The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Legitimate Links

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-10-20

"Swedish...Russian...English....same difference!" wrote Fred.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-22

Abstract Test Case

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-19

A great many breakfast cereals promise some sort of health benefit. This brand is good for your heart, that brand has 11 essential vitamins and minerals. This one’s got bran! Just because there’s a promise of health benefits doesn’t mean they actually exist- most of these cereals are lightly fluffed sugar held together with a smidge of starch.

Object-oriented languages promise a lot of code-health benefits, and used properly, they can certainly deliver. In this somewhat tortured metaphor, the Lucky Charms marshmallow of OO features is Inheritance. It’s tasty, it’s easy to explain, but it’s not really good for your code. A little bit, here-and-there, from time-to-time is great. But some folks buy the three pound bag and that’s just not good for anybody.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-20

The Official Software

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2017-10-18

At the very beginning of my career, I was a junior programmer on a team that developed software to control an electronics test station, used to diagnose problems with assorted components of jet fighters. Part of my job was the requisite grunt work of doing the build, which entailed a compile-script, and the very manual procedure of putting all the necessary stuff onto a boot-loader tape to be used to build the 24 inch distribution disk arrays.

An unspooled magnetic tape for data storage

source

This procedure ran painfully slowly; it took about 11 hours to dump a little more than 2 MB from the tape onto the target disk, and nobody could tell me why. All they knew was that the official software had to be used to load the bootstrap routine, and then the file dumps.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-21

Too Salty

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-17

The first rule of building your own password storage mechanisms is don’t. Like most other highly-specialized wheels, you aren’t going to do as good a job as someone who specializes in it. It’s bad enough when you write your own date mangling code, but for security-critical features, like passwords or encryption, you’re begging for trouble.

Joni spotted some trouble: many of the users in the database had the same password hash. This, of course, should never happen- the password should be combined with a user-specific salt as part of the hashing, so that even if two users had the same password, they’d have different hashes.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-22

RAM On Through

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2017-10-16

RAM types

The company Tomasz worked for launched a new device line with more RAM than the previous generation. This was supposed to put an end to the sort of memory shortages common to embedded systems. However, it wasn't long before they began hearing from clients whose systems crashed whenever they attempted to upgrade the accompanying software package.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-19

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-10-13

"After trying to close my steam support ticket, I got this," writes Joe, "Now, I'm not entirely sure."

20 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-19

Refactoring the Conditional

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-10-11

Virginia N was trying to refactor some code, and that meant understanding where the value m_PSOC_SIG was used, and why. So, she did some searching, and found this line, which doesn’t contain our value:

ChangePosition("P",true,(bool)ar[6],(DateTime)ar[1],(DateTime)ar[5]);

40 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-19

We Know How This Works

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-10

One of the selling points of a language like Java is that it comes with a rich standard library of useful classes. This allows developers to completely ignore those useful features, and instead reinvent the wheel badly. Once this novel square wheel has come off the assembly line, it becomes the defacto standard for the organization.

Take, for example, Caiwan’s office. They have a… special date-handling library.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-13

A Case of Bad Timing

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2017-10-09

Although I've retired from full time work, I still consult for lots of small mom-n-pop places. Mostly, it's little scripts to automate doing this and that. Sometimes, the boss' kid or nephew was asked to get ambitious and solve a problem. When the inevitable happens, they call me to bail them out.

For the most part, it's usually something like some file got moved/renamed/deleted. Sometimes, they got ambitious and attempted to write a batch file. This time, a college freshman, who claimed to be "good with computers", had written a program to control the little scripts and jobs in an automated fashion. Apparently, it was getting too complicated for him and they asked me if I could work with it.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-20

Sorry for the Inconvenience

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-10-06

"Yeah, I'm kinda sorry that I have to use Visual Studio too," wrote Kevin D.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-17

Hired: State of Contracting

by Remy Porter in Sponsor Post on 2017-10-05

Our sponsor, Hired, passed us off a report they just published: “The State of Contract Work”. I said to myself, “Wait a second, I’m a contractor!” Well, technically, I’m more of a consultant or sometimes a trainer- one of those evil highly paid consultants who swing in, tell developers how to do their jobs, and leave behind nothing more than the smell of brimstone and invoices.

The bad thing about this line of work, at least from the perspective of a TDWTF article, is that if I encounter a real WTF, it’s because someone wants me to fix it. A WTF that is getting fixed isn’t really a WTF anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t encounter some real head-scratchers from time to time.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-22

The Anty Pattern

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-04

An anti-pattern that shows up from time to time here is the old “our IDE’s build output is mapped to a network drive on the web server”, but “Drummer” shows us a novel new variation on that theme.

It all started when a co-worker asked them, “how do I change the compiler version?” The code was built using Ant, so “Drummer” opened the build file and searched through it for a javac element- the Ant command which runs the Java compiler.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-08

The Porpoise of Comment Easter Eggs

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-10-03

Porpiose

Today's submitter writes: I wonder how many developers out there have managed, intentionally or otherwise, to have a comment Easter egg go viral within a project.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-13

Dashboard Confessional

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-02

Three years ago, this XKCD comic captured a lot of the problems we have with gathering requirements:

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-16

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