Dear Error
Recently, while trying to open a GIF (apparently a corrupt one) in the Mac version of Photoshop, a coworker of mine got this error:
Can't open file because x .
It was probably trying to say something about the size of the file and failing.
Well, your comment is probably right – but you’re making an educated guess and, as you know, computers don’t ‘guess’ nor are they educated … which means that heavens only know what it ‘thought’ it was trying to say.
This same coworker had recently been to a conference at Microsoft, where he got put on an email list. The first mail he received from this list started with this polite salutation:
Dear ODBC error #-2413: <some ODBC error>,
Unfortunately I don't recall if the ODBC error was the old favorite "The operation completed successfully". That would have been *really* funny.
Actually, I don’t think it could be much funnier than this … but I could wonder how they got the email address right (since it was delivered) – must be a really badly hacked DB.
By the way, about the error message listed on your page that looks like "Please insert 'Ignore error. Hit Cancel' in drive A:\" – my guess would be that it wasn't a resource corruption problem, but rather some kind of hack where the programmer was too lazy to suppress a specific error message, so he passed in the "ignore this error" message as a substitution string for the disk name.
Submitted by: Narciso Jaramillo
Again, possibly a good guess but it looks to me like someone got their string tables scrambled. That is, the inserted string was in the string table for some other use – probably an unintentional remainder – and was referenced accidentally. But, I guess we’ll never know for sure.