My cable internet won’t be installed until Monday afternoon, so I’ve been plodding along with a reluctantly purchased AOL account. (No, it’s not free anymore … I signed up several months ago after I began traveling.)
AOL’s Mac software seems to be insanely buggy and unpolished. I can only start the AOL application half the time, and I can never quit it properly. The next time I start AOL after I’ve force-quit it, it usually gives me a message about not being able to open the file ‘Window Size Database’. Fortunately, I can guess that the file in question is basically a throw-away user preference file, so I merely delete it and move on (which AOL - in their infinite wisdom - opted not to do automatically). Side question: Would AOL’s target audience, the novice internet user, know to do this?
But several times, after searching for and subsequently deleting the Window Size Database, I’ve been given this lovely message:
And I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. (No, it’s not OK.)
It goes away after trying to open the application again a few more times, but I don’t like error messages I don’t understand. And I find that I can usually understand them, so this bugs me in a small sort of way.
Any ideas?
Update: While trying to edit this post with MarsEdit, I recieved a message which read (in part):
Sorry, your entry could not be edited. Something wrong happened.
I’d like to point out several things about the difference between these two seemingly similar error messages. Firstly, Ranchero (makers of MarsEdit and NetNewsWire) is a tiny company consisting mainly of a husband and wife who somehow still manage to pump out impressively cool software. Because of that, they’re allowed to have slightly ambiguous error messages from time to time. Secondly, ‘Something wrong happened’ is rather funny. ‘AOL cannot start’ is not. Take your pick.
28/04/2005 at April 28, 2005 @ 4:49pm Permalink
That trouble box freaks me out. I couldnt close it when I tried. Refrain from doing that again if you dont mind.
29/04/2005 at April 29, 2005 @ 9:40am Permalink
I thought it was pretty cool, myself.
30/04/2005 at April 30, 2005 @ 12:43am Permalink
The message — “Sorry, your entry could not be edited. Something wrong happened” — actually comes from WordPress, and MarsEdit is dutifully passing it along.
I’d suggest that the WordPress folks are also allowed to have slightly ambiguous error messages from time to time too. It’s still better than “AOL cannot start!”
01/05/2005 at May 1, 2005 @ 11:56pm Permalink
any updates as how the move went to sc? curious.
19/05/2005 at May 19, 2005 @ 2:46am Permalink
It’s a known error with WP. Should have been fixed in 1.5.1, but then again, may not. See the ecto forum for details: http://bb.infinite-sushi.com/viewtopic.php?t=566
19/05/2005 at May 19, 2005 @ 12:57pm Permalink
I’ve not seen the WP error since, so maybe it is indeed fixed. They introduced different bugs with 1.5.1, though, like the RSS feeds breaking.