Articles

Brandon got it wrong the first time when it was "UIDIOT":

If you aren’t familiar with Serialization in Java, then today is your lucky day! Here’s a quick, crash course in Java Serialization:

Most first-class (consultants & employees) and second-class (contractors) programmers don’t realize that there’s an entire class of programmers below them. These programmers – the third-class programmers – work in Developer Purgatory with far less responsibilities, no latitude to make any decision at any level, and always get assigned the “dirty work.” In fact, some even consider it an act of charity to call these poor folks “programmers” at all.

Hopefully Nicole had a good time on a long trip she took:

Barry R. and Rob P.'s coworker had a problem: how could he really, really make sure they verify that a value stored in an enumeration, say the EmailsFormat enum, is actually a valid value for that enumeration? With the handy FromEmailsFormat function of course!

If you’ve developed software for long enough, you’ve most certainly heard of a “business logic layer.” It’s supposed to be the layer (or “tier”) containing an application’s business logic and is sandwiched between a “persistence layer” and a “presentation layer.” Some call that the “standard three tiers of an application.” But what it really is, however, is a bad design that leads to bad software. Or at the very least, dangerously poor semantics. In lieu of your standard WTF article, allow me to explain why.

Joe A. recently had some troubles at work. Joe works for a company that runs scrolling marquee signs using a markup language similar to HTML. It's a small company, run by two guys we'll call Tom and Bill.

From Christopher:

Ahh, the things you can find in an old, gigantic system! Chris B recently uncovered this gem in an old Java application. It might be misnamed, but then again... how could one possibly describe what this is supposed to do...

From David W.: "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. MAN WALKS ON MOON. ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON HIROSHIMA. Great news headlines grab our attention, tell us in seconds how our world has changed, and stay with us for decades. Google News's interpretation of a San Francisco Chronicle story, however, will most likely fail to stand the test of time."

Date and Time computations aren’t easy. Unless you’re fortunate enough to use Metric Time, there are a whole lot of uneven measurements to work with. Sixty seconds in a minute. Twenty four hours in a day. Thirty, thirty one, twenty eight, maybe twenty nine days in a month. Fifty two point something weeks in a year. It’s just ugly.

Unless you’ve just recently signed on to this whole Internet Thing, you’ve probably noticed an increasing trend in the World of Authentication. These days, when logging on to various websites, users are asked for a name, password, and the answer to one or more “secret questions.” It’s actually a new-fangled type of authentication called Wish-It-Was Two-Factor.

Ever wanted your .mp3 file to play like an .mp3 file? Well, now you can have it both ways!

I hate the final stretch of a project; it's when all the minor bugs that I've been putting off fixing need to get fixed. An anonymous submitter that we'll call Scott was brought on for the final round of fixes of a large, vendor-built application.

Imagine how much easier your job could be. Imagine no meetings, no signatures on change control paperwork, no code written by people other than you. Imagine being able to just log in to the production server to make a quick fix. Imagine being able to log in to the database server to manually fix some data.

Ahh, 6142 years ago, when the internet was still in its infancy.

Generally speaking, $300 doesn’t go very far in the world of custom software. If you’re lucky, it might be enough to fix a typo in a production application. These days, with the advent of IT Project Portals (as discussed before) that provide everyone access to certain developers from certain countries, $300 can go a long way. Not long enough to build working software, of course, but surely long enough to generate lots and lots of worthless code. At least, that was the experience with Christopher’s client.

Today's highly inappropriate ad being run under a very sad headline comes to us from Justin:

When users upload a multimedia file to Toti S.'s company's website, their system transcodes the file into several different multimedia formats. At the high level, it's a pretty basic process.

Sometimes in IT, we have to be dicks. Like private dicks, I mean. Like Dick Tracy dicks. What did you think I meant?

Consider this print configuration dialog that Quint came across...

Sometimes, there just isn’t a better way. You have to implement the DoNothing() method. Or even IsTrue(). At least, that’s what D.C. assumed when he saw a a class with a member variable named “self” …

When Mario W.'s company was approached by a mega not-for-profit organization for a brochure and web site, they were excited. The organization worked for welfare and was all over the place; it owned a nursing home, meeting places, a travel club, meals on wheels... in fact, it might be quicker to list the ventures they don't have: a tattoo parlor, a laser tag arena, and a bee colony. All told, there were about 5,000 members across all the corporation's ventures.

"Occurance" is definately a common mispeling.

Sebastian K.'s first encounter with Megan – a programmer in the company’s data verification department – came in the form of an innocent-sounding question: “how do I get the first value out of a variable?”

The important thing is that all 580% agreed that each city did their best to build stadiums!

Telly B. sent in a representative line that returns database connection information... from the database.

Matt found a less-than-helpful helper function in a large JavaScript library:

A frequent user of Cognos PowerPlay, Tom Murray shares some of its more insightful error messages...

It's Like a Double Yellow Line:

Kyle was in the market for a bluetooth GPS device and stumbled upon this company who had a rather interesting SKU Number scheme ...