Why Borland trashed its spreadsheet

Reminds me of a similar story

I used to work for a company that distributed bibliographic databases on CD-ROM. The company that produced the databases used to release a CD catalogue every six months or so which was sent to all customers.

One of these CDs was made to auto-run the user's web browser with a link to a registration page on the company website. Unfortunately, the person who tested the CD didn't try it on a different machine. He had set the link incorrectly so the browser tried to access the registration page on his local machine, which was called a girls name. The URL was:http://<girlsname>/registration/index.html or something.

In Internet Explorer, this simply returned an error message, but Netscape (yes, this was some time ago) would try and help out the user by putting www. and .com either side of the hostname. The URL was rewritten to: http://www.<girlsname>.com/registration/index.html

This particular girls name was a porn site.

it *does* happen

"Instead of the expected SECOND appearing, the characters "FUCKME" appeared. I was shocked. No, that doesn't really cover it: I was traumatised."

Poor thing .... Was it the shock of your life ? ;-)

I'd be shocked if only that caused the product to be ditched ...

Mind you, I used to embed sarcastic comments or parabols in my sources years ago, about some colleagues or other event. Not rude words of course, but kind of private jokes, in the hope it would one day make someone have a good laugh. Sort of legacy from me.

12 years after, some ex-colleagues told me they re-read the sources to update/adapt them, and got a very good moment remembering the joke.

It *does* happen even in big companies, even if the SECOND.BAR thing seems to me bad taste and 14-years oldish.

Not just in the comments

We once developed a product around some 3rd-party code. When the first drop arrived one developer noticed that after attemtping to allocate memory, and failing, the code would exit with the error message "Fuck me, no memory left".

He sent a message to the team mail alias suggesting that perhaps we needed to change this, prompting an immediate reply from our (as we thought, somewhat straitlaced) manager: "Yes, of course. It isn't internationalized"... :)

Memories

I had something similar to this

Back in the early 90's i was working as helpdesk support for a very large database provider. We had just shipped our latest version to our customers and were getting the normal increased support calls etc from customers who were upgrading.

A dba for one of our customers came on the line and said one of his users had got an odd error message pop-up on his screen. I asked him to read the message exactly as was written down.

He read out, "If this happens we're fucked"

mmmm

A colleague attempting to track down a particularly horrible bug sprinkled our VB6 application with logging statements. When a sysadmin at the datacentre asked why there were over 12000 and rising "FUCK ME - HOW DID WE GET HERE?" messages in the system event log I had to pass him over to my surprised friend...

Classic e-mail from our project manager followed -

Subject: To those considering profanity in log messages

Don't even f---ing think about it.

While we're sharing ...

10 years after leaving mainframes behind, I received through the internal mail a note asking, "Remember this?" and a piano-ruled printout out with an elegantly arranged boxed-out error message that read, "If anyone is reading this, the database is truly fucked in a manner that defies explanation". True, but unhelpful.

Seriously?

So you are messing around in DOS 'typing' binary files which really you have no need to do, get offended by a Friday afternoon comment left by some bored programmer and go squealing to the company? 10/10 for sense of humour failure.

My own particular favourite was a question I saw on a pub quiz machine a few years ago (slightly sensored to avoid libel!)

Q: What did U** G****r become famous for?

and one of the possible answers was:

For being a twat.

Cover CDs

Reminds me of the cover CDs you used to get on magazines, back in the day when you still had to explain what "the internet" was to most people. A lot of those CDs included Netscape, because there was no browser built-in to any OS back then.

On one of them I looked at, the version of Netscape was just an image of the Netscape folders from someone's machine, including all their state files, showing their browsing history... they had been to some very naughty places.

I might even still have that disk somewhere....

Browser Histories

I used to work at an Internet Set-Top Box manufacturer.

Occassionally we had boxes returned from customers, for us to identify faults with.

A quick sweep of the Flash filing system and we had a full set of naughty web-sites and passwords!

We used to give them to our youngest team member (just out of University) to access in order to test our prototype porn filter.

But then there is Foobar ...

which appears in almost every programming book on the market.

I'm led to believe that it's from the acronym FUBAR or Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

Just wait till Windows Foobar is released - I believe it's the version after Vista.

I've never used profanities in user visible log files or error messages (though variable names have occasionally succumbed!).

Another example

I once bought a civilization type game which was touted as being highly-customizable by its publishers.

A quick look through the plain text configuration files led me to believe the product hadn't been designed too well and had been given to a third party to get it working properly. The files were full of comments such as "Another botch to get this crappy stuff working" or "Not sure why this works but it seems to make this fucking thing work".

Fuck Shit Piss!

A long time ago, I worked for a company that developed the hotel reservation software for the THF hotel chain, and I remember there was a furore one day when the customer called in and said all 8 consoles were flashing the message "Fuck Shit Piss!" on the screen...

Turns out a programmer put the message in the "default:" block of a "switch" statement, which should never have been reached (it was switching on the record type field in the database, or something). For completeness, he put in this message so he'd be sure to know what it was if it came up during testing.

Sure enough, a year or so down the line, there was a disk crash which corrupted the database (after a lightning strike disrupted power, IIRC), and some record type fields happened to be affected, resulting in the above message appearing on all 8 consoles!!

(This was back in the early 80s, and it was a microcomputer system, pre-IBM PC compatible, running on an 8088 processor with 8 display consoles - so cool! Anyone remember its name?)

Never, ever type "Fuck off!"

I used to work at a major trading bank in London who I shall not name to protect the... well, whatever. Anyway, one of my team members used net msg (or whatever it's called) to send "Fuck off" to one of the other team members. For some reason, it took some time so he sent it again. It still didn't arrive so he sent it once more.

The reason it took some time was because he had actually broadcast it to everybody on the network, including about 200 traders. And, of course, every time the message popped up, saying "Fuck off" from xxx (or words to that effect) the recipient had to click on OK to close it. Three times...

There was an utter furore as some traders claimed that they may have lost deals because of this. I had to discipline the guy while trying to keep a straight face...

Wouldn't have happened nowadays

It wouldn't be such a big f**king deal nowadays in Chav Britain. Every c**t swears their t*ts off, all the bl**dy time.

The most interesting thing I've learned from this story: `type` is the DOS equivalent of `cat`.

Dr. Dobb's

Is still around in an online version.

I admit to having left a few "If you got here we're fucked!" error messages in code paths that shouldn't have been reachable...

Happy Days

AFAIK I still have some (comparatively very mild) live stuff out there that had a supposedly unreachable piece of code that just said "Something very bad happened"

They have never got back to me, so I am guessing that they either found it in my code, or it was truely unreachable

@Philip the Duck

Was it a MIRAGE system - made by a company in Bristol, I think. i thought that was a 68000 system.

Also, I am informed by an ex-Volkswriter user that if you selected delete of a word throughout a document (or replace with blank) and it took a long while...and you kept pressing the key combination to repeat the delete because you thought nothing was happening...you got the message

"word 'xxx' deleted (lots of times)"

at the end.

Well, it made I larf.

This should never happen..

My fave error message to date: This should never happen..

Also, I designed a web site for the CEO, I coded all sorts of cryptic abuse into the comments. She was so impressed with it I got a special staff award. I don't think anyone was ever bright enough to "view source".

F**kin error messages

Ah, profanity in code. I remember my Compilers and Compilers 2 courses; by the time I was in Compilers 2, I had forgot most of my code, and built the code generation phase on top of the year-old codebase.

Imagine my face when I find something along the lines of:

case 'A': // accept symbol, fuckin' A!!!

(loose translation from Spanish, the original Spanish phrase was a little bit more offensive)

Which was on plain view for my teacher. And the rest of the class, as it was on the projector. Oops.

Recently, a small change on an existing app caused a bug that triggered one of those "can't get here" logger messages. The reaction from users was amusing, as this message was:

"Error 666: HELP! THE MACHINES HAVE RISEN! RUN TO THE HILLS! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!"

Ok, that's what happens when you mix Terminator with Iron Maiden. I wonder if my other apps have shown "If you can read this, your system is stoned" messages...