The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Tablemania!

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-07-31

We've all heard of dates. Not the kind with someone to whom you're attracted. No, I mean the kind that represent some relative position on the calendar. Now we've all seen what people do when faced with the extremely difficult task of working with dates. Short of programming in brainfsck, intelligent programmers use the built-in variety, be it in C#, Java, etc.

Sometimes, you need to be able to identify different parts of a date. But, given (let's use Java as an example) a java.util.Date, how on Earth can any reasonable person possibly figure out the year without too much grief? I mean, it's mathematically hard to convert all those milliseconds to years. There must be a better way to identify years!

81 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-10

Circle Around the Requirements

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2014-07-29

Bakdar was the only technical person at PromoCorp, a marketing company. When someone finally launched a technical project, he was ready. The product was a cutting-edge web-to-print technology, in which Joe User could easily upload an image of his plumbing company’s logo onto a mock-up of a pen, and send it to PromoCorp with his order. It would save time, money, and provide a revenue stream for PromoCorp. The project was big, the project was technical, and the project was the attractive sort of thing that made careers. Bakdar was over the moon.

It was a brilliant idea, with one problem. PromoCorp didn’t have the internal resources to create the web interface on their own, so they contracted a third party, Weblutions, to do it for them. Bakdar was the liaison between the two, tasked with making sure things went smoothly. The interface between Weblutions and PromoCorp was supposed to import the images from Weblutions so that they could be emblazoned onto things like crappy t-shirts nobody would ever wear. The finished goods would then be returned to the customer who initiated the request.

66 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-01

Limited Options

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2014-07-23

Security is challenging to get right. It's always a complex balancing act between what users want and what administrators need. Between placing the server in a hermetically sealed container with no cables running the outside world, and setting the server up on the busiest street corner in town with an already logged-in administrator account pulled up on the attached monitor. Depending on the O/S update policy in practice at your company, that last example can be roughly the equivalent of connecting your server to the Internet.

Here at TDWTF, security is a common topic of submissions. If only because there are so many different (and creative) ways to set things up that are wrong and only a couple of ways to set it up that are correct. And there is a non-zero percentage of administrators that are, shall we say, less than diligent in how they go about their job. We're sure that none of you fit into that category. We're talking about other people.

66 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-24

The Great Bacon Conspiracy

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-07-21

As an IT infrastructure manager, Jerry spent more time skimming his junkmail folder than he liked. Unfortunately, a large number of important messages landed there, because Garrett, the CSO, mandated an extremely aggressive approach to identifying spam. No less than once a week, a vital message was marked as spam.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2014-07-22

Just Roll With It

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-07-15

DBAs are supposed to bring knowledge of the underpinnings of databases to the table. How to lay out tables and indices across disks for linear vs. striped access. How to properly set up partitioning for different types of access. Granting assorted privileges and roles. Managing backup and aging off data in a controlled manner, and so forth.

Some take pride in showing developers the "right" way. Some are maniacal in their tight-fisted my-way-or-the-highway approach. Others seem better suited to a career of asking do you want fries with that?

89 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-04

In the Belly of the Beast

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-07-09

A large company is something like a whale. They are huge beasts who strain their sustenance (profits) from the ocean that surrounds them. In this analogy, customers are krill, but their employees are more like Jonah- wrapped up inside of a beast larger and more complex than they can possibly imagine.

First, we have no control over who gets swallowed up in that whale with us. Phil, for example, found himself huddled in the bowels of a large manufacturer with Len as his only company.

The Broken Piece

95 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-23

Classic WTF: The Program Generator Program

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2014-07-04

It's the 4th of July, which is the day the US attempts to forget they ever pretended to like soccer through wild displays of patriotism and fireworks. It's also a holiday, so enjoy this WTF from the archives, The Program Generator Program from 2012.

When you've been in IT for as long as Pat McGee, you're bound to have survived at least one or two COBOL horror stories. While COBOL is certainly not the worst platform to develop software on (MUMPS will most certainly hold that title through at least our grandchildren’s lifetimes), its extreme verbosity and unique idiosyncrasies make it a challenge for organizations to develop clean, maintainable code.

74 comments - Last comment @ 2014-07-16

if(useTCP) return;

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-07-03

A long, long time ago, in a phone company long since gone and resurrected, if Aunt Bee wanted to call Sheriff Andy, she picked up the phone, pressed the receiver a couple of times, the operator picked up, Bee said to connect her to Andy, and the operator shoved a jack into a hole to complete the circuit. For long distance calls, two or more operators and switchboards were involved. It left something to be desired, but it worked.

Fast forward a while, and Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn got the idea to automate it all with a packet-switched network. David Reed designed UDP, which helped eliminated the operators sitting at switchboard jack panels, but didn't guaranty delivery of the packet, and if the packets did arrive, there was no particular ordering to them. This fire-and-forget mechanism was fine for the sender. Not so much for the recipient.

77 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-19

Scriptzilla

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2014-07-01

In the late 90s, Jeremy fought a battle against a menace more terrifying than the dreaded Y2K bug. He maintained a network management application running on Solaris which managed TDM and ATM switches, called PortLog. This prototype CMDB maintained a database of all of the equipment in the network. It created a unique identifier encoded each device’s shelf, slot and port number according to a “magic” formula. That formula needed to change in the next release, thus forcing the unique ID of each device to change as well, in every deployed instance of their database.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-04

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