Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)

Reticulating splines is a ripoff from Sim City. Whenever you create a new city or load an existing one, you see a loading screen with all sorts of status messages that really don't make sense. One of those status messages is "Reticulating splines". For some reason, that's the only one I remember because I really never knew what the heck that meant.

I think that's a joke. I remember that one game I used to play would put up crazy status messages as it was loading/creating a level for you. Such as "Dividing by zero" or "Calculating the Square root of -1"

However a quick google search turned up this gem
"Reticulating Splines: Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness. "

I found this on one blog: Reticulating splines is the process of combining a series of short lines and curves into a longer spline or network of splines. It's a process used in the landscape generator in many computer games. Basically, the engine generates a few small patches of terrain and then interpolates between these.

And this on another: Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness.

But I think in this case it is a cute reference to what you see when The Sims or Sim City is starting up...it always says Reticulating Splines at the bottom which apparently was a joke put in by the programmers since in The Sims games no terrain is actually generated.

In Sim City 2000, they even joked about that. They used a sound file with this woman in a sexy voice saying "Reticulating splines". This was wile creating / loading a city as well. I always thought it was funny.

Bet you didn't expect so many responses to this one ;)

I'm all for putting personality into messages, except...

During this "Reticulating splines…” phase, your PC will become unbearably slow.

Mozy implies that it works in the background, and is pretty non-intrusive, but its not true. It will make your machine dramatically slower, and so obscure messages like this are just annoying.

Mozy's priority should be

1) work
2) don't slow down my interactive work
3) if you must slow me down, tell me why
4) make up cute messages

and don't do #4 until you successfully do #1, 2, and 3

I'm just trying Mozy out - I have been pleased so far. I too wondered what this message meant, although I have to say that on my computer it only appears for a few seconds. I haven't found Mozy too intrusive yet. I haven't noticed the "unbearably slow" effect yet, and that's with 4.5 GB worth of stuff to be backed up. Maybe they've released a new version since your original post that performs better. There are several settings you can adjust having to do with how intrusive it is - I've set mine to use as much as possible in order to get the initial backup done quickly, and still haven't found it slowing my system down too much. However, this is on a computer I don't use a whole lot (I use it mostly as a file server) so maybe that's the difference.

A message that says, "Please wait while I Reticulate those Splines" comes up on the Wii Sims game. It appears after all 5 *star* levels have been reached.

Prior to this message it always gave tips 3 or so that would alternate.

Thanks for the info, I was wondering if it was some secret message that had be decoded! ;>)

I keep getting this message even after 9 hours the program started! Last time I just canceled. It did not do this when I first started using Mozy. Not sure if it is really doing the backup.

Mozy will work with VPN also - just need to configure the proxy correctly and it will work both and and off VPN

I believe that what MOZY is really doing is concatenating data sets, but into separate files, not one contiguous set.

Jeesh! I have just realized that I have been in I.T. for 40 years now!!! I just realized that.

And to think that I had some priority on the meaning of reticulating spines one minute ago.

SC2K played with the term. It was a joke to the Simulator guys.

Sims 2 continues the joke where it says "Re reticulating Splines" and I believe it also says "Re Re Reticulating Splines"

I always thought it had sometime to do with the encryption Mozy does before sending your stuff into the Etherworld. But I like the Sims explanation better. As a programmer, I always appreciate a bit of humor in the otherwise boring software we deal with daily.