Feature Articles

As a junior network administrator at a small local ISP, Kiefer R.'s job is pretty mundane. Aside from the occasional bandwidth problem investigating, cable laying, and spline reticulating, there's not too much excitement.

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small Souvenir. Nothing specific, per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (first one here, second one here)

Back in the early 1990's, G.R.G. worked at a certain university as a programmer. In addition to breaking into server rooms and deafening cute little chinchillas, G.R.G. built one of the university's first web applications. It was a fairly simple CGI program that provided web-access to the student registration known as Old Yeller.

Bug tracking software? Who needs it! I was confident in my ability to maintain several Outlook folders of bug reports, flagging completed ones 'orange' — or was it 'green' that meant done? No, wait, I think it was purple. My system was perfect. Then Alex came along and ruined it all. I can't pinpoint exactly when I started regularly using the bug tracking software that he liked, but it may've had something to do with being held at gunpoint. You probably thought Alex was kidding in that article. "You don't have a choice in this. Use the software," Alex suggested. After the threat encounter training session with Alex, I called my loved ones, then started copying the unresolved bugs (yellow flags) from my Outlook manual bug tracking system. Wait, crap, blue flags.

When Damon's coworker stopped by his cubicle for a chat, Damon wondered if they should have met in a dark alley somewhere. Damon, a developer, and his coworker in quality assurance were meeting to trade bugs on the newly created Defect Black Market.

When programmers disagree, generally one of two things happens. One, they talk it over like mature adults and agree on a solution that works for everybody. Two, they have a swearing match that ends on an angry compromise, then the programmers go off and do their own thing anyway and blame the whole mess on a "miscommunication."

One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

Thank you all for participating in last week's survey! I crunched the numbers and read through the 150+ printed pages of comments, and learned some pretty neat things along the way: Quite a number of readers missed the invisible <AprilFools> tag, and hate the new4 name The Daily WTH. Not too many paid attention to the distinction between features (like Code SOD, Error'd, etc). The non-coders usually don't understand the code snippets, and they're OK with that. Some would prefer an explanation in the comments, though. The general consesus for the comic (MFD) was that, while the idea of having a comic here is good, MFD isn't quite "there" yet. It does show some potential, but in the mean time, the reader-submitted comics are "where it's at." There was also a lot of very helpful constructive critisism. Despite hating the content here, and especially disliking me, some of you still visit on regular basis and actually take the time to leave survey comments. I'm flattered. Especially by you, Survey Taker #2883: Alex, please stop trying to be funny. You are completely devoid of any sort of sense of humour and impervious to being told this. Your idea of an April Fool's joke was to pretend to rename the site what, three months after actually renaming it and renaming it back? That's not funny. You don't know what funny is. You don't get it, and no matter how much you're told, you *won't* get it. When three thousand people call you an ass, start looking for a saddle. I don't want your worthless prose, your insipid writing, or your mean-spirited forays into OS/platform wars. Basically, any time your personality creeps through, we all suffer. For those of you who asked about another programming contest: yes, soon!

For the most part, it was like any other sales meeting. Robert sat in a dark conference room with the potential client's CTO, COO and a few other managers. A projector lit up the whiteboard with PowerPoint slides and screenshots from their in-house billing system. Janice, the CTO, went over the automated billing application and related processes so that Robert, an IT consultant, and his team could develop a proposal for maintaining it.

The store was abuzz leading up to the most gala event that Computer Czar store 893 would have the honor and privilege of hosting. After the big night, they'd have to wait an agonizing three months until the next one. It was time for the Quarterly Computer Czar Store 893 Service Recognition Award Ceremony.

I'm sure many of you have had or are currently working in a tech support position. Consider yourself fortunate if you've never had experiences like these.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: Yet Another Survey on The Daily WTF. However, unlike the recent survey from December, this one is not so much about you, but about what you think about the content here.

Lee B. was ready to impress. The night before his first day on the contract he laid out his outfit for the day, ironed his clothes, and made sure to get a good night's sleep. He wanted to leave a great impression, and had planned and visualized exactly how he would do so.

In the past, I didn’t mix TDWTH and work too often, but with the tweaked name and tweaked direction on content, I knew this article would be a perfect fit.

As you can probably tell by now, The Daily WTF is now named The Daily WTH, as in The Daily What The Heck. Don’t worry, though – nothing else has changed. Okay, that’s not entirely true: a few other things are changing, but they’re all mostly minor. Really, you won’t even know the difference.