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J Watson experienced password complexity at its finest.

With the Webinar I'm doing this morning, I didn't have a chance to finish today's article. So instead, let's do a classic! Meaninglessness was originally published on April 19, 2007.

A few weeks ago, the fine folks at the IASA invited to speak at one of their webinars to discuss an article I wrote a little while back. It's a free webinar, and runs tomorrow (Thu, Mar 18, 2010) from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern:

It’s a pretty common programming problem: given two dates, determine how many days are between them. Most programmers have the benefit of built-in library code, whether that’s DateTime in .NET, Calendar in Java, and so on. Some – MUMPS programmers, probably – have no choice but to parse and then re-implement the same “30 days hath September…” algorithm. And then of course there are the few who re-implement it anyway, perhaps because they figured that no one else in the history of computing had ever solved that unique problem.

When Hassan joined Meteor's IT department in 2006, he was pleasantly surprised to find everyone abuzz with excitement.

“It seems every other week,” Samuel writes, “there’s a story about outsourcing gone bad. Maybe we’ve been lucky, but for the past decade or so, we simply couldn’t have survived without our friendly team of offsite developers.”

"Working in IT, I see lots of error messages," writes Eric, "this one, however, was unique. Apparently the computer didn't nobulate quite right..."

"Half the world's IT people hate our company's guts," Aaron told the HR lady. "For once, can we hire someone from the other half?"

"This code was left by the Senior Software Consultant," Michael Wheeler writes, "I'm not sure if it's insurance against 'Return' not returning... or a comment that explained why the line of code was left in."

“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”

“I was hired as a ‘best practices consultant’ to help bring a 300-developer company’s development practices into the 21st century,” wrote Ian, “and after six months, I had failed.”

"I've heard about verified by Visa, but this is something new," writes Velmu.

It's time once again for Share Your Bizarre Email day! mail in or post your favorite emails in the comments. Here's three to get started...

“Our codebase is a bit... backwards, to say the least,” writes Aaron Silver, “things that should go up don’t go up or down... instead, they’re painted orange .”

Not too long ago, I was at a client site, working to understand and improve their development process. From a birds-eye view, their development organization was a lot like many other Corporate IT set-ups: they had a sizable portfolio of proprietary applications that were built for and used by different business groups. Some of these applications were “mission critical” and had highly formalized promotion and deployment processes, while others were ancillary and were hardly ever used. <shameless_plug>This, along with the medley of technologies and platforms, was why they sought our help in managing and automating their development processes with BuildMaster.</shameless_plug>

“When a ‘customer’ of ours needs custom-developed software to suit their business requirements,” Kelly Adams writes, “they can either ‘buy’ the development services from the IT department, or go to an outside vendor. In the latter case, then we’re supposed to approve that the software meets corporate security guidelines.”