Alex Papadimoulis

"I'm pretty sure that the price tagging software at Forever 21 trims the beginning and end of the Description field," George. "Either that, or these are more popular than I realized."

The Network Batch File Virus was originally published on March 15, 2007.

“I’m continually amazed by the unique and clever solutions developed by my colleagues,” Mark writes. “And I should say, I don’t mean ‘amazed’ in a good, innovative-idea-to-save-company-money sort of way. It’s more a wow, that’s more wrong than I could have ever imagined sort of way.”

"Drat!" Arttu notes, "the limits of displaying long numbers caught me again!"

By now I'm sure you've heard of the Bad Code Offsets project. I announced it here back in November and gave a pretty exciting update in December, where we were able to give a whole bunch of money to some great open source projects. But what was especially exciting was the The $500 Good Code Grant.

One mistake that rookie carpenters will often make is to measure for trim molding – baseboard, casing, crown, etc – by the linear foot. Take the casing on a 7’ door, for example. Each leg of the door requires 84” of trim and the header needs 32”. If your house has 16 doors, and each side of the door needs 200” of trim, then that adds up to 533’ 4” (16 x 2 x 200”). And since you can get casing in 16’ boards, you’d need to order 34 boards to get the job done, right?

"If you want My Space or American-On Line web pages," Dmitri confidently told the Wall Street executive before taking another long drag on his cigarette, “then hire New York programmer to build.” He exhaled, filling the air in the posh Moscow bar with even more smoke, then leaned in to say, “but if you need real, smart, mathematically strong system, then you hire Russian. Who you think build Google? Russian!”

"I spotted this poll in the September 30th edition of the The Herald Sun," writes Geoff, "while I'm strongly in support of 'here here here question here here here', it is clearly a hotly contended topic."

They're All Idiots, Too (from Aaron Salo) The CFO stormed in my office, with an unmistaken look of frustration on her face. "I just spent half an hour on the phone with T-Mobile," the grumbled, "I can't get my new BlackBerry to check my email!"

"I recently had the chance to work on one of our projects that has been in development for longer than I have been employed here," writes Phillip, "back when the project was first started, a large part of it was outsourced overseas because, well, that was all the rage back then."

Not too long ago, Johnny D worked for a large worldwide electronics company that designed controllers and devices for all sorts of industries. Like many global corporations, Johnny had the usual problems dealing with international leadership and being such a small part of a large machine.

"Apparently," James noted, "my standard license doesn't include need have have."

I Guess So (by Stuart Whelan) The company I worked for was hiring a C++ developer, and I was assigned the job of hiring the candidates. When the scheduled start time of 1:30PM came and went, I went to the lobby to see if there was a scheduling mix up. At around 1:50, while I was chatting with the receptionist, a disheveled fellow walked in the door. "Is this Omni-tech?" he asked.

"While browsing the code base of a recently inherited project," Joey L writes, "I found this curious method."

On the back of your desktop computer, somewhere on the power supply unit, there might be a little red switch that toggles between 110/115 and 220/230 volts. You’ve probably never had to use that little switch, and you’ve likely avoided flipping it unnecessarily, lest bad things might happen. In fact, had it not been for the preceding sentences, you might not have even thought of that switch for at least a few more years. That had certainly been the case for Byron Schield, until he took a new job as an “IT Generalist” for a burgeoning logistics provider.

A few months ago, Hugh accepted a contract assignment to work on a Java project and, ever since starting, his day-to-day has felt a bit like the old game of Zork: a maze of twisty passages, all alike. So far as he can tell, a large part of the system was created by a chimpanzee (possibly orangutan) that received a treat whenever it pressed a giant button marked "Copy and Paste". One of the class files that Hugh has spent a bit of time working on has over 10,000 lines of code and at least one method that's over 2,500 lines long.