h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket."


Any ideas?

Oh, and feel free to post your favourite error messages below.

Mine is this:

AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED: AN UNEXPECTED ERROR HAS OCCURRED.

Actually, my all time favorite was when I was using a SUN SparqStation20 and I got an error code with the following explanation.


"This should never happen"

I felt a twinge of pride.

I have a morbid dislike of programmers who think humorous error messages are cool

No, I do not believe this error was meant to be humorous. It was quite serious. I just managed to do something that was never expected to happen.

Yeah, but they always have a catch-all message for unhandled exceptions. The programmer might have written "Whoops" or "Unknown error" or something. It's laziness on their part that they didn't see the event causing the error and trap it properly, and for that reason I'm not going to forgive humour. They might as well write "The Programmer has just been fired for not trapping this condition"

Well, I used that (wonderful) computer every day for nearly a decade and only saw that message that one time, so the programmer was nearly correct.

Ah, but there's a huge difference between the type of error message that says "An unknown error has occurred" and the one that says "An error has occurred. Error code 00xIkwj324j" and then the useful ones.

The first two almost always tell the user something they already know (it's broken) and nothing about how to fix it.

The other sort of error message is the one that lets the user know that someone's been notified of the error. In general, there is no point at all in telling a user error codes, what are they going to do with them? Far better to have what appears a catch all error page that collects as much information as it can and automatically lets the techs involved know.

Ooops, might have given away trade secrets

Oh, I see.

So when you display "An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.", it's cleverly designed so that I stay there gazing at it with incredulity for ages while you gather all the stats you need.

Nah, I'm going to guess that that one is reporting back that a protocol tried to open up a locked down socket, so the route reported by that there was no socket, and the operation died ungracefully.

I'd very much doubt there was any data collection going on there.

Oh, I see.

Now if they'd only told me "Your socket is unexpectedly locked down." I'd have popped down there and unlocked it for them.

It's only a guess, but it's my best one at the moment.

I know what you mean about crappy error messages though, they're infuriating more than anything.

You need one of these. -----> Sorted.

It would be nice for the innocent user to see a message like "We cannot complete the request. We apologise. This is not your fault."

Programmers find it harder than bishops or prime ministers (apparently) to concede that someone else may not be always to blame.

The socket error message conjured up images...

http://gheorgheniplex.blogspot.com/2013/02/socket-error.html

On the other hand, it's probably something profound...

DG

That's through experience Recumbentman

I was *so* hoping you'd read this, Dmitri.

Heh-heh. I can't help it, I'm literal-minded.

An opperation on something that is not a socket...

I'm not socket... None of us, thus far, in this thread are socket.... so, on which of us was this opperation attempted? Can we locate the individual, they might have information regarding which opperation it was being attempted on their non-socket person... actually... not seen socket in ages