Storm in a teapot: Anger brews over npm's jokey proxy error messages npm, the widely used and defiantly lower-case Node.js package manager, on Monday briefly returned an error to users connecting to the registry via proxy who attempted the npm install command. The error message declared "npm ERR! 418 I'm a teapot…", in reference to a RFC 2324, a tongue-in-cheek coffee pot communications …
Agreed; so long as a humorous message or whatever does not cause user confusion or hurt ones business case, why not?
My favorite was a little box that popped up in some test code:
Some things in life
Are inevitable
Death. Taxes. Lost data.
Im your storage unit
Guess which I bring?
"...since 418 isn't a recognized HTTP status code."
So what? it's a status code, if your protocol stack can't handle 'unreserved' status codes then there is something wrong with your protocol stack.
RFC2616 section 6: "HTTP status codes are extensible.".
But Mark should know this as he worked on its replacement [1], and oh look in the new section 6 we have the statement "HTTP status codes are extensible."[2]
Clearly, Mark has zero ability to appreciate that this tongue-in-cheek reference to the coffee pot protocol actually foresaw the rise of IoT and the explosion of device specific protocols - in the coming years we can expect to see many more status codes defined, at a rate faster than they can be formally recognised and then deployed into operational systems.
[1] https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6
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I had the idea once of adding offensive error messages to utilities that I developed for internal use of our development team. They were the kind of errors that "should never happen". It was late on a Friday and I was tired. I'd forgotten about it by the Monday.
Then about 6 months later, one of our junior developers who didn't speak good English asked me to help him with an error he didn't understand. It said that his mother entertained old men in public toilets. Needless to say I took the opportunity to update the messages.
I had the idea once of adding offensive error messages to utilities that I developed for internal use of our development team. They were the kind of errors that "should never happen".
Whereas it wasn't offensive, I knew someone who got a reprimand when an error message reading "One of Klas' hairy cases" appeared during a demo to a customer. In fairness, it was a C reimplementation of original Fortran code that issued PAUSE 666 at that point, and the translator wasn't sure what was going on when that happened because the original code was undocumented.
@AC
They were the kind of errors that "should never happen
When I were a bit younger I had a generic message for errors that weren't in the tree, "I smell Elderberries"
I suspect it would be obvious as to what I'd been watching .......
(I now tend to go with:
Now lost in a maze of dark twisty corridors. Calling out for help
and dumping all variables except passwords.)
Whilst developing a social media analysis tool years ago, I set the Server 500 errors to show a random selection of memes. This was all well and good until a customer demo was done without my knowledge. Apparently the CTO hit a 500 error and the audience was displayed with an angry penguin meme. Surprisingly, considering the audience were stuffy business types it all went down well. I was asked to make the error pages more professional after that point though.
"Thanks to the magic of Cloudflare edge workers, we were able to implement this host header check entirely in JavaScript. Unfortunately, our host header parsing had a bug. It failed to account for port numbers appended to the host name."
Modern "development" in a pithy description.
(The other part consist in observing that our "skilled consultant" demaning much buckos for his skills is running Node as root on the Internet-facing server.)
Modern "development" in a pithy description.
Really, most software development, ever, except now stuff gets into production faster.
And that wasn't a "bug" in the host header parsing. It's an utter failure by an incompetent developer who couldn't be bothered to look up the specification (freely available online) and test the basic cases; and by project managers who didn't make sure they were tested before pushing into production. This sort of thing is an insult to the term "bug".
I'm betting it would have choked - indeed might still choke - on a bracketed IPv6 address. Which is a perfectly valid value for the HTTP Host header.
Down voted, not because you can't use a teapot to brew coffee, but that unless you thoroughly clean it out afterwards your next few brews will have the distinct tang of coffee. So no true tea drinker would consider using a teapot to brew coffee...
That is a pint of tea beer
[http://draftmag.com/10-tea-beers/ ]
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