The result of one of my rare immersions into the tech world . . .

About a four-link-long surfing series from someone's blog entry about Sonlight, I bumped into the Worse Than Failure (WTF) blog



and the following entry:

Do Not Click! 2007-10-10
by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd

This popped up for Steve in Lotus Notes. I wonder if this is what happens when you click buttons labeled "do not click!"











Alan C. came in to work one morning to find that someone had helpfully labeled all the cables on one of the hotdesks. How did they ever cope before?
















Brian was using an internal tool at work and ran into this next error. Naturally, the window doesn't actually detect key strokes ...

Best comments in reply:

Made me think of WTF:
http://xkcd.com/327/

and:

The cable labels gave me flashbacks. At my old position we had to label every cable to a ridiculous degree.

Ethernet data cables had to be a certain color and Ethernet management cables (DRACs, LOM) had to be a different color. So right off the bat we had to swap out 95% of the cables in our facility.

Every Ethernet cable had to be labeled on both ends with:
1. Server name
2. Server port (in case the server had multiple NICs)
3. MAC Address
4. Switch name
5. Switch card
6. Switch port

So you would end up with a cable "flag" that was about 6 inches long. It was obviously useful, in the case when someone sneaked into the server room and unplugged a random cable (which never happened). Of course if you ever moved anything or renamed a server for a new project you had to make 2 new labels.

The best part was labeling the power cords. You needed to have the server name and the "slot" the cord was plugged into on the surge suppressor. Then you had to label the end of the surge suppressor and which circuit breaker it plugged back into.

. . . Which comment yielded a reference back to an earlier WTF post:

Clean design and thorough documentation are essential in every type of engineering, from aerospace to software. Network Engineering is no different: with miles of cables wired to thousands of jacks in a typical office building, an unlabeled block of cable is just as good as a dead one. Fortunately, the fine folks at Patrick McGoohan’s office made sure to carefully label everything . . .

*****

Well. I was about to leave WTF having ignored the following post. I was sure it was some kind of joke. Someone must have done some Photoshopping:

Sorry, You Used That Password 28,452 Times Ago 2007-10-08

by Jake Vinson in Error'd

This one's from the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

(submitted by Sean)

So assuming 60WPM and 4-5 characters in a word, it'd take you over an hour to type in your password. And hopefully you'd type the correct one in, rather than one of your last thirty thousand passwords.

Amazing! There really is such an error message:

SYMPTOMS

If you log on to an MIT realm, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, click Change Password, type your existing MIT password, and then type a new, simple password that does not pass the dictionary check in Kadmind, you may receive the following error message:

Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes.

Note that the number of required characters changes from 17,145 to 18,770 with the installation of SP1.
NOTE: This is not a common case; it occurs only when you configure Windows 2000 to authenticate against an MIT Kerberos domain.

Whew! I'm so glad to discover this is not a common case!