A topic in Error'd
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@RaceProUK I feel like there should be a blakeyrant about no one needing the error code.
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@boomzilla Hmm... I can try.
clears throat
It's a bit dumb to give an error number that doesn't really mean anything, and doesn't get meaningful search results.
Hmm... Guess I'm just not as good at it as he is.
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@RaceProUK
The first line is definitely missing "I double-dare you, motherf*cker!"
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@asdf said in A topic in Error'd:
@RaceProUK
The first line is definitely missing "I double-dare you, motherf*cker!"BEEP BOOP
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@RaceProUK said in A topic in Error'd:
doesn't get meaningful search results
It does, if you use Google…
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OK, guys.
I get that you're all about this new hip Unix bash PowerShell command line shit. But you know, and I know, that THIS IS BAD UX. If you give me an error message, WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT.
You know what the error is, just tell me. Maybe we can achieve better than 1970s level computer technology here?
</blakey>
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@asdf said in A topic in Error'd:
@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
</blakey>
I knew it!
Oh yeah I don't believe a word of what I just wrote there. I channeled my inner @boomzilla .... Err, Blakey... And just wrote
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@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
If you give me an error message, WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT.
Because an error message in a command line window is that much worse than one in a modal messagebox.
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@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
1970s level
I mean, originally error codes were just numbers because there wasn't enough room to waste on descriptive text.
Nowadays we waste gigabytes on uncompressed pictures for games.
Shirley we could spare the bits needed to at least give back the compiler-generated errors?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
1970s level
I mean, originally error codes were just numbers because there wasn't enough room to waste on descriptive text.
Nowadays we waste gigabytes on uncompressed pictures for games.
Shirley we could spare the bits needed to at least give back the compiler-generated errors?
Is "Page fault in nonpaged area" more helpful than "STOP 0x00000050" for Average Joe?
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@Maciejasjmj are all your users average Joes? Even testers, admins and helldesk guys?
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@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj are all your users average Joes? Even testers, admins and helldesk guys?
The technical user will know what to do with an error code, and the non-technical user won't know what to do with a description either other than to pass it on.
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@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
OK, guys.
I get that you're all about this new hip Unix bash PowerShell command line shit. But you know, and I know, that THIS IS BAD UX. If you give me an error message, WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THAT.
You know what the error is, just tell me. Maybe we can achieve better than 1970s level computer technology here?
</blakey>WtfFramework policy for cryptic error codes is that they only go in "Something totally fukt that shouldn't be able to happen happened" error handlers. The error code is basically the serial number of the exception handler and shortcuts the "Where the fuck did that get thrown from!?" stage of debugging.
We've found that if we give the user (who are technical staff building or supporting applications) an actual error message, they'll spend time rewriting their shit to try to work around whatever, or in the case of live applications, bother implementation to rewrite their shit to try to work around whatever. If we give them a cryptic message, the first step is "WENG WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!?" and I only hear about the impossible happening when it's happened to some critical brazillion-dollar process with insane levels of visibility, a fifteen nanosecond SLA and a particular implementation developer who refuses to think critically and a fix-timeline of 'YESTERDAY!'
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
1970s level
I mean, originally error codes were just numbers because there wasn't enough room to waste on descriptive text.
Nowadays we waste gigabytes on uncompressed pictures for games.
Shirley we could spare the bits needed to at least give back the compiler-generated errors?
Is "Page fault in nonpaged area" more helpful than "STOP 0x00000050" for Average Joe?
I would have gone with "tried to remember something but I forgot I didn't write it down. For the debugger guys: E_PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA 0x00000050 Dump saved as datProg-20170322.dmp"
Satisfies everyone!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
1970s level
I mean, originally error codes were just numbers because there wasn't enough room to waste on descriptive text.
Nowadays we waste gigabytes on uncompressed pictures for games.
Shirley we could spare the bits needed to at least give back the compiler-generated errors?
Is "Page fault in nonpaged area" more helpful than "STOP 0x00000050" for Average Joe?
I would have gone with "tried to remember something but I forgot I didn't write it down. For the debugger guys: E_PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA 0x00000050 Dump saved as datProg-20170322.dmp"
Satisfies everyone!
Except marketing. And possibly legal. That message out and out says "We fucked up!"
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@Weng said in A topic in Error'd:
@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Tsaukpaetra said in A topic in Error'd:
@sloosecannon said in A topic in Error'd:
1970s level
I mean, originally error codes were just numbers because there wasn't enough room to waste on descriptive text.
Nowadays we waste gigabytes on uncompressed pictures for games.
Shirley we could spare the bits needed to at least give back the compiler-generated errors?
Is "Page fault in nonpaged area" more helpful than "STOP 0x00000050" for Average Joe?
I would have gone with "tried to remember something but I forgot I didn't write it down. For the debugger guys: E_PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA 0x00000050 Dump saved as datProg-20170322.dmp"
Satisfies everyone!
Except marketing. And possibly legal. That message out and out says "We fucked up!"
Proof who TRWTF REALLY is then?
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@Weng said in A topic in Error'd:
a particular implementation developer who refuses to think critically
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj are all your users average Joes? Even testers, admins and helldesk guys?
The technical user will know what to do with an error code, and the non-technical user won't know what to do with a description either other than to pass it on.
You overestimate googlability of error codes. I mean, it wouldn't be a problem if everyone documented every single error code of every single part of software and hardware, like in good old times, but no one does it anymore. Even the MSDN list of all error codes for Windows is out of date.
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@dkf said in A topic in Error'd:
TRWTF is Canada, eh?
(The license plate on the car appears to be Beautiful British Columbia.)
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@boomzilla said in A topic in Error'd:
blakeyrant
I was recently reminded about the recent lack of PEDANTIC DICKWEEDERY on this forum.
WE HAVE QUOTAS TO FILL, PEOPLE!
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@ben_lubar said in A topic in Error'd:
WE HAVE QUOTAS TO FILL, PEOPLE!
Wouldn't it be simpler to have a single shared quota for pendantry across all participants? Or we could have one quota for ordinary forum members, one for mods, and one for admins, leveraging the existing permissions system. (Yes, we could use the groups, but then we'd have all sorts of complexities with overlapping group requirements, and that'd be annoying to solve even with code.)
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@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj are all your users average Joes? Even testers, admins and helldesk guys?
The technical user will know what to do with an error code, and the non-technical user won't know what to do with a description either other than to pass it on.
You overestimate googlability of error codes. I mean, it wouldn't be a problem if everyone documented every single error code of every single part of software and hardware, like in good old times, but no one does it anymore. Even the MSDN list of all error codes for Windows is out of date.
But you'll still generally need to Google the description to know that PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA generally means a driver problem, and MISMATCHED_HAL means that your Windows installation is borked. You could hardcode it into the program, but then it's difficult to update when it turns out the cause is different.
The more descriptive you get, the bigger the odds that your description will turn out to be misleading.
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@dkf said in A topic in Error'd:
Or we could have one quota for ordinary forum members, one for mods, and one for admins, leveraging the existing permissions system.
Would someone who was both a mod and an admin have to fulfil twice the pendantry?
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@loopback0
Sure, why not. Since twice of zero is still zero and all.Filed under: Work? Pshaw
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@izzion Pendantry doesn't count as work. Mods and admins actually do it.
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
The more descriptive you get, the bigger the odds that your description will turn out to be misleading.
And the less descriptive you get, the bigger odds that your error code/message is will be ungooglable due to another, more popular piece of software having the exact same popup.
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
@Maciejasjmj are all your users average Joes? Even testers, admins and helldesk guys?
The technical user will know what to do with an error code, and the non-technical user won't know what to do with a description either other than to
pass it ondismiss without reading.
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@Gąska said in A topic in Error'd:
And the less descriptive you get, the bigger odds that your error code/message is will be ungooglable due to another, more popular piece of software having the exact same popup.
Just throw up a UUID. The likelihood of two of those colliding (non-maliciously) is low enough that I'm not going to try losing sleep over it.
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@dkf as long as it's copyable.
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
The technical user will know what to do with an error code
I suspect companies really use cryptic error codes to make that shit hard to google so you have to call support and pay $$.
On a related note, there's no way to capture the data from a bluescreen to attach to a helpdesk ticket. There's just too much too fast.
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@Yamikuronue said in A topic in Error'd:
On a related note, there's no way to capture the data from a bluescreen to attach to a helpdesk ticket. There's just too much too fast.
You can turn off automatic reboots after a BSOD (which is a shitty default on par with extension hiding).
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@Maciejasjmj Shitty for power users like us, but probably better for normal users, as they'll probably find being presented with a lot of undecipherable text even scarier.
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
But you'll still generally need to Google the description to know that PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA generally means a driver problem, and MISMATCHED_HAL means that your Windows installation is borked. You could hardcode it into the program, but then it's difficult to update when it turns out the cause is different.
The more descriptive you get, the bigger the odds that your description will turn out to be misleading.
Windows has always sucked at providing useful information when something goes wrong. However, in all fairness, the thing that triggers the error message sometimes isn't what actually caused the error.
I was recently reading about the dreaded
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUALand what typically happens is something that goes like this:-
A driver needs to do something important so it raises the IRQ Level to IRQL 2
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The driver crashes or hangs before it can lower the IRQL back to 0
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Some other unrelated program does something with memory that causes a page fault
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Windows says "Sorry, fuck you, a page fault is not allowed at IRQ Level 2"
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Blue Screen of Death (or Bleu Screen of Cheese in the French version of Windows)
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@RaceProUK said in A topic in Error'd:
as they'll probably find being presented with a lot of undecipherable text even scarier.
It's supposed to be scary, it's supposed to make you shit your pants and run to the closest IT guy instead of dismissing it as "just the PC rebooting sometimes".
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f78aec90 8081df85 8b5ef610 8b08c110 8b08c2a8 0x8b5cfc89 <———— This looks odd what is this module?
Any blog post that goes into crash dump debugging always loses me pretty early on when it does something like this. Those guys are wizards to be able to spot that that line is different to the other gibberish around it
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@Yamikuronue said in A topic in Error'd:
I suspect companies really use cryptic error codes to make that shit hard to google so you have to call support and pay $$.
As the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Or, in other words, I rather suspect that devs are just lazy and put error codes because they can't be bothered to do anything else.
Now, that companies find out that customers are happy to (well, maybe not happy, but at least not opposed to...) pay for support, rather than having properly coded stuff in the first place, and thus decide that it's not worth doing anything to change the error codes, that's another story.
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@remi said in A topic in Error'd:
I rather suspect that devs are just lazy and put error codes because they can't be bothered to do anything else.
Nah, coming up with a bunch of numbers takes work. Lazy devs just put "an error occurred".
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
It's supposed to be scary, it's supposed to make you shit your pants and run to the closest IT guy instead of dismissing it as "just the PC rebooting sometimes".
Yeah but that only has a chance of working for users with an IT guy nearby. Your old mom is either going to call you, in which case being miles away and knowing that she probably just left the cat sleep on the printer again you will just tell her to reboot, or go to the local IT shop that will fleece her and make her buy whatever McNorton shit they have in stock at that point. So it's much better for those users to have a "random" reboot and only get support when things really start to go wrong.
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@Yamikuronue said in A topic in Error'd:
@remi said in A topic in Error'd:
I rather suspect that devs are just lazy and put error codes because they can't be bothered to do anything else.
Nah, coming up with a bunch of numbers takes work. Lazy devs just put "an error occurred".
No, just put whatever number you're thinking of. A "code review and/or later refactoring" (read: never) will take care to ensure the code is not already used elsewhere, and document it.
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@Maciejasjmj said in A topic in Error'd:
@RaceProUK said in A topic in Error'd:
as they'll probably find being presented with a lot of undecipherable text even scarier.
It's supposed to be scary, it's supposed to make you shit your pants and run to the closest IT guy instead of dismissing it as "just the PC rebooting sometimes".
In 99% of BSODs there's nothing actionable there anyway since the cause is something like "the video card tried to fart but accidentally sharted." It's only when it starts happening repeatedly that you can use the BSOD to start investigating what's going on.
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@hungrier And I think I'm right in saying that BSOD errors are logged in the system logs?
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@RaceProUK I think they are
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@RaceProUK said in A topic in Error'd:
@hungrier And I think I'm right in saying that BSOD errors are logged in the system logs?
Maybe some. I've been getting them on one of my systems (forget what it said - I'm still coffee deficient). Haven't found any useful info in the event log yet...
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@RaceProUK I seem to remember that they're dumped into a file somewhere... I cannot guarantee that I'm not just hallucinating that though.
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@Erufael said in A topic in Error'd:
@RaceProUK I seem to remember that they're dumped into a file somewhere... I cannot guarantee that I'm not just hallucinating that though.
I think it has to be turned on now, it's not by default?
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@Yamikuronue said in A topic in Error'd:
@remi said in A topic in Error'd:
I rather suspect that devs are just lazy and put error codes because they can't be bothered to do anything else.
Nah, coming up with a bunch of numbers takes work. Lazy devs just put "an error occurred".
In C# stuff using async, it's common to see "The following error occurred: One or more errors occurred." because it wraps your errors even though only one of them was thrown.
