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Gnarly Error Messages
Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."
The random bomb that used to pop up using Mac LC's... not explanation, just BOMB. That used to freak some people out.
sig.
Press F9 to continue.
Had a Mac program long ago that featured the following error msg:
I must remember to put an error message here
And in another:
Whoops !
If you see this error please report the code as I have forgotten put an error message here
beauty is only a light switch away
i once received the following at work in the proprietary software used for cable tv tech support/etc....
"You need help. Please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx for assistance."
Remember the Amiga 500/1500 error message that said
"Guru Medatation"
"An Error Occurred Because An Error Occurred"
Ah, so that's why!
"Error: No error"
I got that one a few times; always memorable. Almost as fun as seeing your GUI melt into the joy of a KDL:
"Welcome to Kernel Debugging Land!"
***
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This error is documented in MS's KB:
"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on his own." Scary.
I've encountered "Error: too many errors" several times before.
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
While doing some JavaScript programming with and old version of Netscape:
Undefined is not definedAppleWorks GS on the Apple IIGS... "A serious system error has occured" and two buttons appeared. The first button said "Reset", and the second button had an arrow pointing to the first button. :)
There's this little gem from Real Media.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
The fax machine in my office's mailroom displays this to confirm that your outgoing fax was sent. It confused the heck out of me the first time...
My favorite Windows Error.
Though now on NT/2000 these errors are logged in the handy-dany event logger.
Or something to that effect. It was a few years ago, so probably MacOS8. Just the standard error box with no explaination besides "Oooooops"
There's always the old favorite "This application has performed a fatal error and will be shut down: Windows" and the similar "This file appears to be corrupted or infected, and should be replaced: Symantec AntiVirus." I'll post the screenshot of the antivirus one if i find it.
I still put those in for giggles.. Usually in something like this:
if ($a > 0){
#something
}elsif($a 0){
#something
}elsif($a = 0){
#something
}else{
die "Error: You shouldn't see this."
};
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
(1) Winerr 00E : Unexplained Error - Please tell us how this happened0 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000c0000240".
(2) 01B - Error Removing Temp File; Kernel.dll Will Be Substituted
(3) 01C - Wrong Disk Formatted. Sorry About That.
(4)Title: setup32.exe - error in application
The instruction "0x77e0a053" points to memory at "0x0f1366b8". The data was not transferred into RAM because of an I/O error in "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
That's a lot of zeros... I thought addresses were only 32 bits long in Windows2000...
Rapid Nirvana
I like this far more than is acceptable:
>cat food
>cat: cannot open food
At a DN300's boot prompt I typed:
:)
> ?
You must be from Prime. Use 'h' for help.
Prime was Apollo's competitor at the time.
Hedley
My favorite on the NT servers was a popup explainging that the Dr. Watson process had generated a Dr. Watson error. If the system hadn't frozen I would have screen-capped that bad boy.
Also, twice when using Veritas Backup Exec NT 7.3 I received a warning error messages stating that there were over 1 billion administrators currently connected to the system, so I should be careful making changes. I wasn't aware Backup Exec was so popular.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Gnarly Error Messages" make me picture the Dell dude popping up like the M$ Clippy and saying something like "Dude, your program just totally crashed. Bummer!"
"Cannot Start Transaction While in Firehose Mode"
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
That's like the fun command you could use on some older versions of make:
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[in soothing voice]"Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
If you think
When installing linux you can get this error:
***Kernel panic: I have no root and I want to scream
if you don't tell the kernel where to find it's root filesystem.
Travis
Service unavailable due to link posted on Slashdot.
Is when Windows Media Player 6 (before all the gooey interface stuff) gave me an:
Error #112233:
Catastrophic Failure
And then it continued to play the Divx movie fine....
If you are unable to see this press Cancel.
Message i got when installing Windows XP
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
I remember I was using an old Amiga disk-doctor type utility, and I got this wonderful error message:
'Cannot mark bad blocks because the block used for marking bad blocks is bad.'
Say THAT 10 times fast.
I've been telling this wonderful story to my computer friends for ages, and finally, I have an online outlet for it! Yay!
A friend once got a javascript error that would have made Bill Clinton proud:
'is' is not defined
I once got a Windows message telling me to insert the CD labeled 'Windows 98' into the floppy drive C: (really! all three in one!)
But my favorite was an old mainframe warning:
Warning: Starting system abort routine. Enter 'go' to continue or 'no' to stop.
To this day I don't know whether 'go' would continue aborting, or continue running, nor whether 'no' would stop running, or stop aborting!
Q325038: Calendar Type May Change to Japanese Emperor Era When Outlook Runs
cpeterso
After a 20+minute download (with 33.6kbps isp)I launched the Virus Definition Update package only to get the confirmation:
"The following file may have a Virus, contiue anyway?"
This was a NortonAV popup messagebox, not netscape or ie.
If you think
I work tech support now. Dont' get any of those, but one of our production systems threw this at me the other day:
"System Error: You need to contact technical support."
Unfortunately, the guy in the next cube over wasn't much help...
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
All IBM MVS error messages end up saying this in the manual:
ERROR: Error on open macro at the address indicated
PROGRAMMER ACTION: Fix and rerun.
No joke.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
____________________________
Internet Explorer
Line: 142
Char: 7
Error: 'null' is null or not an object
Code:0
URL: http://jobs.microsoft.co.uk/working.asp
________
http://remember.mine.nu/null.jpg
I used to label my drive "DEFECTIVE" - so that whenever I did a DIR, it said - "The volume label on drive C: is DEFECTIVE"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yep. I had a Mac LC. I changed my bomb error to say, "someone set up us the bomb!" Fun, editing error messages. There's a hack somewhere that replaces the BSOD with Haiku:
Windows XP crashed.
I am the blue screen of death.
No one hears your screams.
One for some disk-scanning tool was:
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and loss of data.
Guess which has occurred.
Then there's the
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++
+++MELON MELON MELON+++
+++REDO FROM START+++
error, copied from The Hogfather
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Has these funny errors to laugh at
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
1. MS Excel: Cannot quit Microsoft Excel. [OK]
.... bla bla
2. MS Outlook: The COM Transaction Integrator Resync TP service depends on the SnaBase service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully.
3. Cannot copy 16SID_~1. The file exists.
4. MS FrontPage: Out of memory while attempting to allocate 0 byte.
5. MS Word: Cannot execute the command since Unknown is busy.
6. MS Windows Update: This update solves the security problem with an uncontrolled buffer in the SNMP service in Windows XP. You can find more information in MS Security Bulletin MS02-006. Download the problem now to stop malicious users from
7. The window Internet Explorer or the ActiveX-control on this page is busy. If you close this window there might be problems. Do you wish to close the window? [OK/Cancel]
8. Winsock Error: -10000. No Error.
9. Dreamweaver: An unnamed file contains an invalid path. [OK]
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
elsif($a 0)
die "Error: You shouldn't see this unless I forgot a less than sign (or Slashdot removed it)."
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Or how about:
:-D
"You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler."
Oh for the days when Apple had a since of humor.
And personally I prefer the ones that said "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue"
RMN
~~~
What really gets on my tits, is microsofts excuse for an error message:
"Please contact your system administrator."
- I am the fucking adminsitrator and I still don't have a fucking clue!
It's really really easy to change your error messages in a pre-OSX Mac system. When I was in 8th grade I got a good shot in at my music teacher. I booted up our studio computer, fired up ResEdit and changed a resourse or three. So instead of "Please re-insert disk" he saw "Hey! I was eating that!" Instead of the standard Error type-11 messages (application crashed - out of memory - restart) he got "what did you do that for? - (poke again)" and the restart / shutdown dialogue was replaced with "play God." - restart, Shut Down and Cancel turned into Resurrect, Eternal Damnation and Have Mercy. :)
Good times.
triv
The year was 1989, and I was installing Interactive 386/ix (AT&T licensed UNIX) on a pc. At some point in working on the box I got the error "bad magik". I have loved unix and unix-like operating systems ever since. DOS was always boring.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
My favorite error message (not really an error, more informational) came from a driver for a Cannon office printer (floor model copy machine + printer + fax) when requesting a size for a margin. The message stated "Enter an integer between 0 and 1.2"
I got the title as an error message from RSX-11M Fortran-IV Plus in about 1982. Turns out, after bothering the folks at DEC for days, that the problem was a mis-aligned named COMMON section. Why didn't they just SAY so???
Dog is my co-pilot.
[root@localhost]% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
[root@localhost]% gotta light?
no match.
[root@localhost]% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
[root@localhost]% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans
[root@localhost]% rm God
God not found.
[root@localhost]% talk VladimirPutin@Kremlin
Cannot find VladimirPutin@Kremlin: Your party is not logged on.
More funny UNIX commands here.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
The old SWTP microprocessor kits used to output a single * as a prompt. I prety much knew how the day was going to go when I saw one that, the first time it was powered up, type out FU
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The Selecting Blendolini Causes Choco-Banana Shake Hang From the BSOD-on-my-toaster dept issue was a real error in a Microsoft related program, "Someone's in the Kitchen." There used to be a whole technet article describing the crash involving the choco-banana shake recipe, but it was pulled. For reference, check this out: Q157668 Mystery solved.
I once worked with this woman with poor vision who was hysterical because something about an "illegal abortion" had appeared on her machine.
She said that she had advised a girl who had made some mistakes on such matters but never was actually involved in such a thing. Only later she realised what it really said.
I was compiling a program once (I sure as hell wish I remembered which program it was) and it told me that my refrigerator did not have enough beer. The program still compiled of course...it just flashed that error across the screen.
Back in my VAX/VMS days, the powers that be decided to name the machines after planets. The limit was six characers, so the names were "VENUS", "MARS", and "PLUTO". So far, so good.
Certain conditions, (such as a reboot) were generally accompanied by broadcast messages that would (in our case) be sent to hundreds of dumb terminals in about 12 different cities.
*** Reply received from operator on MARS ***
System shutdown in 5 minutes
From a TI-86 calculator, in the middle of my math final:
ERROR 29: BAD GUESS
Not exactly what I wanted to hear from my calculator.
This space intentionally left blank.
'I'm crushing your head!' error appears after leaving open a pop-up slider
Product: Flash
Platform: All
Versions: 5.0
ID: 15438
Issue
After leaving a slider pop-up open, the user switches to another functio] such as accessing a menu or testing a movie. Flash then behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes an error message appears which states:
"I'm crushing your head!" "Crashing at gPopupDail should be new!. Yes = go to debugger, No = keep running, Cancel = terminate."
At other times the slider may continue to appear independently of the panel.Reason
This error is caused by leaving the a pop-up slider open while attempting to perform another function.
Solution
Click out of the slider area to close the pop-up slider before testing the movie or accessing another menu.
Random Musings
A Friend (not a FOAF, just a friend) worked for a company that wrote software for optimising the layout on ICs. The error they coded wasn't ever supposed to be encountered outside the development area, unfortunately the got a call from a customer asking what
"Error: Wrong Gender, unable to have sex."
meant.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It's the "Jovial" one right now, but for a while it gave an error:
HTTP error 403: file is none of your business
You have a lot of nerve even clicking on this link.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Here's a kernel dump I got once while creating a software raid. I tried to post it, but the lameness filter keeps stopping me.
Kernel error
No datacenter is secure if it has windows.
I used an IBM 1130 in college (yes, we had electricity in those days). There were half a dozen or so status lamps on the front console. These were bulbs inset into rectanglar holes, with a chunk of translucent colored plastic containing a phrase for the status. One was a green piece of plastic labeled "Power" and another was a red one labeled "Parity Error".
The computer was down for a week due to a parity error when the system was powered up. The IBM tech couldn't figure it out. Eventually somebody looked at a picture of the console in the manual and noticed the Power and Parity Error indicators had been switched. The system was working all along!
Probably an old one but it would appear relevant.
I know someone who, in college, changed our local instance of OS/360-MVT to that instead of giving the traditional
message, it would say
Adrian
Back in the 80s, we got an Amiga 1000, and my dad was trying to hook up an apple image writer to the serial port. Apparently, the Amiga would dump error messages to the serial port, expecting a terminal to be connected. So at some point, he tries to print something, it doesn't work, the machine trys printing an error message to the serial port. So the printer makes it laborious dot matrix printing noises, and then advances the paper, which says "Printer not found".
Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction
When men used to be men
I was messing around with an old parallel port drive in DOS, when the device driver flaked out or something. DOS helpfully printed out this error message :
Out of paper on Drive D:
Hum, sure.
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
If the internal temperature on your TiVo reaches a certain point, you're greated with an image of the TiVo dude in flames, with a message "Your TiVo is on fire! Call 911 now!". http://tivo.samba.org/download/belboz/firegood.jpg .
I read a case history that was somewhat similar. Except the error message was in Latin. Someone who had once taken Latin was tracked down, and asked to translate. The translation was something like, "Unto the son is born a brother". When the original programmer was tracked down, he was embarrassed. "But that condition was never supposed to arrive. He had some kind of complicated data structure, where each element could have children and siblings. Except the element at the apex of the tree was supposed to be a special case -- no siblings.
But since it was never supposed to happen the original programmer didn't bother to put a meaningful error message.
Back with good old version 7, make gave error messages like:
make: stop. don't know how to make foo!
if you had typed "make foo" and there was no makefile, or no rule for foo in the makefile.
When computer naive people (remember them) would ask what computers could do, it was fun to have them sit down and type:
make love
Which would, of course, result in:
make: stop. don't know how to make love!
"make war" was another good one.
Not exactly an error message. More of a message error, but I'm sure alot of people have heard of the "Please insert dick and press any key to continue..." urban legend. Ouch.
Imagine the lawsuit when some newbie takes it literally while running porn software.
Tech support line: "You reformatted your what?"
Table-ized A.I.
As a Systems Administrator, I must concur that the most annoying error messages are the ones that tell me to "Consult your Systems Administrator".
load "linux",8,1
"The printer doesn't work."
"Is there an error? What does it say?"
"It's all the way in the next room."
"Ma'am, I need to know the error."
"It says printer error."
"Could you read me exactly what is says?"
"I remembered. That's what it says. Printer error."
"Ok, ma'am? You're talking to the guy that wrote the software. I know for a fact that it doesn't say printer error, because I never wrote an error message that says printer error. Now please put down the phone, go into the other room, and read me the real message."
*click*
True story.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Many years ago on my Amiga (call me a fanatic, but I still love that machine) there was a very cool file management program. For the life of me I can't remember the name. Anyway, if you tried to do certain things, like delete a floppy disk, or format a directory, it would pop up a message "User Stupidity Error." Finally, some code that tells it like it is. I wish I could put "User Stupidity Errors" in my programs at work . . .
Does anybody remember what the name of the program was?
PC Load letter? What the fuck does that mean?
That bitch is lucky I'm not armed.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
This was in the back of PC Magazine a few weeks ago. Sorry I can't remember the specifics.
Setting: A published piece of software, in a moderately obscure error case. The first half of the error message is fabricated (since I don't remember the specifics) but the second half tells volumes about programmers and their motivations:
This feature has not yet been correctly implemented. Bad Programmer. No donut.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
In the 70's I worked in a college computer center equipped with an RCA Spectra 70 batch-oriented system. I was fixing a problem with one of the line printers (paper stacking) when I got a bad static shock from the printer cabinet, at which point the printer abruptly stopped printing.
I walked over to the operator's console to report the problem, and was interrupted by the console teletype printing a message (paraphrased):
Job 00371 has device LPT1 in silent death
While we were trying to figure that out, the console continued to print out messages every 30 seconds or so:
Job 00358 has device MTA0 in silent death
Job 00364 has device CDR0 in silent death
Job *SYS* has device CPU0 in silent
My all-time favorite is the old "ren" error - "Duplicate file name or file not found".
If it's not immediately funny - parse it:
"Duplicate file name" = "The file exists"
"File not Found" = "The file doesn't exist"
So...basically the error message says "the file exists or it doesn't"....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
KMAG YOYO ... reportedly an MVS error. Displayed only when a theoretically impossible state occurred. Once, while testing the system, it came up. The old programmer said it meant: "kiss my *ss guys, you're on your own".
Well this one is not really an error message. There was a multimedia company that had a promotional floppy (this was before CD's) that had this gag error message pop up on your mac (it's been a while so I might not get the wording exactly right)
"How would you like if I erased all your files?" with two buttons both of which said "OK". If you clicked on the button it would say "just kidding" if you clicked anywhere else it would call you a coward.
Of course, my TA called me out on it when I got the graded result back -- she had taken off three points. I said, fine, if YOU can find the flaw in the rest of my logic, then I will accept that I made a mistake and deserved to be docked three points. She rapidly gave up, and only took off one point instead.
An amusing error I got when trying to run VirtualPC for Windows inside VirtualPC for Mac. Yes, this is real.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Unknown Error in "step 5. Profit!"
Table-ized A.I.
Return_Value = Otay_Buckwheat;
Right up there with 0xDEADBEEF- RS6000 proc's when the registers aren't initialized.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I doubt you could get that message past the suits these days. If you did, I'm sure Paramount would demand a royalty every time the message appeared (Star Trek franchiise).
Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0.
attraction: domain error: forces on balls too great
Here is a screenshot.
Not that it's exactly on topic, but here are links to a few other pictures of Windows error messages and bluescreens from the same site that I thought were funny.
My fave is still an error from the TRSDOS days:
Error: Unprintable Error
Come on! You can tell me.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Ok. This is a bad admission but here goes. I *used* to have a bad habit of using bizare dada names for test variables so they would stick out at me when cleaning code up for production. Some of them where just ludicrous. I realised the practice was getting way too whacky when the boss came in red in the face asking what the fuck a variable called "MaryCarefullyWipesHerFrock" was doing in his precious code, and why it was commented that it was "being taken from behind by intDuckMonster"
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I always liked:
%man arse
no manual entry for arse
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
I played a joke on my company a few years ago. I screen capped and altered an error message to say "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I placed this image in the middleof a copy of a page from our website, then sent a company-wide email exlaining the new update they needed to see. After a few people asked me about the error message (also asking me to order new monitors...), I copied a CNN health page and gave it a few minor alterations. I wrote a fake explanation of a new virus going around called the "Microwave Virus" that overloaded the UV guns in your monitor. This exposure can cause people to feel tired, irritable, and a few other normal things you feel while you're at work. I then renamed my computer to 'www.cnn-news.com' and posted the page using MS Personal Web Server. I sent out a 'Sysadmin Virus Warning' and went to lunch.
When I got back from lunch, a group of my coworkers were trying to figure out if they should go home or if they should see their doctors first. Heh.
They weren't so stunned that I faked the message, but rather that I had faked CNN's site so well. Pity they missed the typo in the error message.
Needless to say, I didnt go back to programming for the rest of the day...
The next reboot gave us "NVRAM insanity error." Quite descriptive. :-)
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I like the message I got from VM 370 many years ago:
Illegal Error: Device returned illegal error code.
Translation is "You bought a third party compatible disk drive and it returned an error code to the OS that wasn't defined".
Our customer support group received a call one day from someone asking to talk to Bob. The cs rep replied that this was Foo Inc's support line, and gave them the head office number. The customer insisted that this was a legitimate problem with the software.
When the cs rep dug a little deeper, the customer said: "I was running your software, and an error message came up that said 'This should never happen. If it does, call Bob' ".
Sure enough, I grepped the code, and Bob had left that error message in an obscure part of the code.
Phemur
> Forth will rise again
:)
ITYM "again will rise Forth"
Yoda You Like Are If FORTH Understand You Will Then
This was in production Lisp Machine system code for a long time. I don't recall what triggered the error, but I did manage to get it once on a TI Explorer (Texas Instrument's Lisp Machine):
Something really bad happened. See if RMS is in the building.
Since RMS was responsible for much of the system code, this kind of made sense. But it was in a commercial machine! And, yes, it meant *that* RMS.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
A guy I work with had shakey hands and with taps enabled on his laptop, he managed to drag the Start menu stuff in Win98 to another directory.
When I tried to drag the Start Menu Dir back to where it belonged I got:
Cannot perform this operation as it is a Rooted Explorer
Amen to that.....
Burma?