My Old Friend, the Assertion Error
Above is an error dialog that pops up on me every so often. It comes from the utility that adjusts color on my Samsung SyncMaster 214T LCD display. It doesn't pop up every time I boot, but I see it enough to consider it an old friend.
I don't need anybody to explain what this means. It's a consequence of a distant descendant of the writeln statements we used to put in code to track what it's doing. An assert is basically the programmer telling the program: "At this point you had better be doing X, or you will crash gracefully and dump me into the debugger so I can figure out why not." (Here's a more detailed writeup.)
No, what I'm curious about is how many of you see assert dialogs like this on a regular or semiregular basis? I see this one a lot, but it's the only one I've seen on this machine. Assertions should be removed before a program is released to the public, but I'm sure quite a few of them sneak out-though you'd think a gazillion dollar Asian hardware monolith would be maybe a little more careful.