Articles

As a junior network administrator at a small local ISP, Kiefer R.'s job is pretty mundane. Aside from the occasional bandwidth problem investigating, cable laying, and spline reticulating, there's not too much excitement.

"Having worked in the Computer industry for about twenty years now," Matt writes, "I rarely get the chance to actually write code. But I do get the joy of other people's problems landing at my feet when things go wrong."

If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.

Whereas most ads for search engines list something boring like "hotels" or "pet grooming" as an example, Live Search knows what the average internet user actually searches for.

Originally posted by "rc_pinchey"...

“Shortly after joining my new company,” writes Rajesh Subramanian, “they introduced me to The Monster: a massive, incomplete framework written in C++. Its documentation consisted of a few sparse, often contradictory comments. It was designed to be multithreaded, but always crashed with more than one thread. It was expected to run on different operating systems, but never quite made it past Windows 2000 SP3. And naturally, it’s filled with friendly variable names like s, t, pp1, pp2, and so on.”

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small Souvenir. Nothing specific, per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (first one here, second one here)

Back in the early 1990's, G.R.G. worked at a certain university as a programmer. In addition to breaking into server rooms and deafening cute little chinchillas, G.R.G. built one of the university's first web applications. It was a fairly simple CGI program that provided web-access to the student registration known as Old Yeller.

Originally posted by "Charles Capps"...

Bug tracking software? Who needs it! I was confident in my ability to maintain several Outlook folders of bug reports, flagging completed ones 'orange' — or was it 'green' that meant done? No, wait, I think it was purple. My system was perfect. Then Alex came along and ruined it all. I can't pinpoint exactly when I started regularly using the bug tracking software that he liked, but it may've had something to do with being held at gunpoint. You probably thought Alex was kidding in that article. "You don't have a choice in this. Use the software," Alex suggested. After the threat encounter training session with Alex, I called my loved ones, then started copying the unresolved bugs (yellow flags) from my Outlook manual bug tracking system. Wait, crap, blue flags.

Real mature. What hilarious and edgy word will it pick next? BOOB? FART?

How Can You Expect This?! (from K.D.)

"I started working at my company about four years ago," Craig F. writes. "When I started here there were a number of applications developed and floating around for use by the staff, all written by a contractor whom I've never met, but whose name I curse regularly.

Originally posted by "JukeboxJim" ...

L Young writes, "I'm pretty sure that there isn't a number that falls between this range..."

Things started simply enough. In the first version of the now years-old ColdFusion application that Lindsay L maintains, all database queries were hard-coded.

When Damon's coworker stopped by his cubicle for a chat, Damon wondered if they should have met in a dark alley somewhere. Damon, a developer, and his coworker in quality assurance were meeting to trade bugs on the newly created Defect Black Market.

Brad P had a difficult time solving this limo company's (UPDATE: now fixed) CAPTCHA. I wonder if they've ever considered why no one is emailing them...

When programmers disagree, generally one of two things happens. One, they talk it over like mature adults and agree on a solution that works for everybody. Two, they have a swearing match that ends on an angry compromise, then the programmers go off and do their own thing anyway and blame the whole mess on a "miscommunication."

A little more than a year ago, Nathan T's company decided to outsource a large portion of certain project to a certain country many thousands of miles away. "Even if the code quality isn't as good," one manager would often say, "we'll just pay them to rewrite it and rewrite it again. It'll still be less expensive."

One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

Andrea is never going to get her refund...

Originally posted by "Dirk"...

"I've lost the will to live," Reacher writes, "or at the very least, debug my coworker's code."

Thank you all for participating in last week's survey! I crunched the numbers and read through the 150+ printed pages of comments, and learned some pretty neat things along the way: Quite a number of readers missed the invisible <AprilFools> tag, and hate the new4 name The Daily WTH. Not too many paid attention to the distinction between features (like Code SOD, Error'd, etc). The non-coders usually don't understand the code snippets, and they're OK with that. Some would prefer an explanation in the comments, though. The general consesus for the comic (MFD) was that, while the idea of having a comic here is good, MFD isn't quite "there" yet. It does show some potential, but in the mean time, the reader-submitted comics are "where it's at." There was also a lot of very helpful constructive critisism. Despite hating the content here, and especially disliking me, some of you still visit on regular basis and actually take the time to leave survey comments. I'm flattered. Especially by you, Survey Taker #2883: Alex, please stop trying to be funny. You are completely devoid of any sort of sense of humour and impervious to being told this. Your idea of an April Fool's joke was to pretend to rename the site what, three months after actually renaming it and renaming it back? That's not funny. You don't know what funny is. You don't get it, and no matter how much you're told, you *won't* get it. When three thousand people call you an ass, start looking for a saddle. I don't want your worthless prose, your insipid writing, or your mean-spirited forays into OS/platform wars. Basically, any time your personality creeps through, we all suffer. For those of you who asked about another programming contest: yes, soon!

Originally posted by "JukeboxJim"...

Design me a House (by David J)

"Your password has been changed" *picks flower petal* "your password has been changed not" *picks flower petal*

For the most part, it was like any other sales meeting. Robert sat in a dark conference room with the potential client's CTO, COO and a few other managers. A projector lit up the whiteboard with PowerPoint slides and screenshots from their in-house billing system. Janice, the CTO, went over the automated billing application and related processes so that Robert, an IT consultant, and his team could develop a proposal for maintaining it.

K. K. sent in an example of his company's naming conventions for methods, in which if you have a method that's used frequently, you repeat part of its name for dramatic effect.

The store was abuzz leading up to the most gala event that Computer Czar store 893 would have the honor and privilege of hosting. After the big night, they'd have to wait an agonizing three months until the next one. It was time for the Quarterly Computer Czar Store 893 Service Recognition Award Ceremony.

Where's this bus going, Mike C. ponders. Hopefully the driver knows.

Originally posted by "Tann San"...

Hannes writes, "I'm currently working on maintaining rewriting an application from the early days of ASP.NET (c. 2001) to be all AJAXy and Web 2.0. One of the first things I stumbled over when I first fired up the debugger was a strange exception - the RedirectException - that got thrown on almost every page. Sometimes, it was thrown more than once in the page lifecycle, but it never made it up to the front-end.

Originally posted by Spikeles...

A few years back, Randy A took a contract as a maintenance developer on a wretched abomination of an application. Like those who've stared into the heart of the Great Codethulhu, Randy's retinas are forever burned with code from the system. One line that continues to haunt his dreams is as clear as the day he first encountered it...

I'm sure many of you have had or are currently working in a tech support position. Consider yourself fortunate if you've never had experiences like these.

Originally posted by Zecc...

Jason snapped this at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum on one of their "fitness" machines.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: Yet Another Survey on The Daily WTF. However, unlike the recent survey from December, this one is not so much about you, but about what you think about the content here.

Lee B. was ready to impress. The night before his first day on the contract he laid out his outfit for the day, ironed his clothes, and made sure to get a good night's sleep. He wanted to leave a great impression, and had planned and visualized exactly how he would do so.

Something different for today — a multiple choice CodeSOD! Assume the following:

In the past, I didn’t mix TDWTH and work too often, but with the tweaked name and tweaked direction on content, I knew this article would be a perfect fit.

As you can probably tell by now, The Daily WTF is now named The Daily WTH, as in The Daily What The Heck. Don’t worry, though – nothing else has changed. Okay, that’s not entirely true: a few other things are changing, but they’re all mostly minor. Really, you won’t even know the difference.