The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Mutex.js

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-18

Just last week, I was teaching a group of back-end developers how to use Angular to develop front ends. One question that came up, which did suprise me a bit, was how to deal with race conditions and concurrency in JavaScript.

I’m glad they asked, because it’s a good question that never occurred to me. The JavaScript runtime, of course, is single-threaded. You might use Web Workers to get multiple threads, but they use an Actor model, so there’s no shared state, and thus no need for any sort of locking.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

string isValidArticle(string article)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-14

Anonymous sends us this little blob of code, which is mildly embarassing on its own:

    static StringBuilder vsb = new StringBuilder();
    internal static string IsValidUrl(string value)
    {
        if (value == null)
        {
            return "\"\"";
        }

        vsb.Length= 0;
        vsb.Append("@\"");

        for (int i=0; i<value.Length; i++)
        {
            if (value[i] == '\"')
                vsb.Append("\"\"");
            else
                vsb.Append(value[i]);
        }

        vsb.Append("\"");
        return vsb.ToString();
    }

36 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

You Absolutely Don't Need It

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2017-09-13

The progenitor of this story prefers to be called Mr. Syntax, perhaps because of the sins his boss committed in the name of attempting to program a spreadsheet-loader so generic that it could handle any potential spreadsheet with any data arranged in any conceivable format.

The boss had this idea that everything should be dynamic, even things that should be relatively straightforward to do, such as doing a web-originated bulk load of data from a spreadsheet into the database. Although only two such spreadsheet formats were in use, the boss wrote it to handle ANY spreadsheet. As you might imagine, this spawned mountains of uncommented and undocumented code to keep things generic. Sin was tasked with locating and fixing the cause of a NullPointerException that should simply never have occurred. There was no stack dump. There were no logs. It was up to Sin to seek out and destroy the problem.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Cases, Cases, Cases

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2017-09-12

Paul R. shows us a classic example of the sort of case statement that maybe, you know, never should've been implemented as a case statement:

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

A Bad Route

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-11

Ah, consumer products. Regardless of what the product in question is, therre’s a certain amount of “design” that goes into the device. Not design which might make the product more user-friendly, or useful, or in any way better. No, “design”, which means it looks nicer on the shelf at Target, or Best Buy, or has a better image on its Amazon listing. The manufacturer wants you to buy it, but they don’t really care if you use it.

This thinking extends to any software that may be on the device. This is obviously true if it’s your basic Internet of Garbage device, but it’s often true of something we depend on far more: consumer grade routers.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Never Bother the Customer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-07

Matthew H was given a pretty basic task: save some data as a blob. This task was made more complicated by their boss’s core philosophy, though.

Never. Bother. The. Customer..

44 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-19

Gotta Get 'Em All

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-09-05

LINQ brings functional programming and loads of syntactic sugar to .NET languages. It’s a nice feature, although as James points out, it helps if your fellow developers have even the slightest clue about what they’re doing.

// some validation checking
var retrieveDocIdList = this.storedDocumentManager.GetAllForClientNotRetrieved(client.Id).Select(x => x.Id.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)).ToList();

retrieveDocIdList.ForEach(id => {
    var storedDoc = this.storedDocumentManager.Get(int.Parse(id))
// do some other stuff with the doc
});

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-13

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