An error was encountered while opening a window!

I've written previously about pathetically inane error messages that lurk in dark corners of otherwise good software, waiting to spring out at you when you least desire them.

Today's beauty is one that lives in the current latest release 7.0.2 of the IBM Lotus Notes client (imminently to be replaced by the brand new Notes 8 client based on the IBM Expeditor/Eclipse architecture).





This is all that you're told. No more, no less!

So, there was an error, was there? And one that was encountered while opening a window, was it? What a masterpiece of exposition! What design committee thought up that one?

If you get yourself into this predicament, you'll find that this artfully vague message will be regurgitated every time that you try to relaunch the Notes Client following the crashed session.

As it turns out, the solution is quite simple: open the Task Manager and cancel the ntaskldr.exe Notes task.

Would it not be easy to modify this error message to suggest such a remedy? No, no, of course not: let's leave it there to bamboozle even more users!

MESSAGE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS:
Why not eliminate the stupidities in your old code, and not just plow ahead creating new code?

UPDATE:
There's more info about this situation in IBM support Technote 1224056 which states this "was addressed in Notes/Domino 6.5.6. It is reported as no longer occurring in the Notes/Domino 7 and 8 releases." ... I'm not too sure about that! Time will tell, eh?

Some Calamitous Error Messages - Redux

I've bemoaned the sorry state of "modern" software before (as have many others at various "this product sucks" sites).

My pet peeve is silly, meaningless, inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, thoughtless, and just plain stupid error messages.

I strive to make my own code display error messages that are as meaningful and helpful as possible, but it seems that not everybody does --and this is the year 2007! What hope is there for mankind?

Aunt Calamity has her own ideas over at the "ghost in the machine" web site: http://www.auntcalamity.com/ghost.htm Here are illustrations of a mere a few that I've encountered just in the last few days. They come from a variety of software products (the vendors all do it).

• Top image (Techsmith Snag It v8.2.2) -- if there there are 0 seconds left, are we going into some sort of hyper-time?
• IBM Lotus Notes v7.0.2 -- What on earth does this mean? (Maybe there's a connection between the digits in the version number and in the error message body "7" and "0" and "2" ?)
• Qualcomm Eudora (actually this is a deficiency in Windows dialog box architecture, it's not really Qualcomm's fault ) -- Apart from the gobbledygook message text, why can't the "OK button be labeled "Cancel" and the "Cancel" button be labeled "Debug"?)
• NTI Shadow 3 -- which of several concurrent jobs is the one that has just been completed? (I've asked them to add the Job Name to each message, but they haven't done it.)

Device drivers, and the code that calls them, are consistently bad offenders. Here's one that I came across at THE DAILY WTF recently. "Very Strange: Attempt to disowned by driver after WIN32 Checks out. Disown attempt ignored."

Very strange, indeed!

I could go on and on, but won't bother, and I'm sure you could add your own beauties to the collection!

Auntie's messages are a calamity

I continue to be amused, annoyed, upset -- but not surprised -- with warning messages and error messages and warning of all sorts.

They can pop up at the most unexpected times in the oddest places, sometimes where no equipment at all is involved, such as with mistranslated signs in hotels and other places. Some of these can be side-splittingly funny, others might have more serious implications. There are numerous examples, just one of which is Beijing cleans up its sign translations

The field of software (including "firmware" or embedded software in devices such as TV remote controls and microwave ovens) is a fertile spawning ground for this.

There are those signs/messages that do not convey useful information or use poor wording or terminology (such as "Note item not found" ). And there are those that give misleading or even totally incorrect information (such as "The specified agent does not exist" ). Please don't get me wrong: these two examples are not meant to imply that the world of IBM Lotus Notes is worse than any other! It's just that I had them at hand elsewhere in this blog and easy to cross-link to.

In most cases, poor messages like the above are unintentional. Just imagine what you can come up with if you really try, and indeed Aunt Calamity has done this for us: see ghost in the machine.

Go on, go on. Suitably inspired by Auntie's contribution, why not become mischievous (or even miscreant) and start generating your own in this fashion!