The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Abstract Test Case

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-19

A great many breakfast cereals promise some sort of health benefit. This brand is good for your heart, that brand has 11 essential vitamins and minerals. This one’s got bran! Just because there’s a promise of health benefits doesn’t mean they actually exist- most of these cereals are lightly fluffed sugar held together with a smidge of starch.

Object-oriented languages promise a lot of code-health benefits, and used properly, they can certainly deliver. In this somewhat tortured metaphor, the Lucky Charms marshmallow of OO features is Inheritance. It’s tasty, it’s easy to explain, but it’s not really good for your code. A little bit, here-and-there, from time-to-time is great. But some folks buy the three pound bag and that’s just not good for anybody.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-20

Too Salty

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-17

The first rule of building your own password storage mechanisms is don’t. Like most other highly-specialized wheels, you aren’t going to do as good a job as someone who specializes in it. It’s bad enough when you write your own date mangling code, but for security-critical features, like passwords or encryption, you’re begging for trouble.

Joni spotted some trouble: many of the users in the database had the same password hash. This, of course, should never happen- the password should be combined with a user-specific salt as part of the hashing, so that even if two users had the same password, they’d have different hashes.

28 comments - Last comment @ 12:21

RAM On Through

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2017-10-16

RAM types

The company Tomasz worked for launched a new device line with more RAM than the previous generation. This was supposed to put an end to the sort of memory shortages common to embedded systems. However, it wasn't long before they began hearing from clients whose systems crashed whenever they attempted to upgrade the accompanying software package.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-19

We Know How This Works

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-10

One of the selling points of a language like Java is that it comes with a rich standard library of useful classes. This allows developers to completely ignore those useful features, and instead reinvent the wheel badly. Once this novel square wheel has come off the assembly line, it becomes the defacto standard for the organization.

Take, for example, Caiwan’s office. They have a… special date-handling library.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-13

A Case of Bad Timing

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2017-10-09

Although I've retired from full time work, I still consult for lots of small mom-n-pop places. Mostly, it's little scripts to automate doing this and that. Sometimes, the boss' kid or nephew was asked to get ambitious and solve a problem. When the inevitable happens, they call me to bail them out.

For the most part, it's usually something like some file got moved/renamed/deleted. Sometimes, they got ambitious and attempted to write a batch file. This time, a college freshman, who claimed to be "good with computers", had written a program to control the little scripts and jobs in an automated fashion. Apparently, it was getting too complicated for him and they asked me if I could work with it.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-20

The Anty Pattern

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-04

An anti-pattern that shows up from time to time here is the old “our IDE’s build output is mapped to a network drive on the web server”, but “Drummer” shows us a novel new variation on that theme.

It all started when a co-worker asked them, “how do I change the compiler version?” The code was built using Ant, so “Drummer” opened the build file and searched through it for a javac element- the Ant command which runs the Java compiler.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-08

Dashboard Confessional

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-10-02

Three years ago, this XKCD comic captured a lot of the problems we have with gathering requirements:

27 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-16

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