Dan was using a third-party database which provided a PHP API. At one point, Dan was running into an issue where he actually needed locks on the database. Fortunately for him, the vendor documentation told him that there was a method called obtainRowLock.

obtainRowLock($table, $where) - Attempt to lock a row, will escalate and lock the table if row locking is not supported, will escalate and lock the database if table locking is not supported; returns true on success, false on failure
$table - name of table to lock
$where - WHERE clause to define rows, ex: "WHERE id=52". If left empty, function will assume a table lock

Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but it was written by a cocaine addled Pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important.

Such is the code which Román sends us.

It's not unusual to store format templates in your application configuration files. I'd argue it's probably a good and wise thing to do. But Phillip inherited a C# application from a developer who "abandoned" it, and there were some choices in there.

<appSettings>
        <add key="xxxurl" value="[http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx/]http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx"/>
</appSettings>

Aaron was debugging some C# code, and while this wasn't the source of the bug, it annoyed him enough to send it to us.

protected override int DoCompare(Item item1, Item item2)
{
	try
	{
		DateTime thisDate = ((DateField)item1.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime;
		DateTime thatDate = ((DateField)item2.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime;

		return thatDate.CompareTo(thisDate);
	}
	catch (Exception)
	{
		return 0; // Sorry, ran out of budget!
	}
}

In ancient times, Rob's employer didn't have its own computer; it rented time on a mid-range computer and ran all its jobs using batch processing in COBOL. And in those ancient times, these stone tools were just fine.

But computing got more and more important, and the costs for renting time kept going up and up, so they eventually bought their own AS/400. And that meant someone needed to migrate all of their COBOL to RPG. And management knew what you do for those kinds of conversions: higher a Highly Paid Consultant.