The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Outages, Prices, and Catastrophe

by Remy Porter in Error'd on 2021-10-22

Shaun F noticed an outage.

cloudflare's website demonstrating a cloudflare outage.

"Maybe," Shaun writes, "they should use the Cloudflare Always Online service."

23 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-24

Performance Tuning for Exabyte Queries

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-10-21

While NoSQL databases have definitely made their mark and have an important role in applications, there's also still a place for RDBMSes. The key advantage of an RDBMS is that, with a well normalized schema, any arbitrary query is possible, and instead of optimizing the query, you optimize the database itself to ensure you hit your performance goals- indexes, statistics, materialized views, etc..

The reality, of course, is wildly different. While the execution plan used by the database shouldn't be dependent upon how we write the query, it frequently is, managing statistics and indexes is surprisingly hard, and when performance problems crop up, without the right monitoring, it can be difficult to track down exactly which query is causing the problem.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-24

A Ritual Approach

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-20

Frequent contributor Russell F stumbled across this block, which illustrates an impressive ability to make a wide variety of bad choices. It is written in C#, but one has the sense that the developer didn't really understand C#. Or, honestly, programming.

if (row["Appointment_Num"].ToString() == row["Appointment_Num"].ToString())
{
    bool b1 = String.IsNullOrEmpty(results.messages[0].error_text);
    if (b1 == true)
    {
        row["Message_Id"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_id}");
        row["message_count"] = ($"{results.message_count[0] }");
        row["message_cost"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_price }");
        row["error_text"] = ($"{results.messages[0].error_text }");
        row["network"] = ($"{results.messages[0].network }");
        row["to"] = ($"{results.messages[0].to }");
        row["status"] = ($"{results.messages[0].status }");
        row["communicationtype_num"] = ($"1");
        row["Sent_Date"] = (String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss}", DateTime.Now));
        row["Sent_Message"] = row["Sent_Message"].ToString();
    }

    if (b1 == false)
    {
        row["Message_Id"] = "0000000000000000";
        row["message_count"] = ($"{results.message_count[0] }");
        row["message_cost"] = ($"{results.messages[0].message_price }");
        row["error_text"] = ($"{results.messages[0].error_text }");
        row["network"] = ($"{results.messages[0].network }");
        row["to"] = ($"{results.messages[0].to }");
        row["status"] = ($"{results.messages[0].status }");
        row["communicationtype_num"] = ($"1");
        row["Sent_Date"] = (String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss}", DateTime.Now));
        row["Sent_Message"] = row["Sent_Message"].ToString();
    }
}

22 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-22

Low (Quality) Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-19

Like the tides, the popularity of low-code development environments comes in ebbs and flows. With each cycle, the landscape changes, old tools going away and new tools washing up on shore. One one hand, democratizing access to technology is good, on the other, these tools inevitably fail to actually do that. Instead, we get mission critical developed by people who don't understand how to develop, and are thus fragile, and released on platforms that are almost certainly going to be on legacy support in the next cycle.

I don't want to imply that low-code tools are automatically bad, or insult non-developers who want to give developing in a low-code environment a shot, though. Especially when professional developers can't really do any better.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

An Hourly Rate

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-18

When someone mentioned to Abraham, "Our product has an auto-sync feature that fires every hour," Abraham wasn't surprised. He was new to the team, didn't know the code well, but an auto-sync back to the server sounded reasonable.

The approach, however, left something to be desired.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

Counting to One

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-10-15

Two of today's ticklers require a little explanation, while the others require little.

Kicking things off this week, an anonymous reporter wants to keep their password secure by not divulging their identity. It won't work, that's exactly the same as my Twitch password. "Twitch seems to be split between thinking whether my KeePass password is strong or not," they wrote. Explanation: The red translates to "This password is too easy to guess", while the green 'Stark' translates as "you've chosen a very good password indeed."

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

Joining the Rest of Us

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-14

Using built-in methods is good and normal, but it's certainly boring. When someone, for example, has a list of tags in an array, and calls string.Join(" ", tags), I don't really learn anything about the programmer as a person. There's no relationship or connection, no deeper understanding of them.

Which, let's be honest, is a good thing when it comes to delivering good software. But watching people reinvent built in methods is a fun way to see how their brain works. Fun for me, because I don't work with them, probably less fun for Mike, who inherited this C# code.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

Supporting Standards

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-13

Starting in the late 2000s, smartphones and tablets took off, and for a lot of people, they constituted a full replacement for a computer. By the time the iPad and Microsoft Surface took off, every pointy-haired-boss wanted to bring a tablet into their meetings, and do as much work as possible on that tablet.

Well, nearly every PHB. Lutz worked for a company where management was absolutely convinced that tablets, smartphones, and frankly, anything smaller than the cheapest Dell laptop with the chunkiest plastic case was nothing more than a toy. It was part of the entire management culture, led by the CEO, Barry. When one of Lutz's co-workers was careless enough to mention in passing an article they'd read on mobile-first development, Barry scowled and said "We are a professional software company that develops professional business software."

33 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-18

Like a Tree, and…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-12

Duncan B was contracting with a company, and the contract had, up to this point, gone extremely well. The last task Duncan needed to spec out was incorporating employee leave/absences into the monthly timesheets.

"Hey, can I get some test data?" he asked the payroll system administrators.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-13

Price Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-11

Russell F has an object that needs to display prices. Notably, this view object only ever displays a price, it never does arithmetic on it. Specifically, it displays the prices for tires, which adds a notable challenge to the application: not every car uses the same tires on the front and rear axles. This is known as a "staggered fitment", and in those cases the price for the front tires and the rear tires will be different.

The C# method which handles some of this display takes the price of the front tires and displays it quite simply:

34 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-18

Money for Nothin'

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-10-08

... and gigs for free.

"Apple is magical," rhapsodizes music-lover Daniel W.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-16

Making Newlines

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-07

I recently started a new C++ project. As it's fairly small and has few dependencies, I made a very conscious choice to just write a shell script to handle compilation. Yes, a Makefile would be "better", but it also adds a lot of complexity my project doesn't need, when I can have essentially a one-line build command. Still, my code has suddenly discovered the need for a second target, and I'll probably migrate to Makefiles- it's easier to add complexity when I need it.

Kai's organization transitioned from the small shell-scripts approach to builds to using Makefiles about a year ago. Kai wasn't involved in that initial process, but has since needed to make some modifications to the Makefiles. In this case, there's a separate Makefile for each one of their hundreds of microservices.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-08

Eff Up Like It's Your Job

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2021-10-06

This past Monday, Facebook experienced an outage which lasted almost six hours. This had rattle-on effects. Facebook's pile of services all failed, from the core application to WhatsApp to Oculus. Many other services use Facebook for authentication, so people lost access to those (which highlights some rather horrifying dependencies on Facebook's infrastructure). DNS servers were also strained as users and applications kept trying to find Facebook, and kept failing.

CloudFlare has more information about what went wrong, but at its core: Facebook's network stopped advertising the routes to its DNS servers. The underlying cause of that may have been a bug in their Border Gateway Protocol automation system:

47 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-10

Unzipped

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-10-05

When you promise to deliver a certain level of service, you need to live up to that promise. When your system is critical to your customers, there are penalties for failing to live up to that standard. For the mission-critical application Rich D supports, that penalty is $10,000 a minute for any outages.

Now, one might think that such a mission critical system has a focus on testing, code quality, and stability. You probably don't think that, but someone might expect that.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-07

Totally Up To Date

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2021-10-04

The year was 2015. Erik was working for LibCo, a company that offered management software for public libraries. The software managed inventory, customer tracking, fine calculations, and everything else the library needed to keep track of their books. This included, of course, a huge database with all book titles known to the entire library system.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-16

Persnickety Sticklers Redux

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2021-10-01

This week's installation of Error'd includes a few submissions which honestly don't seem all that WTFy. In particular, this first one from the unsurnamed Steve. I've included it solely so I can pedantically proclaim "24 is not between 1 and 24!" There is still a wtf here though. What is with this error message?

Insufficiently pedantic Steve humorlessly grumbles "Configuring data pruning on our Mirth Integration Engine. Mirth can do many things, just can't count up to 24."

13 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-16

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