When in doubt, consult the online Magic 8 Ball
On our team's web site, buried among the other debugging documents,
was a page titled simply "Magic 8 Ball"®¹.
If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle,
on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message.
The messages were things like
- Memory corruption.
- Try a newer build.
- Known bug.
- Can't connect.
- Hardware failure.
- Looks like a X bug. (Where "X" was a random component.)
It was fun to give the 8-ball a shake,
but the real purpose of the 8-ball was to be a link sent out in
response to failure reports.
You see, there was a secret URL for each of the 8-ball's responses,
so you could respond to a failure report with something like
The Magic 8 ball says... http://internalserver/magic8.asp?TWVGS
and when the person clicked on the link, they got an 8-ball that
said "Known bug" or "Memory corruption".
Some teams liked the 8-Ball's responses so much, they asked us to
add new custom messages to the repertoire.
Anyway, I was reminded of this by
the story of Radio8Ball.
¹Magic 8-Ball is a registered trademark of Tyco Toys, Inc.
When the
Tyco scandal hit the airwaves,
I always did a double-take before realizing that it was
a different company.
- Tyco International = scandal-plagued multinational conglomerate,
cursed by shareholders.
- Tyco Toys = a division of Mattel, maker of the Magic 8 Ball,
beloved by soothsayers.
