Does your Development team reward stupid coding errors, they should

I saw this blog entry that says at Sun's Prague office when someone does a cvs commit that breaks the build they get an ugly ceramic "golem" on your desk...Possibly for weeks or months. Here is a link to the article with a picture

We have something similar at my work, recently brought back by me. We use a toy Roger Mellie, for those of you who don't know Roger Mellie (shame on you) but he is a character from an adult (lots of swearing and rude jokes) cartoon. He even has an entry on Wikipedia

We pass "award" when some one does what I like to call a "Schoolboy error". An error that for want of a better word is just plain dumb. A really stupid error that leaves you completely baffled until you realised that its something stupid that you have done, its usually even better if they get someone else over to try and work out the problem, complete embarrassment

I liked this article because we a soft toy what we called excited man. The person who makes a “Schoolboy error” gets the shame of having the toy displayed on his desk.

I have reintroduced the “Schoolboy Error” trophy at work and as soon as I did I earnt it immediately. I had been trying to get hibernate to work recently and I was having a bit of a wrestle with it. I found I just couldn't specify a config file, hibernate was picking up the config file I had clearly placed in the correct directory, I was shouting at the screen, cursing hibernate and then whilst stepping through the code for about the 50^th time I noticed that I had spelt hibernate.cfg.xml – that is what it should have been instead I had written in

hibernate.cgf.xml

it still almost looked okay even now , until you notice the I have put cgf instead of cfg.

I think its a good thing to have in the office because firstly it gives everyone a laugh and sometimes it can prevent other develocommittingiting the Schoolboy Error themselves

This error reminds me of an error a customer had done recently. A few weeks ago I had to upgrade a customer because they were experiencing the dreintermittentitten problem. This is usually some kind of machine set up problem, especially if it works one minute and then not the next. So whilst I was there upgrading their system in a last ditch lets upgrade em and hopes it fixes the problem. The customer (an oracle forms developer) checked in some code to use some of the new functionality then just after checking in the code we managed to recreate the problem. It turned out that the customer had mis typed CENTERLINE and had put in CENTRELINE in only one instance of the code (which loaded up a layer called CENTERLINE, except it doesn't if you don't spell it correctly). So the main reason I went to the customers site was to actually fix a problem with his spelling.

A classic school boy error if ever I saw one. Still me and the chap basked in the glory of fixing the problem rather than dwelling on the cause.

I am still waiting for some one else in the team to reclaim the Roger Mellie doll from desk, I have the utmost faith in my fellow programmers. If anyone else has any good examples of school boy errors please put them in the comments and if you are bored at work I would recommend you check out Roger Mellie's profanisaurus viz link iabsolutelylutly hilarious.