Articles

Josh D. appreciates having the convenience of online shopping with all the security of email:

A few years back, I was “between jobs” (voluntarily, for the record!) and thought I’d try one of those generic “.NET developer needed for three-month contract” jobs. As I learned at the interview, the client was a Certain Federal Agency, and this Certain Federal Agency required that all contractors have clearance at the “Confidential” level. But not to worry: although my then-clearance level was at the “Hoi Polloi” level, the Certain Federal Agency was happy to bring people on board now (as they needed people “right away”) and have them “wait a little bit” while the clearance request went through. Sounded reasonable enough to me, so I took the job.

"Tim was a hardware engineer for a large technology company," wrote in Brent, "and was responsible for analyzing cable signals. He purchased a tool to analyze these signals from a different company, call them Initech."

After searching for a bug for quite some time, Kai Meierhofer came across the BEA bug tracker page, where one can specify how useful the bug was. Talk about service!

As software developers, we automatically know what our clients want. Even if during the requirements gathering phase the client tells you they want you to zig, you know that they actually want you to zag.

As a software & electrical engineer, a major part of Nick Johnson’s job is figuring out why some aspect of the complex controlling hardware & software that’s used by industrial-sized equipment isn’t working exactly as it should. Personally, I couldn’t imagine debugging such a beast. Sure, there are plenty of sensors and log files, but they only paint a partial picture: who’s to say the recording equipment isn’t flawed, too?

G.M. learned an important lesson about Killing while installing the German edition of Windows XP. Apparently, holding shift and clicking the close button of the installation window might just cause you to lose some date...

If only C.E.'s Jury Summons letter had a VBScript error on it …

Learning programming is like learning anything else. You have to start at the basics. Much like you won't be able to ride a bike without first being able to identify what a bike is and how you make it go, you'll need to know some of the essentials before whipping up your first "hello world."

Peter B. was an out-of-work PHP developer looking for contract work in early 2005. A recruiter he'd worked with in the past emailed him some information regarding a possible position. Reading the job description, Peter thought he'd be a good fit, so he submitted his resume and got a response via email a few days later.

Glen sent this in and I am grateful!! This is apparently a hidden feature of some software that ships with certain Asus motherboards.

A few years back, Brian T took a position in the “Installations and Upgrades” department at a certain enterprise software company. Being that they were an enterprise software provider, installation and upgrades of their software could only be performed by highly-paid technicians. It was Brian’s job to support the technicians and provide them with scripts to help them do their job.

Joel (no, not that Joel) did a good job:

Today's snippet comes from an issue that Brian discovered in the production code of a large telecomunication company's call center software. It attempts to solve a fairly simple problem: get the handle to a specified window and, if it can't be found, try again for MAX_SECONDS. However, there was a bit of an issue with the default wait time...

I hope that WorseThanFailure is James E.'s favorite internet.

AJ got his start at a very small, clientless, and ultimately doomed software company, and it was there that he met Jerry. By the time AJ came to the company, Jerry was off the dev team and in more of a sales role. Still, he'd been on the dev team for years and his code remained throughout the system.

A few months back, G.R.G. shared a story about the “Secured” Server Room at a certain university he once worked at. Like so many WTF’s, there’s a fun follow-up to this story. Brief recap: the dedicated air conditioning unit for the “ultra-secure” data center had died and none of the elite group of key holders could be reached to open the door; fortunately, G.R.G. was able to unlock it with his trusty Bic pen and let the maintenance guy in to fix the problem.

From James S.:

When Lex submitted a large snippet of code from an older ASP/VBScript application that he had inherited, I was considering extracting the following single line and publishing it as a Representative Line...

Brand G. got his start in the game industry working at MicroProse, famous for classics such as Civilization, the X-COM series, Masters of Orion, Pirates, and Dark Earth (one of my personal favorites). MicroProse was also known for its military simulation games, such as Gunship, Pacific Air War, M-1 Tank Platoon, and Falcon 4.0. Brand was brought on to work on such a simulation, European Air War.

As Stephen A.'s client was walking him through their ASP.NET site, Stephen noticed a rather odd URL scheme. Instead of using the standard Query String -- i.e., http://their.site/Products/?ID=2 -- theirs used some form of URL-rewriting utilizing the "@" symbol in the request name: http://their.site/Products/@ID=2.aspx. Not being an expert on Search Engine Optimization, Stephan had just assumed it had something to do with that.

I’ve always found it disheartening to see bad, custom enterprise software. In virtually every case of enterprise software failure, a company had an opportunity to build an effective system that would help employees be as productive as possible, yet ended up with a monstrous application of rapidly decaying quality that everyone – from the day-to-day users to the maintenance programmers – has come to despise. Worse still, there’s little the business can do: they’ve already invested in building the application and simply can’t justify rebuilding another one.

From Marcelo L.:

Despite what our teachers may have said, there is such a thing as a stupid question. And generally, newbies are the ones asking ‘em. I know I sure did (thankfully, under a pseudonym). But unlike the mean-old folks who would often answer my questions (“RTFM, idiot!”), I don’t believe in picking on those trying to learn. In fact, today, it’s time to pick on someone trying to teach…

Huh huh huh watch whut I'm gunna write in Scrabble huh huh.

Everyone knows that global variables are a Bad Thing. It's not too clear why they're bad, but it probably has something to do with speed. Think about it. You never know where a Global could be (it could be across the Globe, after all!). But a Local variable -- it's always right there, nearby.

Several months back, I featured an arcane programming language called MUMPS. Most of you had never seen before nor, presumably, would want to ever see again. Despite having about as much utility in modern software development as a sextant in modern navigation, MUMPS (or M (or Cache)) is still wildly popular in several markets and shows no sign of going anywhere anytime soon. And to make matters worse, MUMPS isn’t one of kind. There are several other ancient languages like it that just refuse to die. Today, we’ll learn about one of these languages named RPG.

Many years ago, Dan B. worked at a large accounting firm that had several small, satellite offices spread throughout the world. The offices shared data -- mostly email -- via a dial-up based file synch operation that would run several times throughout the day. Since these offices were so small, they didn't need IT support on staff; instead, they'd rely on the IT staff at the central office for help.

"...and that's why Colgate can kill you. And now a word from our sponsor... Colgate?! Ahh, crap."

While reviewing some old JavaScript code in his company's core application, Dan Howard came across this pain.

These days, networking is easy. Lay down some CAT-5, wire in a few switches, install a router, configure a the clients, and that’s that. Everything plugs in and just works. But back in the day, things worked a bit differently. Namely, there were choices. Lots and lots of choices.

You're special, reader. You're probably a developer and since you read this site you probably care about writing code that won't ultimately wind up being featured here. And you're hard for employers to find because you're probably employed and not looking for a job.

Andrew K. discovered that the Skype updater is probably not using the right time conversion function...

Dave works as a programmer in a small IT department within a large division of a gigantic company. Unlike his company’s Central IT, his division’s IT department doesn’t seem to hire regular programmers. Instead, they take people from within the division that have programming acclimations and stick them on the programming team. Combine this with the lack of a real development process, testing, or even user feedback, and a lot of interesting programs end up in production.

CodeRookie evidently isn't just a clever name.

After running this site for a little more than three years, it’s rare that I’ll come across a snippet of code that leaves me speechless. Today’s snippet comes from a large Java application that Byron recently started working on and is … well, I’ll just let the code do the talking…

Today’s story is from longtime WTF contributor, G.R.G....

Today’s first snippet comes from some work that was submitted to Yndy from a new coder for his company’s code review. The second snippet is the revision to that code.

If you really think about it, the fact that anything on a computer works is amazing. At a low level, magnets read and write ones and zeros on ridiculously fast rotating platters, and then are assembled into files, which then is stored in memory, which is then passed through a video card and converted into some format that can be displayed on a screen. Throw in networked computers and the potential for signal loss over long distances and the probability that something at some point in the process will fail, and the potential for failure increases exponentially. Maybe I'm alone, but I'm in awe of the fact that my computer doesn't just randomly catch fire and explode.

There are plenty of good ways to make money. You can get a regular job working long days like Irving R...