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This week, Harry Altman teaches us how to make sure that autoautomobiles don't crash into your house. It's not immediately obvious, and the answer to the puzzle borders on philosophical.
But first, an anonymous reader wrote "I found this in a practice exam for an Azure Certification, !(Azure Service Bus) story." I believe him.
The power of SQL is that you describe to the database what you want, and the database figures out how to execute that query as efficiently as possible. This means that, at least in theory, you optimize your database access not by changing the query, but by tuning the database to run that query efficiently.
In practice, every database has quirks, and frequently you do tune the query a bit, to trick the optimizer into running it efficiently. And sometimes, you have to modify the query because people are dumb.
Melissa was trying to figure out why an old application wasn't writing out a data file when commanded to do so. It was an implemented feature, it should work, it had worked at one point- but it wasn't working now.
She traced through the C code and found this:
Mr. TA inherited some C# code that communicates with a humidity and a temperature sensor. Each sensor logs a series of datapoints as they run, and can provide them as an array of data points.
This leads to this code:
Laurie has been supporting an internal application for a few years. The code is a mess, and while she wasn't at the company for the early stages of development, tales are told about it- it was chaotic, it was badly estimated, it was wildly over budget, the latter phases were a crunch where ten developers were shoved onto the project at the last second.
Today, it works- mostly. But it provides plenty of support tickets for Laurie, and demonstrates some WTFs.
Winter is coming to New Mexico this year with a vengeance. It should be fine if you just stay out of the wind.
First, to get this out of the way, never let it be said that we at TDWTF won't take our own lumps. The Beast in Black has a beef with our grammar, and technically he is correct. "So Meta, Especially This Atrocity..."
In the cinematic classic They Live, the protagonist is a drifter named "Nada"- nothing. Zizek derives much meaning from this, which is an entertaining rant if nothing else.
But Nada appears in other places, like this code found by JMM.
Dom works on a codebase which has fallen victim to Greenspun's Tenth Rule. Yes, they've implemented a user customization system that is an "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Said Lisp implementation started its life as a Java backend, but over the years got ported into Flash apps, iOS, and most recently the JavaScript front end.