The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Ride the URL Line

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-18

Michael R. wrote, "So, https://TfL.Gov.UK...does that bus go on the 'Information Superhighway'?"

18 comments - Last comment @ 06:39

Featurette: Hired!

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-17

As you know, Hired has been sponsoring the site for the past few months. I went “behind the scenes” to have a brief chat with Michael Mitchell, a full stack web engineer focused on their “Candidate Experience” features.

18 comments - Last comment @ 06:23

Object Relational Mangling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-16

Writing quality database code is a challenge. Most of your commands need to be expressed in SQL, which is a mildly complicated language made more complicated by minor variations across databases. Result sets often have a poor mapping to our business logic’s abstractions, especially in object-oriented languages. Thus, we have Object-Relational-Mapping tools, like Microsoft’s EntityFramework.

With an ORM, you use an object-oriented approach to fetching your objects, and could write something like: IList<HJFRate> rates = db.HJFRates.where(rate=>rate.typeOfUse == typeOfUse) to return all the rows as objects. There’s no concern about SQL injections, no need to process the result set directly. While ORMs can generate poor SQL, or create really inefficient data-access patterns, their ease-of-use is a big selling point.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-19

Cut Short

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2017-08-15

Marcus worked on a small networking team responsible for keeping a series of UK-based garages interconnected with the world-wide web. Seymour, the Team Leader (in title only), knew far less about networking than Marcus, but that didn't stop him from acting like the big shot. Seymour was working a cash register at the original garage several years ago when the owner asked him, "You're a young guy, right? That means you know how the internet works. What can we do to make this place internet-friendly?" After taking a Networking 101 course, Seymour managed to get the garage online, then enabled it to monitor gas prices and perform credit card transactions. This made Seymour a hero to the owner, and earned him the title, "Networking Team Leader" before he even had a team.

Eventually the garage grew from a single location into a chain. When each new location opened, Seymour made it "internet-friendly", using the same techniques he learned at the original store, which usually involved sloppy cable runs and the cheapest router he could buy. When it came time to do more than just have the ISP arrive to show where Seymour to plug in the network cable, he was completely lost. Having multiple locations networked together was really advanced stuff, so he convinced the owner to hire some help.

29 comments - Last comment @ 06:24

Attack of the "i" Creatures

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-14

“Mrs S” works for a large software vendor. This vendor has a tendency to quickly increase staffing to hit arbitrary release targets, and thus relies heavily on contractors. Since they’re usually doing this during a time crunch, these contractors may have a… dubious skill set.

They also don’t care. There is no documentation, no tests, and no explanation. They are just paid tho write the code, not maintain it. They’ll be on another contract before long, so it’s some other schmuck’s problem.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-19

D.O.A.

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-11

John A. writes, "Um, you know, I don't think this was a brilliant idead."

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-19

Protect Your Property

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-10

Given the common need to have getter/setter methods on properties, many languages have adopted conventions which try and make it easier to implement/invoke them. For example, if you name a method foo in Ruby, you can invoke it by doing: obj.foo = 5.

In the .NET family of languages, there’s a concept of a property, which bundles the getter and setter methods together through some syntactical sugar. So, something like this, in VB.Net.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-19

Disk Administrations

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2017-08-09

It was a mandatory change control meeting. Steven S.’s department, a research branch of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health in Belgium, assembled in a cramped meeting room without enough chairs for everyone. Camille, head of IT, was nonplussed.

“These orders come directly from Security,” she began. “Just last month, we monitored over a hundred attempts to break into the HCP.” The Home Care Platform was a database of citizens’ requests for doctors’ visits, prescription coverage, etc. Steven’s team had developed a mobile app that gave citizens access to HCP’s records.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-19