Alex Papadimoulis

"I'm not an expert at world time," Matias, "but this may be an issue with time zones. Maybe some zones have more minutes than others."

With nearly 750 responses, and solutions written in everything from ABAP to MUMPS to XSLT, I’d say that last week’s Programming Praxis (Russian Peasant Multiplication) was certainly a success. The comments are most certainly worth a read, if nothing else but to see things like the circuit diagram solution, something done entirely using regular expressions, and some obscure childrens' language called Baltie 3. That said, I'm excited to present this next Programming Praxis.

Sascha was at wit's end. "It's a fundamental underpinning of the web! Server-side code cannot interact with the user's web browser and tell it to close the window. You have to do it in JavaScript!"

"When writing validation scripts, it's easy to forget that some fields (company name, for example) might actually need a mix of letters and numbers," Laurie Denness writes, "you'd think some companies would be better at remembering that than others."

Not too long ago, the CTO at Dudley H.'s company had a startling revelation: there should never, ever be a need for technical support. If a client has an issue using one of their products, then the problem is most certainly in the product. Maybe the UI is a little confusing. Maybe it's not documented enough. Maybe the documentation isn't clear enough. Whatever the case, every client issue means that someone — be it the developer, tester, or helpdesk technician — didn't do their job properly and should strive to improve themselves.

Ever since the first OMGWTF Programming Contest, I've always wanted to bring back some element of "coding challenges" to the site. Ideally, this would be in the form of a second contest... but considering that contests require a ton of work, and the fact that interns around town have come to learn that interning at Inedo basically mean means shipping mugs, mailing stickers, testing contest entries, and acting as human ottomans, we'll have to go with something a bit scaled back. And that's where Programming Praxis will come in.

Near the end of the new contractor’s first week, Taka Sora was starting to wonder if he made the right hiring decision. Richard – the contractor in question – seemed to know his Action Script 3, but there was just something about him that wasn’t right. And it wasn’t the strange noises that he was making all day.

Today's What The Ad? is courtesy of John D.. The general theme: business ads that wouldn't appeal to a typical business, even then.

"I was updating my AT&T Global Network Client and was confronted with a few choices," wrote Nick S., "I think I clicked the right one."

"Our Senior Architect likes the idea of keeping things simple," Stephen B, "no stored procedures, no parameterized queries... just simple, simple strings."

In 1968, when David Foskey finally had the opportunity to stand face-to-face with a Honeywell 8200, his expression was nothing short of awestruck. Technically, the 8200 didn’t have a face, it had a window that overlooked a room. And not just any room, but a room the size of a freakin' basketball court. In fact, Honeywell recommended that no less than six thousand square feet be dedicated to the 8200; any less and the sorters, collators, processors, storage devices, and computer operators would be a bit too cramped.

Bryan D recently started a new contract with a large company that was developing a rich client application with all the latest buzzword technologies: WCF, WPF, BDD, etc. He was brought on to clean up the code and help figure out why the middle tier wasn’t so “middle”. It actually lived in the UI.

Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.

Back in 2006, Steve worked as a developer at mid-sized financial services firm. Like many organizations with central IT operations, departments within Steve’s company had the option to “buy” application development services from IT, or use an outside vendor for their business software needs, provided that the vendor’s software met IT’s security and technical requirements.

"I was very grateful for the letter Virgin sent out the day after they were here," Magnus Therning "That sure helped us planning."

After spending his first three years out of college in an entry-level position with Ask.com, Erhen was ready to move on to something with more responsibility. One day, he received a phone call from a company that wanted him to come in for an immediate interview.

"It's some nice code," smiled the software architect at Petr Valasek's company, "it needed refactoring before it was ever written. But the good news is, you get to refactor it now."

As a postgrad in the late '80s, Neil Bowers made some extra book money by acting as a helper in the computing lab. At the time, undergrads were all working on a grindingly slow VAX-11/780, and Neil and his fellow postgrads were posted there for hands-on help. This tended to be focused at the start of the year, when there were groups discovering Unix and programming for the first time.