How to innocently crash the Zonbu IM client

Another day, another little “oops, looks like I discovered a bug” discovery.

I was talking to a colleague on GAIM, the instant messenger client. Using the MSN protocol. I copied a list of the most popular topics from this blog and pasted it in to our chat session.

Now, on windows, it would truncate the contents at the last allowable character and throw away the rest. So if I pasted in 50 lines, it would say, include the first 10. No problem. I expected GAIM to do the same thing…

Is it cold in here? Are you frozen?

As soon as I pasted in the data, GAIM froze. I could not click on anything or close the application.

I opened the task manager with CTRL-ALT-DEL and selected GAIM, right clicked (not intuitive as I’ve mentioned) and selected TERM to terminate the process.  By the way, if I didn’t know it was called GAIM how would I even know what to look for?

It terminated cleanly, I restarted it and repeated the process to make sure the crash was repeatable. Sadly, it was.

Carrier Pidgin

This is likely a GAIM bug and not a Zonbu bug, per se, but either way they need to get a fix to users. It may well be fixed in newer versions of the IM client, which I’ve already noted should be shipped out to users ASAP as it has a number of new features that suit an “average” desktop.

Hopefully, Pidgin will makes its appearance on my start menu soon.

-Mr. Zonbu

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