This may just be my all-time favourite error message:
Note that the promulgator of the message doesn’t identify itself (the caption bar is helpfully labelled “DLL”); that the program to be loaded isn’t identified; that the format isn’t identified; that what you might do to fix the problem isn’t identified…
Oh, and by the way… a little detective work shows that it comes from Adobe Acrobat.
You can find an extensive list of presentations and courses that I've taught, including the slides and speaker notes for many of them, here.
Highlights from my schedule appear below. If you notice that I'm in your part of the world, drop me a line if you'd like to get together. If you'd like to engage my services and worry that I'm not available, please note that my clients' schedules are subject to change, so mine is too. Please drop me a line in any case.
May 21-23, 2012
Utrecht, The Netherlands
A public session of the Rapid Software Testing class in the Netherlands, presented through Immune-IT. Register here.
May 24-25, 2012
Utrecht, The Netherlands
A public class of Rapid Software Testing for Managers, also presented through Immune-IT. Register here.
June 12-14, 2012
Cary, NC
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
June 25-29, 2012
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
July 10-12, 2012
Cary, NC
Private training and consulting in Rapid Software Testing for a corporate client.
July 16-18, 2012
San José, California, USA
Presenting "Critical Thinking for Testers" at the CAST 2012 conference.
August 21-30, 2012
Beijing, China
Training and consulting in exploratory testing for a corporate client.
September 10-12, 2012
London, UK
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by ElectroMind.
September 24-28, 2012
Copenhagen, Denmark
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by PrettyGoodTesting.
September 24-28, 2012
Copenhagen, Denmark
A public class of Rapid Software Testing, organized by PrettyGoodTesting.
October 1-4, 2012
Anaheim, California
The STAR West Testing conference.
October 9-11, 2012
Toronto, Ontario
A public offering of Rapid Software Testing, organized by the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality.
November 5-8, 2012
Amsterdam, Netherlands
A tutorial and track session at EuroSTAR 2012.
December 3-7, 2012
Oslo, Norway
A public offering of Rapid Software Testing.
Missing story: As an end-user, I would like an error message to give me some clue how to isolate & fix a problem.
There is one progression to this style of bug reporting: "It doesn't work". Almost as helpful
I hit something similar today.
"Error in processing have been generated. Please try again."
By the way the action was accepted and there did not appear to be a problem other then the error message.
I still have fond memories of the "Error: Can't print" error messages generated by Wordsworth (a word processor on the Amiga).
We never did get printing working.
I think this is my favorite error message of all time. At this time, I had one program running: notepadd++. This was, however, during my first week of using WinVista – so I secretly hoped it was in there. Since notepadd++ is opensource, I could dig through that – yep, that's where the error was.
http://davidwkennedy.com/photos/misc/gdexception.jpg
I think my favorite error message was a confirmation dialog that said: “Error encountered while cancelling” and two buttons “OK” and “Cancel”.
What, exactly, is supposed to happen if I click “Cancel” to an error message like that?
Sorry, not confirmation dialog but an error dialog; I got distracted while writing that short comment.