A state of FUBAR occurred today at 09:35. Unusually fast, I thought.

I tried to run a program I’ve written today from a mapped drive, t:. It works beautifully when I run it from my hard drive on c:, but .NET considers t: to be less secure, and therefore the program throws a SecurityException when I try to run it from there. I don’t know why. I guess I could trace the setting down and change it somehow, but I don’t have the heart for it.

It is a wonderful practical application of the policy “Security by Insanity“.

The program, incidentally, works beautifully. It reads Excel files and transforms them into resource files. It works on my computer (Excel 2007), it works on our shared server (Excel 2003), but fails mysteriously with an “an exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” exception on the customer’s computer (Excel 2003) and his colleague’s computer (Excel 2003).

FUBAR is an excellent term. It is an acronym for “Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition”. (Feel free to replace “fouled up” with a stronger term also beginning with F, if you want to.) It is thought to come from the U.S. military during World War II. Another useful term borrowed from the military is BOHICA (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again), or SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up).

The IT industry has a lot of things in common with the U.S. military, I’ve noticed.