PC World Gripes

PC World is computer magazine. These gripes are about their web site.

October 30, 2000

The web site of PC World magazine has been problematic. Today, I finally decided to document some details.

I tried to read a specific article a few times today and each time got the following errors:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle error '80040e21'
Multiple-step OLE DB operation generated errors.
Check each OLE DB status value, if available. No work was done.
/shared/lib/articles.asp, line 33

Likewise, a couple attempts to load this article also resulted in ugly error messages.

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0005'
Invalid procedure call or argument
/shared/lib/articles.asp, line 31

Of course, things will always go wrong. The gripe here is the error messages which are useless to normal human beings. I am not an expert in Active Server Pages, the server side technology used by PC World magazine, but I do know that ugly error messages like this result from lazy and/or stupid programming. ASP makes it possible to show users messages in English. The programmers at PC World are just not up to the task.

In the past it has consistently caused Netscape Navigator to crash but I did not document the details.

Page last updated: November 2, 2000