll worry about if it ever happens.");
  • (cs) in reply to Brian
    Brian:
    Sprinkled throughout the product I maintain:
    throw new InvalidProductManagementException
        ("Tell <name> to worry about the thing we'll worry about if it ever happens.");

    That's awesome. They really need to include that exception type in the standard library of all modern languages.

  • joepie91 (unregistered) in reply to Krunt
    Krunt:
    feck:
    You can even pay for cab with BitCoins nowadays.

    After recent events involving the IRS and the FBI, I suspect that is no longer possible.

    It is, actually.

    http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ne5ne/bitcoin_in_lithuania_taxi_company_jazzexpress/

  • (cs) in reply to Some Damn Yank
    Some Damn Yank:
    TortoiseSVN can't make a cleanup stick for me, either...

    A cleanup stick? Wonder if I can get one of those. Like a magic wand, do you think, you say something like "Izzy wizzy, let's get busy" and magically all your toys are put away in their cupboards and your dirty socks are in the laundry basket -- or maybe I could get a broomstick, put a little fan at one end and a great big bag at the other, and hey presto! a cleanup stick.

  • Meep (unregistered) in reply to Brian
    Brian:
    Sprinkled throughout the product I maintain:
    throw new InvalidProductManagementException
        ("Tell <name> to worry about the thing we'll worry about if it ever happens.");

    Ha, at my last job, <name> got the hell out of dodge weeks before the things that we would never worry about all started to fail at once.

    Kids, don't immortalize criticism of your coworkers in code. It can never do you a damned bit of good.

  • Jasper (unregistered)

    If Michael is a real programmer, he should touch the Cancel button and debug the application right there in the cab.

Leave a comment on “Top Secret BSOD”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

« Return to Article