I was thinking about a name for a new blog and wanted to name it after a computer error of some description (partly inspired by this site). So I want to know some people favorites.
I remember at a job I had "Catastrophic failure" was used a lot as an error message, to the users as well!
Please give me some inspiration. There is a 99% chance I will call my blog after the most highly voted one.
No keyboard present. Press F1 to continue.
I remember the first time I got this error long ago when booting with a faulty keyboard, I just about knocked myself unconscious with the spontaneous head to desk gesture.
He's looking for a blog name people, not a story. here's a few:
0xC0000005" - anyone debugging under windows will recognize thisMore along the lines of "annoyances":
Unexpected character
This is my favorite so far, because of the interesting alternate connotation.
Anything with "illegal"... like "illegal operation"... how did it know?!
Bad file name; there may be no bad names in the final system!
I'm pretty sure that's a typo ("final" vs. "file"), but its been preserved in every list of classic Mac error codes I've seen...
I named mine 'echoreply', which I thought was pretty neat. There's always stack smashing, but that's kind of a knock off. You've got SIGBUS, but that's not a very informative name to search engines that do not write code. Variants of SEGV might seem cool, but with so many reported segfaults on public lists you'd just get lost in the shuffle.
Of course, there's i-refuse-to-write-reentrant-code-because-threads-are-evil.com , but that's sort of long (but controversial). However, such a name will surely make your blog popular and you get to bitch about mutex debugging. Without checking, I'm quite sure that most preprocessor tokens are taken as domain names. Venturing to other operating systems, "Abort, Retry, Fail" was a popular column way back when, you don't want those sloppy seconds.
Your posts will likely be full of linguistic errors, so syntax error is sort of redundant.
So, I recommend segbus.com which appears to be open, short, related and should catch searches starting with SEG. Or, bareback-with-no-stack-protector-needed , but thats icky and long.
We're sorry, something happened (and why that is the ultimate error message).
The discussion went around our office the other week as it appears that all my exception descriptions refer to "bad things" happening, which gave birth to the BadThingException.
Someone else suggested we needed another case for situations that we were less likely to recover from, so we inherited, and had a ReallyBadThingException; Now, if we can only sneak them past a code review...
Edify had an IDE for application development. For years they had a message at the end whenever code successfully compiled. - "Funny, but no errors."
Error: The operation was a success
This was either WinZip or Windows Explorer back in the Win9x days, when I was stupidly trying to multitask as some part of the system was apparently failing. It was so unstable I couldn't take a screenshot, so I took a hard photo of it. I wonder where that's gotten to...
An earlier version of Photoshop (Must have been 5 or 5.5) had an error if you tried to edit the stroke of a Bezier curve without rendering first:
"Could not stroke the layer because there is nothing to stroke"
But my personal all-time favorite is from JavaScript in the NN4 days:
"Undefined is not defined"
Two for you. First from a pilot version of SunOS (mid-80's):
"Kernel Blew Chow"
Then one that might be too long, also from that era:
"None documents cannot be printed here"
A contractor at a company I worked for made a BadLuckException...it was a timing problem that couldn't be sorted apparently, so that's the exception it would throw.
I saw an Application throw a "ProgrammerIsStupidException". Apparently it was in response to some kind of can't happen condition. I was never able to reproduce the error.
How about Missing Semicolon?
Everyone must have had at least one of those....
My old VZ200 had on (I found by peeking through memory)
Unprintable Error
A mate of mine put a console write out of an app many years ago
"Terminated with unusual error"
A year later, he came back to the project and sat abusing his desktop for three days in a row, at some stupid error that the ETL was throwing until he realised that it he was the one who put it there himself.
From the Acorn BBC Microcomputer implementation of BASIC when trying to re-number the lines of my program starting at line 1 in steps of 42:
> REN 1,42
Silly