blogitech from Chris Maddern » Humour

Made me laugh…

Chris Maddern — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:43:14 +0000

Someone today said to me…

“…a Zillion is 1 followed by a Katrillion zeros…”

I thought that was funny!

On an unrelated note, I got my iPhone today :). Oh god is it good… loads more soon, check out my twitter and flickr for more regular posts… more iPhone-native :)
Chris

Twitter can’t decide…

Chris Maddern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:35:38 +0000

Just a little humorous message that made me laugh today. I was updating my picture on Twitter (as some of you may have already noticed :)), and got the following error message:

As it turns out; it was too large. It just made me laugh that they didn’t put the few lines of code in to check if the file was too big (the file finished uploading from what I could tell) before proceeding and replying with an ambiguous message.

I love twitter too much to have any complaints though.

Long live Twitter and all Twitterites,

Chris

Wonderful Success Message

Chris Maddern — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:40:47 +0000

Error messages have gotten a lot of flack over the years for unintuitive wording or programatic creation (causing odd succesions of phrases to the effect of ‘there was an error’) to which all you can reply is ‘okay’ implying that somehow it is acceptable for the computer to erase all your data. Today, however, a new level of brilliance was achieved by a success message; a friend of mine is building a download manager that reports:

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris