I had a whole bunch of error message screenshots saved and as I was looking through, I realized two things: first, even though there are only 2 dozen of them I don’t know if I have the energy to compose witty comments about each without becoming entirely demoralized. Secondly, I began to notice some themes. Therefore, I am going to take all the error messages I have and roughly categorize them. Since there is often overlap I am going to present it as a table, a sort of bingo card, indicating the categorization.
The first category I call “Sorry, not sorry”: inauthentic apologies for things that the author of the error message is likely responsible for in the first place.
The next category I call “Funny, not funny”: instead of giving inauthentic apologies for our screw up, we will try to distract from it with a “cute” saying (“aw, snap”) or a frowny face icon. I am not laughing, just stop.
The next category is what I call “helpfully not helpful”: the error message gives some excess, though unhelpful, detail with the error message. You still don’t know what went wrong but you spent twice as long reading the verbiage. Also useless suggestions like “try again later” or “retry” fall into this bucket.
The category “dunno” covers most of these errors: I don’t know what happened (even though I am coding an exception block), so I will just feign ignorance. It’s best when these are in passive voice, and extra credit for using the word “something” in the error.
The next category, which rarely comes up, is when there are clues as to what went wrong. I myself have (unintentionally) written errors like this with code like this:
warn "Error: unable to open file $file\n";
Of course, if $file is blank you get:
Error: unable to open file
Someone with some coding experience may pick up that a filename belonged there. Putting quotes around the file would have at least given a hint that I got an empty filename (and failed to sanitize my inputs). Note: I never said I was blameless in this error message hall of shame.
Here we go:
error | notsorry | notfunny | nothelp | dunno | clues |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
x | x | x | x | ||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | |||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | x | |||
x | x | ||||
x | |||||
x | x | ||||
x | |||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | ||||
x | x | x | x | ||
x | x | ||||
x | |||||
x |
How many of those have you seen? Perhaps I should have a giveaway for the first person to have personally seen every single one. I don’t know what sort of prize it would be. Maybe we could sit down and share some whiskey… I feel like I need it after looking at all those.
I’m glad there could be a reason for this error. But, on the other hand, it may just be random, like the lottery in reverse.
I recently upgraded my workstation and, once again, had to change music players. Though this is just as well since Banshee’s 20 seconds of unresponsiveness after changing tracks was pretty intolerable. So now I tried Clementine. It seems like a reasonably good player, but on certain tracks I get this:
Presumably the tracks in question were MP3, but knowing the track/file name and the plugin it wanted would be most helpful in locating the exact plugin I need. After installing a whole bunch of packages with different codecs nothing changed.
In my youth I used to think that free software would ultimately be better quality. So much for that.
For many years I was forced to use Windows on my work computers. I almost always listen to music as I work, so I needed a music player. I quickly grew dissatisfied with Windows Media Player, and after some searching I found Foobar2000, which I really liked. A utilitarian, but capable, interface which did most everything I needed and did it pretty well.
A few years ago I switched my desktop machine to Linux. Hurrah! But now the music player again became an issue. I tried Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok. None of them were very good. Nothing close to Foobar2000. All seemed to suffer from the same issues: lots of pointless graphical flourish, confusing and/or dumbed down interfaces, poor functionality, and lousy error handling. By process of elimination, I ended up with Banshee. A grudging choice which I regret on most days.
A main source of pain is the Podcast extension. It suffers from my usual pet peeves: no indication what, if anything, is happening and poor to non-existent error reporting. Here’s a prime example: I hit the button to check for new podcasts. Nothing seems to happen for a few minutes, but then some new episodes pop in. But they don’t download. I right click on a new episode, and select download. Nothing. I wait. Still nothing. So I go digging. After several minutes of searching I find a log file buried under my home directory, it contains this:
[Warn 09:24:14.993] HttpDownloadTask The Permaculture Podcast - Honeybees with Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp Error: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
So, it actually did attempt to download, but didn’t bother to say anything. When that download failed, it quietly tucked the error into an obscure log file, and on top of that labeled it as “Warn”. I tend to be of the opinion that when I ask for something to be done, and it cannot be, that is an “Error”, not a “Warning”. But even so, the error message doesn’t mention the URL or whether it was going through a proxy, without those I still don’t know why it happened. As I recall I continued experimenting with settings until I figured out that the proxy was the issue.
I didn’t become a software engineer so I could spend my days pushing upstream against issues like this.