The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Vintage 2013

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-17

Today we have more of a representative comment, from Watson. This comes from some GPL licensed code published by everybody's favorite evil empire, Oracle.

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10 comments - Last comment @ 14:29

Extremely One Line

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-16

Autoformatting your code is a standard thing to do these days. And in those days past, if we're being honest. There's no excuse to not use some kind of autoformatter. Whether you configure your editor to do it or are a weirdo like me who runs a formatter from the CLI as a build step, you've got an easy way to format your code so it looks neat and readable. And some IDEs, like Visual Studio, are pretty insistent about doing this for you. Which makes today's code sample a bit more perplexing. This comes from an ancient ASP .Net application that Austin has the misfortune to work with:

protected void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e){if (Request.ServerVariables["http_user_agent"].IndexOf("Safari", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)Page.ClientTarget = "uplevel";} protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 Logic();
}

18 comments - Last comment @ 09:58

An Odd Sort

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-15

Let's say we wanted to query Active Directory and print out a report of all of our users, and their last logon time. That seems like a pretty normal task for a Powershell script. It'd probably be short and easy to read, at least if it were written by a normal person.

Alice sends us one that wasn't. She's already done us a favor, as she writes: "Code cleaned up and indented for the whitespace-missing-impaired."

13 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-16

I Exist

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-14

In addition to using an ancient development environment, with terrible UX, Greta also has the misfortune of working in Pascal.

Recently, she was diagnosing a bug. The program was reporting that files didn't exist when they definitely existed. She traced the problem down into the system library. Let's see if you can spot what's wrong:

11 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-15

Unrewarding

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-09-11

Some new and some old entries this week, from people who find zero profoundly unrewarding.

"A scary blue button from The North Face" warns Dmitry K.. "Northface has just proudly rewarded me with nothing. I am not sure whether I want to try adding such a non-positive amount to my wallet. I am afraid I can trigger a chain reaction that will crash the financial system of the whole world..."

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-14

A Bit of DNS

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-09-10

I'm not a DNS person, in that I appreciate that it exists but am not up on the inner workings. It solves a lot of problems with dark magic I don't fully understand, and fortunately don't need to.

But Lucio noticed something that I do think is interesting, within the scope of the CAA record type.

39 comments - Last comment @ 09:06

Asynchronous Directories

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-09-09

Eri has a mix of a "true confession" and a "wait, really?" today.

The programming language Vala bills itself as a C# like language that compiles into something pretty close to C performance, designed specifically for writing code against Gnome and its associated libraries.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-09-10

A Mortal Blow

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-09-08

From our anonymous submitter:

Having reached the end of the road at a company increasingly swallowed up companies further east which you'd never believe were still afloat, I found myself headhunted for certain specialty software skills. I was reaching the final few years of my expected working span, so I jumped at the chance. The money was (to me at that time) spectacularly good, so I jumped into it.

14 comments - Last comment @ 08:15