The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Time Wounds All Heels

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-08-07

Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh.

Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an email from OnePlus this morning letting me know they have updated the planned delivery date for my order to Yesterday. I guess the delivery driver is going to time travel to get there on time since it still hasn't arrived. "

9 comments - Last comment @ 17:09

A More Civilized Age

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-06

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

20 comments - Last comment @ 16:54

Connection State

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-05

Frederick A sends us a bit of null checking code, and offers us a better solution.

class ConferenceService
{
	/// <summary>
	/// Checks if conference is active
	/// </summary>
	public bool IsCalling()
	{
		try
		{
			return m_ConnectionService.Core.State.IsWebRTCConnected;
		}
		catch
		{
			return false;
		}
	}
}

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-06

Always Take the Option

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-04

Frequent submitter Capybara James sends us this simple snippet, which highlights that even when you have the lovely convenience of Optional types, you can use them wrong.

if (StringUtils.hasLength(dto.getAssetModelUUID())
		// Other conditions
		) {
	return Optional.ofNullable(dto);
}

6 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-06

Lose Some Padding

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-03

Flat-file style databases were designed to fit the constraints of the systems they were running on. You specify your schema in terms of "how many characters in a file we use to store this data", meaning something like this: JOHN SMITH 12343rd StAnytown PA12345 is read in my knowing that the first name field is 8 characters wide, the last name field is 8 characters wide, the street number is 4 digits, and so on.

It's also a terrible schema, and woe to anyone with a long name. But many a mainframe had a similar schema.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-04

I Believe In Lingonberries

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-07-31

I've never been a huge fan of their furniture but I will happily demolish a plate of meatballs.

Jan agrees "My loyalty to this Swedish megastore is immeasurable."

10 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-05

Negative Days

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-07-30

Killian Brendel was looking through the .NET source code, and found this comment on the TimeSpan struct.

    // TimeSpan represents a duration of time.  A TimeSpan can be negative
    // or positive.
    //
    // TimeSpan is internally represented as a number of milliseconds.  While
    // this maps well into units of time such as hours and days, any
    // periods longer than that aren't representable in a nice fashion.
    // For instance, a month can be between 28 and 31 days, while a year
    // can contain 365 or 364 days.  A decade can have between 1 and 3 leapyears,
    // depending on when you map the TimeSpan into the calendar.  This is why
    // we do not provide Years() or Months().

32 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-06

Something Wonderful

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-07-29

Today, we look at a "representative comment" from Mark W. This particular comment appears on a function:

/// <summary>
/// Does something wonderful.
/// </summary>

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-05