“The server cannot process this request … “
” … because it is malformed. It is not advisable to try again. That is all we know.”
That’s a message I got today when trying to sign in to an email account. It was accompanied by a little schematic drawing of an old-fashioned science fiction type of robot in broken pieces.
I tried again. It worked just fine.
What gives? I’ve never gotten a message like that before. And who is this “we,” kimosabe?
I suspect it’s one of Huxley’s pals…
Yep, the old unplug, plug it back in trick.
Like I have to reboot my computer sometimes when it indicates that I am not connected to the internet.
I remember the days when an operation on a computer didn’t work the first time, it wouldn’t work ever. Period. The ones that amuse me nowadays are the ones that you know are supposed to work, but don’t the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd times. Then hey,… it works the 4th time.
And who is this “we,” kimosabe?
neo:
You don’t want to know and you shouldn’t be asking… 🙂
huxley:
It was a rhetorical question. 🙂
One of huxley’s AI pals has a sense of humor, or rather, has been programmed to have one.
huxley:
That’s funny!
It may have been spindled, folded, or mutilated. But to be malformed is another matter entirely.
SHIREHOME: If it’s Windows, just Control Panel, Internet Access , access your connection, drop the connection and reconnect. Odds are more it’s a corrupted connection with the ISP than your computer.
Same for you, neo. Some older sites’ code glitches on heavy network use. I don’t know what you use but Blogger is terrible about it at times. Even freaks out with a “Whoops!” when it processed the request correctly.
The internet doesn’t send your actions “all together”, it splits it into packets it it’s large, then the receiver reassembles it. Heck, it doesn’t even send all the packets the same route. One corrupted byte and the send or receive is flagged failed. Depending on the failure, you get crash, nothing, a messy page or a message.
Kind of like when you’re streaming a movie on Amazon and suddenly you have an odd picture and one character smears themselves across the frame. That’s because the only packets are those that change a picture.
The internet was designed to ride out failures giving all responsibility to the end user(s). That last portion of the message is bad though. Looks like one developers get, not an end user. Should be able to feed you a code you can look up for more info, like 404 (not found) or 401 (unauthorized). That’s just lazy coding.
Those snowy scenes on movies you download? Most likely a corrupted packet and not actually in the original file.
Coolest error handling (at that level) I’ve seen was owned by another telecom guy who was way obsessed. He developed his own library to handle things which would damn near give you a manual’s view of what happened. Very cool.
Irritating at times. No one needs an education on a 502 every time it happens.
Easy solution: stop malforming your requests.
Just kidding. what the heck is a malformed request to a computer? Since you got it to work, it is likely that the malformation occurred at the receiving end, not at the sending end.
But just as an example of what this world is coming to, our one-year-old clothes dryer died during an electrical storm recently. I checked all the circuits, and the Ground Fault Interrupter, and couldn’t find anything to reset. I told my daughter about it, she suggested I unplug it for ten seconds and plug it back in. It worked.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out what in a clothes dryer would be re-set by unplugging and plugging. But this is one of the “new” machines, which dries according to what kind of clothes you tell it you are drying, not according to time, like the old ones. And even so, it “senses” whether the clothes are dry and turns off when it thinks they are.
The washer is even worse — in order to save water it uses the smallest amount it thinks is necessary, then twists the clothes into tight ropes as an alternative to washing the dirt out with water. Give me old appliances over the modern ones!
@ F > “For the life of me, I cannot figure out what in a clothes dryer would be re-set by unplugging and plugging.”
I got that same advice from IT when an office computer was acting up.
There is some kind of “brain” in the circuits that gets reset when you do that.
It’s separate from the Main Brain of the CPU somehow, don’t ask me I just follow instructions.