The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Be Patient!...OK?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-06-22

"I used to feel nervous when making payments online, but now I feel ...um...'Close' about it," writes Jeff K.

17 comments - Last comment @ 04:50

Wait Low Down

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-06-21

As mentioned previously I’ve been doing a bit of coding for microcontrollers lately. Coming from the world of desktop and web programming, it’s downright revelatory. With no other code running, and no operating system, I can use every cycle on a 16MHz chip, which suddenly seems blazing fast. You might have to worry about hardware interrupts- in fact I had to swap serial connection libraries out because the one we were using misused interrupts and threw of the timing of my process.

And boy, timing is amazing when you’re the only thing running on the CPU. I was controlling some LEDs and if I just went in a smooth ramp from one brightness level to the other, the output would be ugly steps instead of a smooth fade. I had to use a technique called temporal dithering, which is a fancy way of saying “flicker really quickly” and in this case depended on accurate, sub-microsecond timing. This is all new to me.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-22

The Wizard Algorithm

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-20

Password requirements can be complicated. Some minimum and maximum number of characters, alpha and numeric characters, special characters, upper and lower case, change frequency, uniqueness over the last n passwords and different rules for different systems. It's enough to make you revert to a PostIt in your desk drawer to keep track of it all. Some companies have brillant employees who feel that they can do better, and so they create a way to figure out the password for any given computer - so you need to neither remember nor even know it.

Kendall Mfg. Co. (estab. 1827) (3092720143)

History does not show who created the wizard algorithm, or when, or what they were smoking at the time.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-22

A Unique Specification

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-19

One of the skills I think programmers should develop is not directly programming related: you should be comfortable reading RFCs. If, for example, you want to know what actually constitutes an email address, you may want to brush up on your BNF grammars. Reading and understanding an RFC is its own skill, and while I wouldn’t suggest getting in the habit of reading RFCs for fun, it’s something you should do from time to time.

To build the skill, I recommend picking a simple one, like UUIDs. There’s a lot of information encoded in a UUID, and five different ways to define UUIDs- though usually we use type 1 (timestamp-based) and type 4 (random). Even if you haven’t gone through and read the spec, you already know the most important fact about UUIDs: they’re unique. They’re universally unique in fact, and you can use them as identifiers. You shouldn’t have a collision happen within the lifetime of the universe, unless someone does something incredibly wrong.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-21

The Sanity Check

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-18

I've been automating deployments at work, and for Reasons™, this is happening entirely in BASH. Those Reasons™ are that the client wants to use Salt, but doesn't want to give us access to their Salt environment. Some of our deployment targets are microcontrollers, so Salt isn't even an option.

While I know the shell well enough, I'm getting comfortable with more complicated scripts than I usually write, along with tools like xargs which may be the second best shell command ever invented. yes is the best, obviously.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-21

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."

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-20

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.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-21

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.

40 comments - Last comment @ 13:15

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;
}

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-21

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.

19 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.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-20

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

4 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-07

Many Happy Returns

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-06-06

We've all encountered a situation where changing requirements caused some function that had a single native return type to need to return a second value. One possible solution is to put the two return values in some wrapper class as follows:

31 comments - Last comment @ 16:04

A Test Configuration

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-06-05

Tyler Zale's organization is a automation success story of configuration-as-code. Any infrastructure change is scripted, those scripts are tested, and deployments happen at the push of a button.

They'd been running so smoothly that Tyler was shocked when his latest automated pull request for changes to their HAProxy load balancer config triggered a stack of errors long enough to circle the moon and back.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-13

A/F Testing

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-04

A/B testing is a strange beast, to me. I understand the motivations, but to me, it smacks of "I don't know what the requirements should be, so I'll just randomly show users different versions of my software until something 'sticks'". Still, it's a standard practice in modern UI design.

What isn't standard is this little blob of code sent to us anonymously. It was found in a bit of code responsible for A/B testing.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-08

I Beg Your Entschuldigung?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-06-01

"Delta does not seem to be so sure of what language to address me in," writes Pat.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-04

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