I was refactoring some legacy academic code recently. It came with a GUI which, if the user did something wrong, fail with the message &quot;Error N&quot; (N being some number) without any further information or logging. The only way to figure out what happened was to grep the source code to see precisely what triggered the alert box.<p>There&#x27;s also the bizarre policy university has about passwords. Your password is reset every six months (fine), it can&#x27;t be similar to your old one (fine) and it&#x27;s truncated to 8 characters (what?).