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

I was tempted to investigate other error messages in the area of Windows sockets.

I found nothing to rival the one in the original post, but these piqued my interest:

"Graceful shutdown in progress."

"Socket operation on nonsocket."

"Protocol family not supported."

"This is a nonrecoverable error."


This was probably my favourite:

"A service provider returned a bogus procedure table."

The mind boggles.

I think English teachers should provide these to their creative writing students to spin a story around.

A service provider returned a bogus procedure table - Sounds like it should, in some way, be related to a railway company

The error reports are sometimes equally useless. One of our clients contacted us the other day, convinced that her website wasn't working. She'd been contacted by a customer, who had tried to buy online but couldn't, because "she got an error message".

*What* error message?

I checked. She got the error message "Your card was declined". There's not much I can do about that, is there?



I have actually written some "This is impossible" and "This shouldn't happen" error messages, and I'm *pretty* sure that none of them have ever tripped, so that's okay. I've also written the error message "Someone's playing silly buggers", which might be triggered in places where someone's deliberately trying to hack the website. None of them have ever tripped either.



I can't think of any funny error messages I've seen, except for h2g2's frequently mocked "Unknown error", which is really funny only because it's prefixed with "The following error has occurred".

Actually, scratch that. I can. You know 3D Secure, the credit card verification step for buying online? If you implement 3D Secure using the RealMPI service from Realex Payments, you occasionally get back the error message "Authentication Successful". I dealt with this by not displaying error messages to the user, and simply showing them a generic failure page. Best I could think of.

TRiG.

I'm fairly certain that the "This should never happen" error I mentioned earlier was along the lines of what TRiG was talking about. I mentioned that this was on a Sun SparqStation 20. It was a dedicated system built for Kodak for their PhotoCD scanning system developed 20 years ago. That's all this wonderful computer did was run one program written in their version of UNIX. I do miss that "pizza box" computer. It was so reliable. Even that "This should never happen" error wasn't fatal. I'm not a coder, but I believe it was just a program error, not a system error. Whoever Kodak hired then to do their coding was good. I rarely got errors, so when they did happen they got my attention. In following scanning systems, the errors got to be much more common and frustrating. Their last scanning system was a ing joke. The kid straight out of school they got to do their coding was an eedjit. He had no knowledge of parallel processing, nor did he have any comprehension of why it's a good idea to document his work... or more importantly, only work on one error at a time before you make a major change. I've never before, nor since, encountered such a disastrous piece of programming.

My favourite piece if lazy programming was a COBOL coder many years ago, who, faced with the fact he had to give mandatory names to the five procedures in his billing program, called them Eggs, Bacon, Sausage, Beans and Chips.

Time to awaken the weird error message thread from its slumbers with a modern classic:

"Attempting to deserialize an empty stream"



Er, run that one past me again?

I can picture someone picking up bran flakes in a wadi.

You can't deserialize the same empty stream twice.

Error messages are a place where a company can show benign concern and support. Why do they so often stick out a tongue out, or two fingers up? They might as well say

Your Fault, Fool!

You have obviously done something reprehensible and stupid!

I'm Not Listening!

Absolutely - that's my job!

"This is another fine mess you've gotten me into"

This week's Weird Error Message of the Week is:


"Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key"


Your interpretations are welcome.