The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2018: The Wizard Algorithm

by snoofle in Best of… on 2018-12-31

NIH syndrome causes untold suffering in the world, but for just a few pennies a day, you can help. Or maybe not, but not-invented-here meets password requirements in this story from June. --Remy

Password requirements can be complicated. Some minimum and maximum number of characters, alpha and numeric characters, special characters, upper and lower case, change frequency, uniqueness over the last n passwords and different rules for different systems. It's enough to make you revert to a PostIt in your desk drawer to keep track of it all. Some companies have brillant employees who feel that they can do better, and so they create a way to figure out the password for any given computer - so you need to neither remember nor even know it.

Kendall Mfg. Co. (estab. 1827) (3092720143)

History does not show who created the wizard algorithm, or when, or what they were smoking at the time.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-03

Assumptions are the Mother of all Bugs

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-12-19

A long time ago in my "C" programming days, I learned that when you code up anything that depends on any sort of external data, be it a file, database or socket, you should be paranoid and do it defensively. After all, you can't control those things and there's no guarantee that they will always work the way you hope. Sometimes you care about every possible error code; sometimes just success or failure. The point is to check the result of what you tried to do.

Fast forward through several years of C++ and ten years into Java, and our boss calls us into the office.

The Command Controller application is failing and nobody knows why. It runs fine for a while and then it starts throwing what appear to be random exceptions. The problem is happening on almost every single command that it's receiving, but only in production. We can not reproduce the issue in any of the other environments (DR, pre-prod, QA or Dev). The team that wrote it is dumbfounded and has asked for help. We have a pretty good reputation at solving tough issues, so you guys need to drop everything and figure this out.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-22

Politics Rules! Common Sense Drools!

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-12-13

As programmers, we all need to fix bugs. As experienced programmers, we recognize that sometimes, the ability to fix one bug depends upon first fixing another bug. Managers, on the other hand, don't always get that simple concept.

At the beginning of my career, I worked for Initrode where I wrote software to run a test-station that diagnosed assorted electronic components of jet fighters. Initrode acted as a government-supplier of the test station to another government contractor (LUserCorp) that used the station to write the test sequences to diagnose electrical faults. If the test station hardware malfunctioned, or there were bugs in the software that made the electronics tests fail to work properly, then LUserCorp could use that as an excuse for time and cost overruns. If that happened, then the government would penalize Initrode to recoup those costs.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-10