The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Context for Logging

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-17

When logging in Java, especially frameworks like Spring, making sure the logging statement has access to the full context of the operation in flight is important. Instead of spamming piles of logging statements in your business logic, you can use a “mapped diagnostic context” to cache useful bits of information during an operation, such that any logging statement can access it.

One of the tools for this is the “Mapped Data Context”, MDC. Essentially, it’s very much like a great big hash map that happens to be thread-local and is meant to be used by the logging framework. It’s a global-ish variable, but without the worst side effects of being global.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-18

The Replacements

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-16

Nobody wants to have a Bobby Tables moment in their database. So we need to to sanitize our inputs. Ted C noticed a bunch of stored procedures which contained lines like this:

  @scrubbed = fn_ScrubInput(fn_ScrubInput(@input))

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-17

Cast Away

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-15

The accountants at Gary's company had a problem: sometimes, when they wanted to check the price to ship a carton of product, that price was zero. No one had, as of yet, actually shipped product for free, but they needed to understand why certain cartons were showing up as having zero cost.

The table which tracks this, CartonFee, has three fields: ID, Carton, and Cost. Carton names are unique, and things like 12x3x6, or Box1, or even Large box. So, given a carton name, it should be pretty easy to update the cost, yes? The stored procedure which does this, spQuickBooks_UpdateCartonCost should be pretty simple.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-18

I See What Happened

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-14

Graham picked up a ticket regarding their password system. It seemed that several users had tried to put in a perfectly valid password, according to the rules, but it was rejected.

Graham's first step was to attempt to replicate on his own, but couldn't do it. So he followed up with one of the end users, and got them to reveal the password they had tried to use. That allowed him to trigger the bug, so he dug into the debugger to find the root cause.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-19

Parse, Parse Again

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-10

Sometimes, a block of terrible code exists for a good reason. Usually, it exists because someone was lazy or incompetent, which while not a good reason, at least makes sense. Sometimes, it exists for a stupid reason.

Janet’s company recently bought another company, and now the new company had to be integrated into their IT operations. One of the little, tiny, minuscule known-issues in the new company’s system was that their logging was mis-configured. Instead of putting a new-line after each logging message, it put only a single space.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-18

Compiled Correctly

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-08

Properly used, version history can easily help you track down and identify the source of a bug. Improperly used, it still can. As previously established, the chief architect Dana works with has some issues with source control.

Dana works on a large, complex embedded system. “Suddenly”, her team started to spot huge piles of memory corruption problems. Something was misbehaving, but it was hard to see exactly what.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-11

Generically Bad

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-07

The first two major releases of the .NET Framework, 1.0 and 1.1 were… not good. It's so long ago now that they're easily forgotten, but it's important to remember that a lot of core language features weren't in the framework until .NET 2.0.

Like generics. Generics haven't always been part of the language, but they've been in the language since 2006. The hope would be that, in the course of 13 years, developers would learn to use this feature.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-11

An Updated Version

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-02

Some folks were perplexed by the fact that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10. The urban legend is that so many old applications checked which version of Windows was running by doing something like version.startsWith("Windows 9") to see if they were on 95 or 98, that Microsoft risked breaking otherwise working code if they released Windows 9.

But gone are those days of doing string munging to check which version of an OS we’re running on. We’ve got much better ways to check what features and functionality are available without having to parse strings out, right?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-15

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