The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

All Locked Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-07-07

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

10 comments - Last comment @ 04:01

Better Nate Than Lever

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-07-04

Happy Friday. For those of us in America, today is a political holiday. But let's avoid politics for the moment. Here's a few more wtfs.

"Error messages are hard," sums Ben Holzman , mock-replying "Your new puzzle games are fun, LinkedIn, but your error messages need a little work…"

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-07

The Last Last Name

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-07-03

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.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-07

And Config

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-07-02

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>

15 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-04

It's Not Wrong to Say We're Equal

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-07-01

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!
	}
}

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-07

Recent Articles

All Locked Up

Better Nate Than Lever

The Last Last Name

And Config

It's Not Wrong to Say We're Equal