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This is perhaps my favorite error message ever, and needs no comment.

If you’re the kind of person who goes outside and moves, check out mapmyrun.com. It’s a fantastic free google mashup that lets you map out routes by clicking anywhere on the map, without needing addresses.  You can violate street boundaries, go the wrong way on one-way streets, claim you’re running in the Atlantic Ocean even, and then it gives you distance stats and a nice elevation graph.  Excellent.

The first question here is who could possibly think it would be okay to give a message like this to a hapless end user. But, as I saw this message every day for over a year, I also wondered:

Why does my object variable need to be set?

What does it need to be set to?

How does one set an object variable?

For that matter, how does one unset an object variable?

What is the object in question, anyway?

Why is there no perceivable difference in performance when an object variable is not set?

And, most importantly, WTF?

For a number of years I’ve been collecting screen shots of ridiculous messages given to me by poorly written programs and web pages. They need a better home, so I’ve started a UI Hall of Shame category for this purpose, because I enjoy commenting on them too much to send them to The Daily WTF. I’ll periodically post some of my favorite snippets of stupidity.

To go along with all of the new things going on in my life, the first entry is from the web page I had to use to set up automatic payments for the cable company I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with to get Internet access. This was a disappointing experience altogether, but the page below contains the most egregious violation of intelligence. To get to this form, I first had to enter my zip code to get to the correct sub-conglomerate site. Then in the screen before this one, I entered my account number and clicked “Register”. Having arrived at the correct site for my zip code and given my account number, they were able to look up my name and print both my name and account number back to me so I could then copy and paste the account number into the field just below where they printed it. And reenter my zip code. Or was I supposed to apply some obscure mathematical function first and arrive at some entirely more enlightening number?

Double feature: going along with the theme of making me do extra work for no particular reason is a dialog box from Windows Vista that I encountered before I finished writing this post (no, not on my computer):

“Change settings that are currently unavailable”. What the heck are they and why aren’t they available? And if that’s really true, how is it that I can change them anyway after clicking this unnecessarily ambiguous thing that may be a button but could possibly be an html link because we’re trying to blur the lines between the Internet and your computer for our devious purposes? It turns out that some extra settings lower down that are initially grayed out become active when you click that identity-crisis-laden button, though there’s no indication that you would want to follow that course of action to adjust those settings. This adheres to what seems to be the general theme of Vista, which is “hide the useful settings as deeply as possible so that they’ll never find them (phase 3: profit!)”. There is no extra functionality added, just extra work for the end users. But who cares about them?

At long last, I have Wordpress and Gallery integrated, with the help of some plugins and tweaking. If you click on Photos on the right, you should get the Gallery main page embedded in Wordpress. W00t!

(This has undergone minimal testing, so if it doesn’t work for you, drop me a comment or an email.)

Here’s a quick walk-through for anyone trying to do this (and, let’s face it, so I don’t forget how it works):

The WPG2 plugin embeds Gallery in Wordpress.

The Page Links To plugin lets me direct the “Photos” link right to my embedded Gallery instead of a Wordpress page.

1. In Gallery Site Admin, turn off the URL Rewrite module. I was using URL Rewrite to get pretty links, but it confuses WPG2. Unfortunately this means I’ll have to go back through blog postings and fix the links, but I would have had to do that anyway because I want them to link to embedded albums now.

2. Download WPG2. Unzip it, and drop the directory in <wordpress_root>/wp-content/plugins. Move wp-gallery2.php to <wordpress_root>.

3. In the Wordpress admin page, go to plugins, and activate WPG2. WPG2 should show up on the top menu bar.

4. Go to the WPG2 menu in the Wordpress admin page, and go through the auto config. You may have to temporarily make your .htaccess writable so it can modify it. Then you can run through the rest of the sub menu, but if you just want an embedded Gallery (no sidebar blocks or shared users), you can ignore it all.

5. Now you should be able to load <wordpress_root>/wp-gallery2.php in your browser.

6. Upload and activate the Page Links To plugin in the same way.

7. Create a new Page in Wordpress and save it. Then go back to Manage -> Pages and edit it again. Add a custom field “links_to” with the value being the full URL to wp-gallery2.php. For me this step didn’t work when I added the custom field as I created the page.

8. Then hack up the Gallery template a bit so it fits better; you can find steps for that elsewhere.

Voila!

Don’t even let ‘em stare at it!