The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Issue History

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2014-08-28

Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. The guilty are too obtuse to recognize themselves in the story, even if their names hadn't been changed.

Playing the part of Alex in this story is you. Your current employer is a stock fund. Your current engagement: to work on FLASH, the in-house developed stock trading system. That's 'stock', the financial instrument, not 'stock', the live kind you find on farms.

56 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-02

The Data Migration

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2014-08-26

Consider a small European country with more than 20 social insurance institutions, each using their own proprietary software. Now consider sharing data between them. After decades of integration failures, these institutions decided to standardize on a handful of applications. One of these institutions hired Philipp’s firm to migrate their data to DB2.

Philipp’s boss gave him the assignment with a clear conscience. “They have a data transfer interface already established. This should be a quick process.”

However, Philipp’s dreams of webservices, integration end-points, clean XML, and a well organized workflow were shattered when he was handed a few examples of the COBOL-generated flat files the company currently used for data transfer, via FTP. There was no documentation regarding the schema. Philipp sat down with William, an employee at the client site who had worked with this data for the better part of a generation, and had discovered its quirks through trial and error.

53 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-05

Non-Restorative Restoration

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2014-08-21

Jeremy’s employer, SwissMedia, were upgrading their proprietary CMS to run on new, shiny, PHP5. They planned for bumps in the road, but assembled a rugged upgrade plan with a steel chassis. When the time came to upgrade their largest client, French-Haitian News, Jeremy was behind the wheel.

The first step in the plan was for Jeremy to take a copy of their production database that he could experiment with and work out the kinks. He would then prove it worked with the PHP5 application, and get the stamp of approval to go to production. SwissMedia outsourced their data storage, so he contacted Sebastien at Datamaniaks to handle that part.

Somewhere between getting the data and making it work with the PHP5 application, Jeremy committed the dreaded “forgotten WHERE clause” boner. His local copy of the French-Haitian News DB became unusable. He immediately reached out to Sebastien to help remedy the situation.

65 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-26

Inheritance

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-08-19

In life, you will inherit all sorts of things: traits from your direct ancestors, knick-knacks from relatives you tolerated, and sometimes, even money! Of course, there are other things in life that you inherit that you might not even want. The gene for some debilitating disease. The urn filled with the ashes of a relative you particularly despised. Code.

Gerhardt was employed at a C++ shop. Their main product used a third party library. Perhaps used is not quite right; abused is more apt. Every single field that was public (whether it looked like it should be public or not) was ab/used to the max.

70 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-11

Nuclear Internship

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-08-12

Before he could graduate, Grigori’s Russian university program required him to complete a large-scale, real-world project. Like most of his peers, he planned to use this as an opportunity for job experience, which meant partnering with an outside company. Since Grigori did low-level development and microelectronic engineering, he found a paid internship position with the Russian Automation Institute. RAI has one major client: the company responsible for managing Russia’s nuclear reactors and supply parts for nuclear weapons.

Before Grigori could start working, his soon-to-be mentor assigned him a “test”. “Before you begin, you must implement this conversion.” The conversion in question was to turn IEEE754 floating points into a “secret” format. The spec document was a three column spreadsheet- a floating point number, a binary32 floating point number, and the “secret” format.
“Can I have more details?” Grigori asked Aleksandr. “Is there any documentation about the format?”

51 comments - Last comment @ 2021-08-22

Schrödinger's Attendee and more Best of Emails

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2014-08-06

99% of terrible emails are just that. Horrible. However, there's that glimmering 1% of terrible emails that are so bad that they end up being pretty good. Here are a few of them. And, as always, remember - send us your (best) worst emails. We love them!

Schrödinger's Attendee (From Aaron S.)

65 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-08

Don't Speak

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2014-08-05

“Are you Greg?” asked the burly man with a scar from eyebrow to chin. “I’m Mark, your manager.”

Greg’s wait in the lobby ended with a jolt of fear- and possibly a broken bone or two from Mark’s handshake. An awkward elevator ride and brief tour ended at Greg’s cubicle. It was a quad- four workspaces sharing a common center. Two corners were occupied, and Mark positioned Greg at the third.

“You’ll be supporting an internal application called PPP- taking over for Lenny, here.” Mark pointed toward one of the other cube-dwellers. “It already works, you just need to keep it that way. Learn the ropes here, and we’ll get you something newer and more interesting real soon. Lenny! Give Greg the PPP source code and backlog.”

61 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-25

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