The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Just Handle It

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-06-15

Clint writes, "On Facebook, I tried to report a post as spam. I think I might just have to accept it."

10 comments - Last comment @ 12:24

The New Guy (Part II): Database Boogaloo

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2018-06-14

When we last left our hero Jesse, he was wading through a quagmire of undocumented bad systems while trying to solve an FTP issue. Several months later, Jesse had things figured out a little better and was starting to feel comfortable in his "System Admin" role. He helped the company join the rest of the world by dumping Windows NT 4.0 and XP. The users whose DNS settings he bungled were now happily utilizing Windows 10 workstations. His web servers were running Windows Server 2016, and the SQL boxes were up to SQL 2016. Plus his nemesis Ralph had since retired. Or died. Nobody knew for sure. But things were good.

Despite all these efforts, there were still several systems that relied on Access 97 haunting him every day. Jesse spent tens of dollars of his own money on well-worn Access 97 programming books to help plug holes in the leaky dike. The A97 Finance system in particular was a complete mess to deal with. There were no clear naming guidelines and table locations were haphazard at best. Stored procedures and functions were scattered between the A97 VBS and the SQL DB. Many views/functions were nested with some going as far as eight layers while others would form temporary tables in A97 then continue to nest.

28 comments - Last comment @ 11:03

The Manager Who Knew Everything

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-13

Have you ever worked for/with a manager that knows everything about everything? You know the sort; no matter what the issue, they stubbornly have an answer. It might be wrong, but they have an answer, and no amount of reason, intelligent thought, common sense or hand puppets will make them understand. For those occasions, you need to resort to a metaphorical clue-bat.

A few decades ago, I worked for a place that had a chief security officer who knew everything there was to know about securing their systems. Nothing could get past the policies she had put in place. Nobody could ever come up with any mechanism that could bypass her concrete walls, blockades and insurmountable defenses.

39 comments - Last comment @ 03:49

Maximum Performance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-12

There is some code, that at first glance, doesn’t seem great, but doesn’t leap out as a WTF. Stephe sends one such block.

double SomeClass::getMaxKeyValue(std::vector<double> list)
{
    double max = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) {
        if (list[i] > max) {
            max = list[i];
        }
    }
    return max;
}

32 comments - Last comment @ 09:52

The Enabler

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-11

Shaneka works on software for an embedded device for a very demanding client. In previous iterations of the software, the client had made their own modifications to the device's code, and demanded they be incorporated. Over the years, more and more of the code came from the client, until the day when the client decided it was too much effort to maintain the ball of mud and just started demanding features.

One specific feature was a new requirement for turning the display on and off. Shaneka attempted to implement the feature, and it didn't work. No matter what she did, once they turned the display off, they simply couldn't turn it back on without restarting the whole system.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-14

Try Again (but with More Errors)

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-06-08

"Sorry, Walgreens, in the future, I'll try to make an error next time," Greg L. writes.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-12

Improv for Programmers: The Internet of Really Bad Things

by Scot Devera in Feature Articles on 2018-06-07

Things might get a little dark in the season (series?) finale of Improv for Programmers, brought to you by Raygun. Remy, Erin, Ciarán and Josh are back, and not only is everything you're about to hear entirely made up on the spot: everything you hear will be a plot point in the next season of Mr. Robot.

Raygun provides a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-08

Six Months of Free Monitoring at Panopta for TDWTF Readers

by Alex Papadimoulis in Sponsor Post on 2018-06-06

You may not have noticed, but in the footer of the site, there is a little banner that says:

Monitored by Panopta

5 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-10