Monday, February 28, 2011

Programvarefeilmeldingsforfattargrubling

Kven er eigentleg desse sjelene som sit og forfattar feilmeldingane ein får opp når noko går gale på datamaskina? Det slår meg at dei enten må ha ein skikkeleg dårleg (eller i det minste ekstremt intern) sans for humor, eller tilhøyra ein skriftkultur som er så radikalt forskjellig frå min (og dei fleste andre eg kjenner sin) at det som for dei høyrest rimeleg ut, for meg i mange tilfelle blir strålande eksempel på vakker absurditet.

Frå tidlegare er eg kjend med at ein del programvaretypar likar å vera høflege når dei har klappa saman,og gi deg alternativ av typen: "Vil du slå av, eller vil du slå av?" Eg har òg tidlegare vore innom nokre av dei meir spesielle forsøka internetten gjer på å kommunisera med meg.
I dag vart eg møtt med denne meldinga frå PASW Statistics, etter ein halvtimes fullstendig resultatlause forsøk på å få programmet til å gjera det det er meininga det skal gjera:

"The PASW Statistics Processor is terminating due to a catastrophic error. Any working file is lost."
OK, slapp av PASW, ingen grunn til panikk. Spesielt sidan du nettopp har nekta å legga inn noko som helst i den "tapte" fila ...
 
Den dramatiske starten vart følgt av: "A program error has occurred". 
Takk, det ante meg vel. Trur kanskje fyrste setninga kommuniserte dette grundig nok.

Det som verkeleg fekk meg til å stussa var likevel den siste biten:
"Please note the circumstances under which this error occurred, attempting to replicate it if possible".

   ???

Det har skjedd ein katastrofe!!!
- Sjå om du kan klara å få det til ein gong til ...?

5 comments:

e said...

Haha! En katastrofe, faktisk...

Kieran S said...

Hi!! I read this post using a combination of my scant norwegian and google translate so forgive me if I misunderstood anything!

One problem is that the people who write these programs are not very good at communicating in natural languages (that is a real term!! as opposed to artificial languages for computers) and can't express themselves very well...at least in my programs I try to have coherent error messages :)

Another problem is that the programmer doesnt know what the error is going to be and so cannot give you a decent message - there will be hundreds of possible events that return 'catastrophic error'. Also, I know they put it a bit abruptly but from their point of view, if you can replicate the error it makes it so much easier to solve.

But I think the best error ever is the infamous BIOS post:

"No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue." - this was actually a real error produced by Microsoft and released in one of their early BIOSes!!!
lol xD

-S- said...

You're right - that must be the best error message ever :D I have had similar problems with Firefox, which sometimes refuses to open and tells me "Firefox is already running". Possible solutions from Help-pages usually include opening "Tools" in Firefox which is hard to do when Firefox won't open.

From your answer I'd say you've understood perfectly - eigentleg burde eg svara deg på norsk ;) How difficult do you find reading Norwegian, having, I suppose, little experience with it in written form? Norwegian is rather more orthophone (spelling based closely on pronunciation) than English, but still. And how well can Google Translate handle my Nynorsk?

Kieran S said...

It was fun trying to read it! I just attempted pronounciation and matched to my vocabulary, which as you say is basically only sounds. It was pretty hard, and I only got the jist of it which got me interested so I went to use Google (which worked really well in the main considering it was probably doing Bokmål).

About Firefox - I've had that error once before and its really annoying because with a tiny bit more work they could have said 'do you want to close the other one?'!
A quick way to get around it is to open task manager (right click on taskbar > start task manager) go to processes and end the firefox.exe process. Then it starts ;)

Do you prefer English or Norwegian? (If its Norwegian, why is English so successful? Is it purely because Britain conquerored most of the world?) Also, what's your favourite language?

Haldis said...

Det finnes gøye feilmeldinger også da. Hvis du ikke allerede sett denne fra UiO er den absolutt å anbefale: http://tinyurl.com/5vdxc6h