The Weird and The Wonderful

The tape drive was going bad, so the SOS was a good alert even though it did not give a hint to what the actual problem was.

I used to work at a tape drive manufacturer, and we had a whole list of LED error codes. SOS was not on the list, but I did see it once when I accidentally shorted two pins on the controller chip with a scope probe. I though that was cute, but it would have been more cute if it had spelled out the designer's name.

I like that one, actually.

The worst error message IMO remains "Abort, Retry, Fail?"

Yesterday evening, I told the VMWare tools of a virtual machine to shrink disk "C:" of that machine. It took extremely much time. When I looked through the log files this morning, I found the reason:

Sep 30 01:28:56.081: vcpu-0| Progress 101% (none)

Now I am 101% sure that the shrinking process has really been completed!

It seems they wanted to shrink it as much as they could, 1% extra. So, if it was a 500 gig disk, you get an additional 5 gigs free. Smile | :)

Or your disk now has -5 gigs Poke tongue | ;-P

It's an OO world.

C#

public class Naerling : Lazy<Person>{}

the free download manager program also make that on downloads

Bernhard Hiller wrote:
It took extremely much time.

That turn of phrase gave me pause, it's more common to say "It took a lot of time." implying that in your opinion, it took much more time than you expected. So, what's syntactically wrong with your statement? Breaking it down, I found: nothing.

Thank you for inadvertently pointing out to a native English speaker, that sometimes he doesn't know his own language so well. Smile | :)

I've heard the phrase "I'm 110% sure that I'm right" several times. Which makes me 99% sure they are wrong in some way.

I remember a TV series, one of the characters can't forget. He was saying they tested him as a kid, again and again making the 99'th percentile. She said, "What's the matter, you couldn't reach 100?" He said, "There isn't a 100'th."

I knew that, but it made me feel better about my SAT's 98th percentile in math because it meant that maybe I was closer to 1.1% away from the top kid in the nation. I took the SAT's over 40 years ago. I'm quite sure my math has degraded since then. It doesn't matter what I scored as a kid.

I can't prove it, but I still think I am above the 50th percentile in math. It took me a week to convince a manager that the math was wrong, when I knew it was wrong within 10 seconds of reading the line of code. (I never said I was superior in English. Laugh | :laugh:

)

From one of our developers who should know better:

C#

// Validate pView pointer
if (!pView)
    {
    pView->KillFuncHook();
    return;
    }

Some time ago I found a similar thing in our codebase. It looked something like:

C++

if(table == NULL)
{
    Log(GetFormatString("Table %d is NULL in funtion xyz!", table->Number));
    return false;
}

Seemed like it had been there for years before fist being hit.

What we used to do in our dept when we found someone else's mistake would be to print it out and hang it on the wall, complete with the name of the author and the date it was found.

Quickly, people began to double check their work. Sadly, we tore down that wall. Cry | :((

Surely there must be other walls in the office.

List of common misconceptions

Yeah, but they're not nearly as close. It loses something when it's not so easily visible.

We used to have a whiteboard with a sort of bug league table, probably time to resurrect that idea.

Name ans shame!

Works for Paedophiles.. Smile | :)

==============================

Nothing to say.

When I was at college i was forced to make a project with lazarus(a free Delphi IDE), Thi IDE is so wrong at so many levels that among other stuff that happened to me i received this error messsage "Oops the IDE has entered in depuration state(the ide freezed down) you only have to close it and wait for the worse"

I have seen some really bad error messages, but I haven't seen any worse than that one. Dead | X|

Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.

While a greenie, the following code was (accidentally) released into production:

Messagebox: Title "Oops"
Message: "Mikel Sucks as a programmer since this should never happen."

How many times did it actually get displayed?

HA! Good Question. The circumstances were such that it really should have never happened.
It was one of those "when a user clicks x and Venus is in retrograde" scenarios.

So to answer you question: Once
After that, I plugged the logic hole and put a "friendly" error in its place.

At least the dev was nice enough to let you know that worse was yet to come.
In my first year of writing code, I had put in a "temporary" dialog for myself which ended up getting released. The entire message was "Oops". That was useful, wasn't it... D'OH!!!!

I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.

Thats the same thing my teacher said c'mon, that message is very unprofessional and when feeding your children depends on that its doesn't sound like a joke Smile | :)

The message you get from Acrobat Reader if you make a mistake in PDF creation is nearly this useful (it is "There was an error reading the document", if I remember right).

Some of the latest bad error messages we've seen here are

"An unknow error has occurred" (yep, with the spelling mistake)

Another From a M$ app logged this useful message to the windows event log

"The"

I think that's my favorite.

My favorite...
"Ironically, we experienced an error while attempting to send the error report."

The only other thing I could think of to say was 'Error report sent successfully', but I don't like to lie to the users Poke tongue | ;-P

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
-Albert Einstein