Helpful

[penagate]

[Arrow_Raider]

This programmer was inspired by the error message art of microsoft.

[wossname]

My favourite was always:

Error: Error message not found

Not only wrong, but paradoxical too.

[mendhak]

My favourite was always:



Not only wrong, but paradoxical too.

This actually happens with the Windows Mobile SDK.

[demotivater]

The dialog title is nice, too - "Problem Occurred". Well no ****.
Almost as good as my old stand by - "Error"

[FunkyDexter]

My favourite is "This should not happen".

[JuggaloBrotha]

I still admire one of the classic's "An error that cannot occur has occurred"

[EntityX]

I don't remember seeing that but it's funny. I can't imagine writing a program where you would ever want that statement to come up unless the application was actually generating sentences based on what was happening.

[Arrow_Raider]

I like how Google's error messages begin with "Oops."

[emartinho]

The most annoying messages I have EVER dealt with (in no real order because they were each THE most annoying at the time they occurred! ):
1. "General Protection Fault" (Windows 95 (and up?) )
2. "coredump" (*NIX)
3. "A Data exception has occurred" (running PASCAL on an IBM System 370)

The last one happened to me with frightening regularity when I was in my first year of university. The first time it happened I went to the REALLY LARGE number of books provided as documentation by IBM (they took up an entire rectangular table that could have sat at least 12 people comfortably!). I looked up the error message and found this 1 line, really helpful, description of what the error means (there were no other entries for that message):
"A data exception occurred."

Wonderful, eh?

-EM

[wossname]

Coredumps are very descriptive. If you have a coredump then you basically have all the info you need to diagnose and report a bug/crash/error. I use coredumps all the time to debug our large multi-process *nix server software.

You can debug coredump files to get the line number of the error (in certain circumstances, often in development, occasionally in production cases if you're very lucky).

So coredumps are the best. I fear you misunderstood this when posting just now.

[Arrow_Raider]

Segmentation fault.

[penagate]

My favourite isn't a message but the classic recursive Dr. Watson on Windows.

I forget how this was triggered, but the gist of it was: The system would become corrupt in some way; One program (often Explorer) would crash; Dr. Watson would attach itself to perform an autopsy; Dr. Watson would crash...

[DeanMc]

Nice!

[emartinho]

I'm not saying that coredumps don't contain the info you need, but when all you get for an error message is "coredump", it's not really illuminating, if you know what I mean.

The same could possibly be said of good old Dr. Watson. The file(s) it created supposedly would give you all you needed to debug the issue, but the message you received normally didn't give much help at all.

[minitech]

Error 405: Error connecting to database. Minitech's message not found.

[EntityX]

This error is erroneous.

Note: I just made that one up but I wouldn't be surprised if I ever saw it.

[minitech]

Error 303: We put 405 where it should have been 404.

[visualAd]

HTTP 1.2 Response Codes:

• HTTP/1.2 423 Internet Explorer Not Supported
• HTTP/1.2 498 Never Gonna Give you Up, Never Gonna Let you down
• HTTP/1.2 555 This server is not responding
• HTTP/1.2 233 Virus Delivered
• HTTP/1.2 399 Page sent to someone else

[EntityX]

Do not turn off or unplug your machine. Viruses are being installed.

[minitech]

I've seen that screen at least five times.

[Blakk_Majik]

How about showing the user an error message that says you wrote something to a log, and when they call you about the problem, you can't find the log because you forgot to change the path from your local machine to the log server before deployment?

Support...nightmare.

[chris128]

The Interbase SQL database system was obviously written by someone with a sense of humour - when it crashes you get a message in the log that goes something like Error ocurred, packing up, going home. Sorry it didnt work out.

I also remember seeing one on a Windows server that said something along the lines of "the server did not want to cooperate" - it wasnt those words exactly but that was basically what it said

[si_the_geek]

Not as impressive as the ones above, but here's one of mine from a few years ago (for people who were in the same office as me):

Sorry, Excel is being awkward - please see Si to get him to tell it off.

The problem was that Excel couldn't do certain things if no printer was set up, but there was always a printer set up - but due to network issues, Excel just needed to be reminded sometimes.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I still admire one of the classic's "An error that cannot occur has occurred"

I use lines like that in most of my programs. I never knew it was a classic. Now I'll have to change them.

[BillGeek]

Anyone remember: "Keyboard error. Press <F1> to resume"?

[EntityX]

that would be almost equivalent to "F1 key inoperative. Press <F1> key to remedy"

[penagate]

Anyone remember: "Keyboard error. Press <F1> to resume"?

It makes perfect sense, but isn't helpful in the slightest.

[minitech]

I actually just got something similar to that, something along the lines of "a mouse driver stopped working. Click OK to continue shutdown."


(The keyboard wasn't working, either.)

[Arrow_Raider]

I love error messages that say one thing, but mean another.

I was installing Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 on an XP machine with media player 11. During the install, it said something like, "Windows Media Player 10 is not compatible with this version of windows."
So there are a couple problems with this error message. First of all, it shouldn't have come up at all. The streets and trips should have detected I have a newer version than 10 and not tried to install 10. Second of all, it should have said that a newer version was installed, not that the OS was incompatible.

Fail.

[chris128]

Oh dont get me started on error messages with hidden meanings!

One of my favourites is when you try to run the client email program Lotus Notes and get an error saying something like "The program cannot be started in domino server mode". What this actually means is that you do not have permission to write to the folder where Notes is installed... yet another reason to use Outlook instead

[KiwiDexter]

We went through a period of inserting "This error should never happen, but we're anal" till they started appearing on user screens ... oops!!!!

[chris128]

Anything that results in the word anal being shown on your customers screens is always funny </tenyearold>