QA Hates You

From a recent The Teaching Company catalog:

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That’s not something a quick little edit in the content management system will fix.

I know what these students will be qualified for:

Apparently, this is not a photoshop.

Today’s students, tomorrow’s interface interns.

(Link via Ed Dricsoll.)

An e-mail from Software Test Professionals:

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I get a lot of e-mails with action links that want me to leer more.

And, hey, while you’re at it, click on over and nominate me for a software testing professional luminary. I like to light fires, so I illuminate a lot. Indirectly.

The word misspelled in the image:

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This is an even better example of why one should use the serial comma than the one I traditionally use:

…highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

(Link seen via @iamdez.)

Ever wonder what Web designers did before the Web existed?

This article gives us some insight.

I’m cruising a low-end user site, and a flashing, garish ad greets me:

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Of course, they want the flashing border to capture your attention.  You know what got mine immediately: misspelling the word receive.

I before E except after C except in a scam, I guess.

If you want to forward a Holland America e-mail, it takes you to the Web interface where the developers have split the difference on the proper use of the possessive:

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One could try to argue, as the developer probably would, that Friends name is plural because there are multiple edit boxes.  However, that would apply to the e-mail address boxes, too, and Friends name as a plural should be Friends names.

Developers are so amusing when they try to manufacture grammatical rules to rationalize their mistakes.

I heard of a mythical time where professional media had proofreaders.  Maybe that was in the Age of Heroes, which is to say a non-existent time before now.  Here are some examples of television news captions that went from someone’s fumbling fingers directly to the air.

(Link via O’Brien Media.)

So I was at this Web blog reading a post about how Microsoft might want little ol’ me to be on its team, and I got a link to this “job posting.”

Except it wasn’t:

 
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What do you know?  Another error has occured.   Is this ubiquitous misspelling a part of a Microsoft library somewhere?  If so, could my loyal Microsoft readers please change it to the non-passive voice We were eating our own dog food, as you can see since we have just splugged it all over your carpet?

Put down in your best practices document, gentle reader, that a part of the build process should include an automatic global search and replace for occured and spell it correctly as occurred.

I guess that job posting is fixed now, but I’m probably not Microsoft material.

Is it always i before e except after c?  This error message from GoDaddy tries a conservative approach:

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Well, that particular developer left nothing to chance and put an e on either side of the i.

And nobody else looked at the error message.

I need to find the publishing house behind the standard developer dictionary and burn it down.

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The development team behind this Craftsman NASCAR sweepstakes misspell occurred.  I don’t know why developers commonly misspell this word.  Are they copying and pasting it from the same Platonic nearly-ideal error message?  Is it misspelled in a default message in every IDE known to man?  Is it some hopeful invocation that the occult will cure the problem?  Who can read the minds of developers?  Whenever I try, I get gibberish interspersed with attention to shiny things.

When you’re testing out your application’s validation, watch for the single-R occured.  You will see them everywhere.

The White House has a budget of $5 million annually for its communications team.

However, apparently none of that has been wasted on proofreaders, since press releases and diplomatic agreements include numerous misspellings, including the President’s very name.

I was going to make some comment about having to pay extra attention to uncommon words such as brand names and people’s names, which often plagues interactive agency communications that misspell their clients’ names or even their own agency names.  However, this problem with the communications team seems to go far beyond that and into lack of attention to detail.

For $172,200 a year, I could head up the effort.  White House, click the Sez Who? link for contact info!

The SD Times Internet site promises me streaming media that it doesn’t provide:

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I keep clicking Nevermind, but I don’t hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Job posting:

 
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Maybe it’s an add for a detrigonometry position.

What kind of company wants desiners?

The kind of company that has a desgin process and works on brand indetity:

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And that lacks a standard for presenting Web site as one word or two:

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That is to say, ultimately, a company like all the rest.

Joe Strazzere has it.

Remember, not all typos have monetary value you can trace to it, but each one in your application or Web site is a drip that accumulates in the mind of your users, and eventually one small typo will make that user stop trusting your software even if it works otherwise.

In the meantime, note that the dollar figure mentioned above is Canadian dollars. Someone clue me in to current exchange rates so I know which way to direct my punchline to the required joke.

From the Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword Civilopedia early in 2008:

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I’ve never really read the Civilopedia before, but since it apparently picked the next (now current) president, I’m going to really delve into it looking for lottery ticket numbers and whatnot.

I’m pleased to report, though, that gameplay continues after 2012, even if you’re playing a Mayan civilization.

Nothing, actually, but this banner ad might lead me to the mistaken conclusion:

Other sizes of this particular ad have the word park spelled correctly; however, the “designers” in this particular instance didn’t see that their text box was truncating a letter. Obviously, it would have not been cost effective for this particular company to have someone look at the freaking things before launching them in the wild, the margins being so low for these sorts of things.

If you’re writing an article about language, how about spelling all the words in the headline correctly?

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Someone will have to tell me what the article’s about.  I couldn’t make it past the headline.  Also, I’m not reading Australian news for fun; I’m reading it because PhilK pointed out the problem.

The title tag and text are correct:

 
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The filename, though, indicates someone mistyped when creating the blog post’s draft: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Bit-More-Invovled.aspx

Hey, I’ve done it too, as anyone who’s paid attention to the archives can attest.  However, you should not be shy, ungentle reader, against logging defects against misspellings in the directories and filenames in your Web applications.  Remember, they too are visible and should be impeccable to put your organization/application in the best light.