Richard’s Ramblings

My Eudora email client started giving me a strange and frustrating error message the other day. Every time I sent out email, a Winsock network timeout error code 10053 showed up in the Task Errors window. Coincidentally, I had recently installed a few other minor applications so it was almost impossible to easily isolate the [...]

Every now and then when I am sitting at my Windows XP system, an annoying error message just pops up out of nowhere. The title bar is a seemingly random four-digit hexadecimal value followed by “qttask.exe - No Disk”. The text of the message says “There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a [...]

Well, since I covered a few computer stupidities, I guess I should give equal space to software stupidities…

Microsoft Word (somewhere around 1999) - “Word cannot edit the unknown.”
If you typed in ‘God’ at the prompt on an ICL mainframe running the VME operating system, and assuming an appropriately named program was not installed, you’d receive [...]

You receive message that says “Manifest Parse error: Invalid at top level of document” when installing a new copy of Windows XP, and the installation stops because it cannot parse CONTROLS.MAN. What do you do?

On June 4, 1996, the maiden flight of the European Space Agency Ariane 501 rocket engaged its self-destruct mechanism 39 seconds after takeoff, disintegrating itself and its four-satellite payload.