The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Office Politics

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-24

"Math is hard, especially timely math," explains The Beast in Black.

14 comments - Last comment @ 15:21

Stripped of Magic

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-23

A Representative Line is a short snippet that makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code." A CodeSOD is a longer snippet, which also frequently makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code," but also is bad in ways that require you to look at the relationship between the lines in the code.

I bring that up, because today's code sample is a long section, but really, it's just a collection of representative lines. Each line in this just makes me die a little on the inside.

15 comments - Last comment @ 12:28

The 5-Digit Session Identifier

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-22

Sawyer was talking with a co-worker about how their unique session IDs got created. The concern was that they were only five characters long, which meant there could easily be collisions.

They started by looking at the random number generation function.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-23

Ticking Toks and Expertise

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2025-01-21

Knowing the kinds of readers we have here, I strongly suspect that if you drew a Venn diagram of "TDWTF Readers" and "TikTok Users" those circles wouldn't overlap at all. But TikTok is in the news, and because my partner uses TikTok, I'm getting second hand smoke of all of this, I think there's some interesting things to talk about here.

If you've been avoiding this news, good for you. For a long recap, Ars can bring up up to date.. But as a quick recap: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is based in China, and subject to Chinese laws. TikTok, like every other social media company, is basically spyware, tracking your behavior to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Over the past few years, all three branches of the US government have decided that the "Chinese ownership" is the problem here (not so much the spying), and passed a law to ban it unless a US company buys it. The whole thing has turned into an idiotic political football, with Biden saying that his waning days of the Presidency wouldn't enforce the ban anyway, and then the whole thing turns into a Trumpist political football as the incoming President is playing Calvinball and making decrees that he did not (at the time) have any authority to make in the first place.

39 comments - Last comment @ 11:45

Consultant Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-20

Janet's company had a glut of work, and thus didn't have the staffing required to do it all. It didn't make sense to hire on any new full-time employees, so they went the route of bringing on a few highly paid consultants, specifically ones who specialized in one specific problem: talking to a piece of hardware purchased from a vendor.

The hardware in question was a scientific which communicated over a serial line. This device provided a lot of data that represented decimal values, but that data was not encoded as an IEEE float. Instead, they used two integers- one for the data, and one representing the number of decimal places.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-21

Secret Horror

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-17

Casanova Matt swings for the fences. "OKCupid (they don't capitalize the K, but I do, for propriety) must have migrated their match questions through Excel during a recent site revamp. These answers should obviously be 1-2 and 3-4, but maybe I could have 2 with Jan and 4 with Margaret (Mar to friends)."

21 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-22

Halfway to a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-16

Roger took on a contract to fix up a PHP website. During the negotiations, he asked some questions about the design, like, "Is it object-oriented or more procedural?" "No, it's PHP," said the developer.

Which about sums it up, I suppose. Have some date handling code:

35 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-21

Brushing Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-15

Keige inherited some code which seems to be part of a drawing application. It can load brush textures from image files- at least, sometimes it can.

static public Brush GetImageBrush(string serviceCode, string imageName, string language)
{
	Brush BorderChannelGroupBrush;
	BitmapImage image = null;

	int point = imageName.LastIndexOf('.');
	string languageImagename = imageName.Substring(0, point) + "-" + language + imageName.Substring(point);

	try
	{
		image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, languageImagename);
	}
	catch { }

	if (image == null)
	{
		try
		{
			image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, imageName);
		}
		catch { }
	}

	if (image != null)
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = new ImageBrush(image);
	}
	else
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = Brushes.White;
	}
	return BorderChannelGroupBrush;
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-20

The Whole Thing

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-01-14

David was integrating a new extension into their ecommerce solution, and found this un-representative line:

$this->model_sale_manageorder->exportOrder(substr($selectid,0,strlen($selectid)-1));

25 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-21

Irritants Make Perls

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-13

Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.

It didn't go great.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-22

Not Impossible

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-10

Someone online said we run a Mickey Mouse outfit. Angered beyond words, we consulted [email protected] and they threatened to find that guy and sue him. So to anyone else who thinks this column is Goofy, you should know that the world's definitive authorities insist that it absolutely is not.

But these guys? This website actually is kind of goofy, according to resolutioner Adam R. who crowed "Someone forgot to localize some text for the new year!"

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-13

Crossly Joined

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-09

Antonio's team hired some very expensive contractors and consultants to help them build a Java based application. These contractors were very demure, very mindful, about how using ORMs could kill performance.

So they implemented a tool that would let them know any time the Hibernate query generator attempted to perform a cross join.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-14

My Identification

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-08

Bejamin's team needed to generate a unique session ID value that can't easily be guessed. The traditional way of doing this would be to generate cryptographically secure random bytes. Most languages, including PHP, have a solution for doing that.

But you could also do this:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-14

Generate JSON

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2025-01-07

Today's anonymous submission is a delightfully simple line of JavaScript which really is an archetype of a representative line.

$json = "{";

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-10

Mr Number

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-06

Ted's company hired a contract team to build an application. The budget eventually ran out without a finished application, so the code the contract team had produced was handed off to Ted's team to finish.

This is an example of the Ruby code Ted inherited:

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-07

Monkeys

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-03

Happy 2025 to all our readers. I can already tell this year's columns are going to be filled with my (least) favorite form of WTF, the impossible endless gauntlet of flaming password hurdles to jump over or crawl under. Please comment if you know why this week's column has this title and why it doesn't have the title Swordfish.

Peter G. starts off our new year of password maladies with a complaint that is almost poetic.
"Between desire and reality.
Between fact and breakfast.
Between 8 and -6:00.
Madness lies, lies, lies..."

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-19

intint

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-02

Ash's company outsourced to an offshore vendor.

This is an example of what they got back:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-08

Y2K25

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2025-01-01

Twenty five years ago today, the world breathed a collective sight of relief when nothing particularly interesting happened. Many days begin with not much interesting happening, but January 1st, 2000 was notable for not being the end of the world.

I'm of course discussing the infamous Y2K bug. We all know the story: many legacy systems were storing dates with two digits- 80 not 1980, and thus were going to fail dramatically when handling 00- is that 1900 or 2000?

40 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-10

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