Alex Papadimoulis

Happy New Year, everyone! To kick off the New Year (and celebrate the new, new, new name), I'm giving away a whole bunch of free stickers!

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Tinfoil Hat Program" was originally published on 2005-05-24...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Implements ISwissArmyKnife" was originally published on 2005-02-24, and never seems to grow old...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Fisher Price Technology Integration" was originally published on 2006-11-13...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Because database drivers can be too complex" was originally published on 2004-07-09, and is just one of those WTFs you wish you could un-see...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. No Quack was originally published on 2006-12-01, and has become one of my all time favorites...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. "Now That is a Way to do States" was originally published on 2005-01-31, and amazingly, no one has submitted a worse way to "do states" to this day...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. The Abstract Candidate was originally published on 2006-08-24, and seems to fit so well with today's earlier article...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. The Brillant Paula Bean was originally published on 2005-08-05, and never seems to grow old...

Merry Christmas, everyone! Instead of a normal tale of incompetence, failure, or disaster, here's a fun story that's kind of the opposite of that. "Print or Fish" was originally published on 2005-11-22, and never seems to grow old...

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. The Great Google Banner Ad Conspiracy was originally published on 2006-12-09.

Although I've taken the rest of the year off, I wanted to share a few fun classics this week. What Is Truth was originally published on 2005-10-24.

It was the best job opportunity Kirk had ever seen.

Today's Best-of-the-Sidebar was originally posted by "old gutsie" ...

"When I called iRobot to see if they could help with my broken Roomba," M. Helm wrote, "the customer service gladly sent out an 'upgrade kit' to fix the problem and noted that I'd have to agree to the EULA sent along with it. I didn't think I'd have a problem agreeing to the EULA, until I saw this."

When Chris M's company finally decided to rewrite portions of their decrepit C++ application, Chris was relieved. "Finally," he thought, "no more ridiculous, unnecessary classes and enumerations."

"This is what saw when I tried to open a Fidelity account online;" Leland W. said, "when I called in for help, a customer service rep explained that this has been a 'known issue' with their software for a while. When she started giving me instructions on how to change my system's language code to EN-US, I opted for the paper application."

These days, having written about bad code for a few years now, it's pretty rare to uncover a new anti-pattern like the FOR-CASE paradigm, IHBLRIA, or RLB o'PCC. However, having seen snippet after snippet like todays two, I think it's finally time to identify the Null Understanding...

A few weeks ago, I shared the RemoveSpecialCharsExceptQuote AmpersandApostropheOpenBracket CloseBracketCommaHyphenFull StopCommaForwardSlash() method that Paul G. was forced to implement by his superior. Now this may come as a surprise, but there were a few more "oddities" at that organization. And shortly after leaving the longest-three-months-of-his-life contract, Paul was nice enough to share some more of them.

Back in July of 2001, a member of Sun's EmbeddedJava Forums asked a fairly simple question: Is it possible to send SMS using Java?

As you may have noticed by now, I’ve decided to rename the site once again. While the New Name (“Worse Than Failure”) seemed like a good fit at the time, and the New, New Name (“The Daily Worse Than Failure”) seemed like an even better fit, it turns out that there was one name that was still better: the New, New, New Name, or “The Daily WTF.”

When Mike's coworker left the company for greener pastures, Mike got stuck with maintaining all of his old projects. This wouldn't have been too bad if it weren't for a application that was developed using the BrillantML (as I'll call it). While Brillant ML is technically a programming language, a more apt description is "a few commands surrounded by an XML wrapper." Yes, it really is as horrid as it sounds.

First and foremost, thank you all for taking the survey. Your answers and comments (which I’m still making my way through) have really given me a good insight and some ideas on where to go in the near future. Speaking of which, as a result of your feedback, I’ve implemented a few simple changes. Featured Comments

Here's yet another screenshot from the inappropriate contextual ads department...

Isaac S. recently started working for a certain online multiplayer game company, and noticed that his fellow developers were very meticulous about security.

Bob T. got sucked into one of those "maybe the new guy can figure it out!" problems, only to open the first page - and then subsequent pages - to see that all of the validation code looked like this...

As one of the more experienced C# coders in his group, Yakir is often asked programming questions. Recently, his colleague James asked him the best way to store hundreds of thousands of items in memory, to which Yakir replied "It depends on how you want to access your data. If you want to access your data by index, you should store it in an ArrayList. If its easier to store things as a key-value pair, then you should use a Hashtable."

After 18 long months, it was finally time to celebrate. David M. and his fellow dev team members received word that their latest build had passed QA testing and was ready for delivery.

R. Young got his first job as a developer right out of college. He was a Programmer Consultant I, which meant that he'd be sent to a client site to fix bugs in some old system. But on his first assignment, he got lucky: the client actually wanted him and the junior-level programmer to develop a small application.

A lot of “certain” developers just don’t like change. They’ll stick to their architecture no matter what, and certainly regardless of the requirements change. Doing any less would compromise the “purity” their design.