Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.
The Daily WTF Sponsors
Microsoft WebsiteSpark - a great program for web shops and freelance web developers and designers where you get some great software (Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server, Server 2008, etc), at no upfront cost for three years; it also provides support and resources to help grow business Rackspace Cloud - massively scalable hosting for .NET (2,3,3.5) PHP, Ruby, etc., with unlimited sites & mailboxes, simple online provisioning, and an enterprise clustered platform that's supported by real people. Peer 1 - provides award-winning Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Co-location, and Network services offered through 15 data center across North America. With over 10,000 businesses hosted on their legendary SuperNetwork™backbone, PEER 1 delivers one of the highest server performance and network outputs in the industry. MindFusion - a great source for flow-charting and diagramming components for a variety of platforms including .NET, WPF, ActiveX and Swing Software Verification - software engineering tools for memory leak detection, code coverage, performance profiling, thread lock contention analysis and thread deadlock detection, flow tracing and application replay on the Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 and NT platforms. Atlassian - the folks behind JIRA (which, in turn inspired Manual JIRA) wanted to let you know that they're not a "follow the rules" software company who realizes that there is no single recipe for practicing agile development. They were once hungry for practical tips, so they thought they should share their agile story. SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all) SlickEdit - makers of that very-impressive code editor and some pretty neat Eclipse and VisualStudio.NET tools and add-ins, some of which (Gadgets) are free. Check out this short video highlighting just one of SlickEdit's Visual Studio integration features.
Two weeks ago, I announced the Bad Code Offsets project. It's a way to undo the bad code you other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software.
And when I say the money goes towards these projects, I mean all of it. 100%. We pay for all expenses — PayPal fees, material costs, postage, etc. — out of pocket. But speaking of money, I’m happy to announce that we’ve raised $3,630.50 and are mailing out checks to the appropriate projects today.
When Vladimir first received his orders, the blood drained from his face. He was to take the legacy VB5 application, a system used daily by scores of users daily, and uplift it to C++.
After reviewing a few parts of the application, things began looking hopeless, however there was some good news! Vladimir had a department full of developers at his disposal and most of them had a hand in the creating and maintenance of the application.
Brad’s phone rang with the telltale tone of an inner-office call. “Yeah,” he briskly blurted out as he picked up the phone, “what’cha ya need?” That was actually his nicewayof answering the phone. As the senior trader at Æxecor, one of the world’s largest energy trading companies, Brad didn’t need to impress anyone and, in his mind, displaying anything less than vicious hubris would be a sign of weakness.
“Err,” the receptionist nervously answers, “there’s a… err, delivery for you, sir. They—”
"For reasons beyond my comprehension," Kristof writes, "one of my coworkers has managed to keep his job after more than eighteen months of messing about. His latest project was to build an import feature in the admin module of our web application. The idea behind the feature was that the administrators could upload a tab-delimited text file containing a list of products, and the application would insert or update the products in the database."
"Of course, the import feature required some pretty basic validation," Kristof continued. "Is it actually a text file? Is it tab delimited? Are the columns correct? And so on."
It's Black Friday! For those of you stuck at work (or not in the US), here's a fun classic. Smooth, Like a Factory was originally published on November 9th, 2006.
Daren S knew that his days were numbered. He was a troublemaker bent on changing The Way Things Were and The Director was hot on his tail. Though Daren worked discreetly, improving his coworkers' productivity a little bit at a time, it only was inevitable that The Director would eventually find out. One does not become The Director by letting such things slide.
Some time ago when Michael was tasked with updating some of code on an old website, one file on the server caught his eye.
Amid an ocean of static HTML files, it turned out that there was exactly one PHP script. Not sure what to expect, he was surprised when he discovered that the script was entirely comprised of vanilla HTML save for one line.
Back in the late-1990s, the Internet Service Provider where Simon C. worked was a mere micro-sized version of what they are today. Their website's original e-commerce system only needed to sell one thing — domain names, and a limited subset of them at that — so the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system didn't need to be all that intelligent. They simply looped through each item ordered by the customer, displayed the description and prices of each one, and worked out the totals at the end. The whole process was so simple in fact that it made sense to the original developer to write the system so that the shopping cart and invoicing pages shared the same code.
Over time, the ISP grew in size to sell additional products such as new domain types and packages with a multitude of sub-products. Also, as the system grew in size, the site began running slower and slower. This gave Simon a reason to look into ways to improve the efficiency of the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system.
We've all been there before. You spend all this time building a kick-ass, ultra-awesome, super-sweet web application and then you realize you need to build some stupid "administration" module that needs to do the boring, run-of-the-mill things like maintain users, groups, privileges, and so on.
There are several different magnitudes of complexity that can be involved with an administration module, ranging from the full-on set of tables including users, groups, roles, tasks, operations, etc., to a simple IsAdmin column on the users table. Actually, it turns out there's an even simpler way, and that Adam P's predecessor discovered and implemented it for their client's fairly large ecommerce website.
