Error Message 1

I got this error message box again. Can anyone tell me what it means?

I actually sort of know what it means, where it originates, and why. But it is a good example of bad programming practice and poor program development management that an end user sees a message like this.

What is wrong with the message? “Bad Opaque”. Yep. This message is worse than opaque, it is a black hole that sucks energy into oblivion. “Bad Juju” (not to be confused with juju) would be just as appropriate and more comprehensible. Where did this message come from? The title on the box provides a clue “Failed to enter room”. I was in a “virtual room” a while ago but the meeting is over and I have closed all of the visible windows. The message box is “on top” and will will not release focus. So, even though it is NOT OK, I click OK because that is the only thing to do.
Some time later, I discover an all-gray window with a title “Failed to connect”. Yep. The programmer clearly failed to connect the “Bad Opaque” message with the application. At least I guess they should be connected as the 3 windows appear to occur around the same time among the 10-12 windows I typically have open on my desktop with no indication on the task bar or system tray.
So my interpretation of this, which may or may not be accurate, is that the meeting I was in has ended, the window-less program that makes the connection tried to re-enter the now closed virtual room. Failing that in an unexpected way pops the “Bad Opaque”.
Somehow the connector or the room-enterer did not get the message that the session was over.  A bit more transparency and better error messages would be helpful.

Some Microsoft products have gotten better about making it clear what the error is and what the consequences of “Cancel”, “End”, “OK”, etc are. But not everybody there has gotten the memo yet, or if they have they have not read it and taken it to heart.

Uncorrectable

But my all-time favorite is this one.

Yes you can!

Typical of Microsoft’s lack of quality control, due to some unexplained condition, you fall into a routine where the debugging software has been left engaged. The good news is that you can use Open Office on Linux to eliminate this message, Microsoft Office, AND best-of-all eliminate Windows.

Lego and Playmobil have the richest offerings in the multi-lingual instruction. You can get important safety warnings in all of the above plus Greek, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish. IBM hardware offerings are even richer covering the Near Eastern and Far Eastern languages as well. Apparently, none of these products are marketed in the Vatican, the final bastion of Latin, much to my disappointment.

Around 1965, Tom Lehrer wrote in a song about a rocket scientist of the time:

You too may be a big hero
Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero
“In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun

[Copyright Tom Lehrer (talk about visionaries), Wernher Von Braun, from memory]

Perhaps I listened to the wrong music as a teenager.

So when someone suggests that we should settle on American English and only allow that, they may be just trying to take away one of your choices. And choice is freedom. Of course stupidity is a a choice. No current medical evidence shows that language instruction causes brain injury. Yet hundreds of school systems cut language programs to maintain the funding for football programs. Go figure.

In the mean time, my wife, a sometime  techno-phobe, asked me to help her purchase an online airline ticket.  Not a big deal.  An hour later, we have a printed ticket at a price that is not prohibitive. My wife, who had not heard the joke before, was amused by the phrase “World Wide Wait”.  Forty-five minutes of the ticket time was spent looking at what I call a “spinner” and some at what techies call a “progress bar”.

The spinner is a screen that acts like it is doing something while you are waiting.   The spinner that might be part the browser.  If it were the cursor on your system, it would slow down or freeze when the local system is waiting for resources.  Other times they hang because they are waiting for a remote, synchronous service like a firewall or a security check. But usually, they are just blinky lights, like the ones that used to chase each other around the marquee at the neighborhood theater until they burned out and nobody replaced them.

More important is the “progress bar”. Or more precisely, the lack-of-progress bar.  This is supposed to move along steadily and indicate how close the web page is to being complete.  I usually see it rush quickly toward half-way.  Then slow down until at 75%, the progress becomes nil.  Finally, after a time twice as long as the wait to half-way, a message box appears that the request cannot be completed due to a condition the user cannot do anything about.  The message never suggests that the web host capacity planner has been sleeping in his chair after a beer at lunch or that that the host DBA meant to re-org the database last month but was at the beach.

And so I propose the “lack-of-progress bar”.  This little gem, when embedded in your web page will not only entertain you by advancing in a non-monotonic way, arbitrarily falling back to a lesser state as the http under-covers encounters adversity, it will put out a meaningful message, pointing the finger at the actual cause of the delay, be it end-point host, local system, or the ISP.  If there are multiple culprits, it will name them all.

Wait there is more! If supplied with the appropriate information, it will simultaneously, write a letter to the U.S. Representative, both Senators, the President, the FCC, the ICC, the DHS, and least effective  but most annoying the TSA. It will  Twitter a spurious rumor about the failing service provider, and a short sale order to your broker.

Or maybe it will meet the release date deadline.  But probably not both.

Shakin’ it up here boss.