Four, Oh Subversioned Four!

I’ve never really used Subversion’s web interface before, since I’m normally checking out or committing revisions from the command line.  However, this morning I wanted to browse quickly through the entire repository tree, so I opened what I thought was the right page.  The title read:

repository – Revision 404: /

Oh, 404.  The standard “page not found” error.

I went straight to our Knowledgebase to figure out the correct address.  I had it right; I just happened to commit revision #404 immediately before I opened the site for the first time, and Subversion was helpfully pointing that out.

That’s just awful timing.

The Poetry of Errors

In an application I just launched, customers can enter a list of people (by username) whom they want added to their website.  This is a large box, so we included instructions for its use directly inside: “To add users to your site, select a role above…” The instructions appear in gray and disappear when you click the box to begin typing, just like the word “Google” in Firefox’s standard search box.

Unfortunately, I inadvertently let the user click “Add” with my instructions still in the box.  The application naturally treated all the words in the sentence as usernames.  After weeding out those that couldn’t possibly be valid, it listed the remainder alphabetically in a table.  The result was this, which I find has a surprising poetry to it:

above add and are as both click
every fine finished for here like many
names please role select separate site space
then to type user users want with
you your

I like best the end: “to type user users want with you your.”

Since we caught the bug internally before any customer did (and I say “we” meaning “not me”), the only consequence is that we have this lovely poem to help us remember.