Inspired...

Surely you mean.......................

"That's not my Cow"

Well, yeah - but those errors are pretty verbose as it is: I just wanted to slip a little joke in there, not take up a fifth of an 80 line display with it. I hope nobody gets too upset by my mutilation there

I'm glad it raised a smile, though, it was a fair faff going through and finding every error message and amending it. There are also a couple of "no cow found" errors, where a resource is missing, though I've tried not to make the joke obscure either the meaning of any errors, nor how to resolve them.

But then again, I'm a programmer, so I fear some of the messages are already pretty obscure.

+++Out of cheese error+++

you know it make sense

Of course I'm just waiting for a suitable error message that it would work well in.

Gets my vote

or how about...

+++divide by cucumber error+++please re-install universe and reboot+++

which is a quote by hex from "hogfather" i think

Weird...
on mine it always says:

++ARE you stupid? Or do you just ACT like you are stupid !++
++bang any head to continue++

But this might have something to do with my anti squirrel spy ware

One of the interesting things this raised was that normal people only quote the memorable parts of error messages.

For a time I was getting many reports of "no cow errors". But, since I'd just replaced all occurrences of "ERROR:" with "NO COW:", the two things meant the same thing. Effectively, people were telling me they were getting "error errors", and not understanding why I felt I needed more info to act on it.

So now, "No Cow" should only be seen for a single type of error (I think it was "ping timeout"), so if someone says "we keep getting 'no cow' errors", I'll know what the problem is.

I should really have known better. When I worked on a helldesk, we would get calls all the time like:
Them: Hi, I got an error
Me: What does the error say?
Them: I don't know.
Me: Ah, you closed the error message before you called, didn't you?
Them: Yes.
Me: Can you remember what it said?
Them: Yeah, "bad resource".
Me: Cool. [heart sinks] Can you remember which resource it said was bad?
Them: It was just that message, then a long line of nonsense. That wasn't important, was it?

The line of nonsense, of course, would be the 'resource id' that'd let me locate and fix their problem in seconds. And I wanted to throttle the programmers that didn't put in bold text "Write down this number for the support team!"

So, yeah, I relearned an important lesson in user interface design.

ee gad! I have seen the home of the no cow, out of cheese, all that jazz...
Just wondering why there isnt a +++MelonMelonMelon+++ error out there, or is there?

I used to have a horrible habit of putting confusing error messages into the various scripts I wrote - which were fine when I was the only one using them but became a little troublesome when others borrowed them.

My favourite error: "This error should not have happened - press any key to delete database, any other key to start again"