By Stephen Bucaro

Your software application pops up an error message with some cryptic message like "Unexpected Application Error", "General Protection Fault" or "Illegal Operation". You don't have a clue as to what message means. Illegal Operation! What did you do wrong?

YOU didn't do anything wrong. Somewhere along line a programmer did something wrong. In this article, I'm going to give you some insight into those cryptic error messages.

General Protection Fault (GPF)

Each application running on your computer stakes out a 4GB area of memory to park itself and all of it's data. All other applications (including other instances of same application) are forbidden from using that memory area. If an application tries to store something in another applications memory area - BAM! General Protection Fault!

GPFs can be caused by operating systems overcomplicated memory management scheme. To understand how complicated that scheme is, realize that your computer may not even have 4GB of memory and hard disk space combined, but you can still run multiple applications that each think they have 4GB of memory to work with. That's real smoke and mirrors!

As complicated as that scheme is, GPFs are rarely caused by operating system. That's because every operating system uses same time tested and proven memory management scheme. GPFs are usually caused by an application programmers coding error. Here are some other possible causes of GPFs.

* Bad memory chip * Failing hard disk * Computer overheating

Illegal Operation

This error is not caused by an illegal operation by you. Your application tried to perform an illegal operation. One example of an illegal operation is "divide by zero". Enter a number in your calculator and then divide it by zero. Your calculator will display message "Error". It's illegal to divide a number by zero.

Somewhere in applications sequence of operation, a mathematical operation resulted in a value of zero. The programmer didn't test for this before they used number as divisor in another mathematical operation. Result, Illegal Operation!

There are many other possible illegal operations. An Illegal Operation error is almost always result of a programmer's error.

Unexpected Application Error (UAE)

By Stephen Bucaro

Open Office is a free open-source office suite that not only competes with Microsoft Office, but can open and save Microsoft Office file formats. It was created using code developed by Sun Microsystems for their Star Office product. Open Office includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, drawing application and several other applications. There are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris.

Open Office is easy to use because interface is similar to other office suites. Naturally, first thing I had to try was drawing program. Within seconds I was able to create 3D textured text and complex textured 3D objects.

Why switch to Open Office? Because now is time to free yourself from Microsoft's Monopoly. If you are not prepared to jump right to Linux, Open Office makes a good transition. You can work with Microsoft Office file formats in Open Office. Then when you switch to Linux, you can continue to work with Microsoft Office file formats in Open Office.

At OpenOffice.org website, www.openoffice.org, there are links to download version 1.0, and version 1.1 beta2. Version 1.1 adds PDF and Macromedia Flash export; DockBook, PDA offic-file formats, and flat XML and XHTML.