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Well, I was going to try to do some fun, year-end post. But, with server troubles and aparantly no one working today, I figured I'll just share with you code left behind for Rob to maintain from a (you guessed it) highly-paid consultant.
The term "Magic Numbers" generally refers to numeric constants embedded in code that serve an essential but often difficult to determine purpose. Avoiding code like "if (table.columns(8).row(12) = 772) ..." is generally regarded as a best practice. But I'm not sure Matt's colleague, however, grasped that concept too well ...
Ultra-complex query execuation plans can be expected (and are quite the norm) in data-warehouse querying systems. But, this isn't example what you should expect to see in a production system ... (zoomed out to the max) ...
James Ingram shares one of his most impressive experiences ...
I had some legacy code originally written by a highly paid consultant. Among his innovations were that all his "Cancel" buttons were on the left, and all his "OK" buttons on the right; the opposite of the MS standard (and every app I've ever seen). The users had gotten used to it, so we couldn't change that.
According to the hit counters, 2/3 of the regular visitors to the site are still on vacation. So for us unfortunate few stuck at work, here is one of my favorite, yet least-viewed posts from a while back.
I hereby issue a challenge for you to justify the actions of Programmer X, as described by Jakeypoo:
Looks like we're back up and running. Seems like it was a transformer that blew, causing total power outage of the data center (which would explain their lack of phone support). Ah well.
So here goes post #12. Have a happy Festi-kwanz-ukah-mas!
Holy fricken' time-for-a-new-host! Jeeze ... the idea with going dedicated was to improve reliability ... but the site has been down since this morning. So if anyone knows of a good data center offering a package for around $150/month who will install Small Business Server, please let me know.
With that aside ... here is a look at Post #4 ...
With the year-end holidays and vacations, I've noticed there's a lot less blog reading going on. In that spirit, I'm thinking of posting some repeats that most of you (according to the stats, atleast) have not seen before. So without further ado, here is post #5:
As a certified Überprogrammer, I get quite annoyed with inexperienced maintenance programmers looking at my code and asking questions that any coder with a clue would instinctually know. Take for example this function:
Brad has actually discovered what appears to be the second most useless Java class written. Yes, it's almost impossible to follow and replaceable with a single line ... but dang ... it's just too hard to top the ObjectWrapper.
Ben Murphy found a developer who liked to cover all of his bases ... then cover the dug-out ... then the bench. If you think this method to convert input (from 33 to 0.33) is a bit superflous, you should see data validation.
A little while back, we got to see how fun recursive sorting algorithms cam be. But that's not the only place where we can have funn + funn-1. How about ... exception handling in java!
Maybe I'm shooting at an unfair target here, but Dave sent in this from Crystal Reports. Now if you think BASIC code can get ugly ... well, just take a look at this ...
if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'SOUTH AFRICA' then "Visitors to " + 'South Africa' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'PUERTO RICO' then "Visitors to " + 'Puerto Rico' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'UNITED ARAB EMIRATES' then "Visitors to " + 'United Arab Emirates' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'CAYMAN ISLANDS' then "Visitors to " + 'Cayman Islands' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'HONG KONG' then "Visitors to " + 'Hong Kong' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'RUSSIA FED EUROPE' then "Visitors to " + 'Russia Fed Europe' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'CZECH REPUBLIC' then "Visitors to " + 'Czech Republic' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'COSTA RICA' then "Visitors to " + 'Costa Rica' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'NEW ZEALAND' then "Visitors to " + 'New Zealand' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA' then "Visitors to " + 'Antigua and Barbuda' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else if {crGetPassportDetails;1.Name} = 'ST LUCIA' then "Visitors to " + 'St Lucia' + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
else "Visitors to " + Mid ({crGetPassportDetails;1.Name},1,1 ) + LowerCase(mid({crGetPassportDetails;1.Name},2,length({crGetPassportDetails;1.Name}))) + " require a full passport which must be valid for " + {@MinMonths} + " months after departure from this country."
... just as Thomas Magle Brodersen found in some production code.
Being as uncultured as I am, I'm completely to come up with some witty way to tie-in today's post with the Charles Dickens' classic. To my credit though, I did make it through the ultra-condensed version and I watched LOTR:The Two Towers (which I'm sure is a pretty similar story).
Anyway ... Ryan discovered, something we can definately file under "least usefull comments" ...
I most of us felt (or, will feel) let down after getting our first job of college. Going from the world of "assume there is an unlimited budget, now ..." to "change the text of the error message generated by ..." makes you feel as if your hard-earned Computer Science degree was as useful as Mordar, your almost-equally hard-earned level 28 half-elf wizard. Of course, this is nothing compared to what Michael Jervis must have felt ...
Shortly after graduating, I started with a small web shop that had just been acquired by a big Tin shifter to start up their services offering. My new boss had written his own ASP editor that he wanted me to use in preference of any decent mature third party code editors, or visual Interdev. Last time I looked (a few years back) it was still available, shame it appears to have disappeared. It was a true master piece of an editor. It was impossible to indent code, as the TAB key in the main text area (no syntax highlighting of course) was forcibly bound to change control focus. The choice of colour was "interesting" and it had many other amazing features. But that was just the start of my boss' genius.
Jeff Davis sent me this advertisement the other day, and I thought it'd be a perfect compliment to a post. But now every time I look at it, I keep seeing something new. So, here it is, your week-end post.
Without Option Strict Off, the compiler wouldn't even let you try to stuff three different return values into a boolean value, as Jeff Atwood's colleague likes to do ...
First, minor off-topic here, I'm thinking it'd be a fun idea to kind of expand on the site and community here and try to offer some other more general content in different feeds. I mean, programming can't possibly be the only thing that makes you ask WTF, right? For example, Tim Cartwright pointed me to this article ... and I made an interesting observation today when looking to buy phones on Amazon. Both elicited a similar response for me ... perhaps they will for you. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Submissions? Just send em along and I'll look to start up a new feed.
With that said, some of the commenters on Monday's URLEncoder blamed the language for allowing such an attrocity. I think after seeing Bob Gateaux's discovery from a C++ project he inherited, we can put the language-is-to-blame theory to rest. Note the elite use of hexidecimal.
In fact, this VB Code is so good, that it's bad (which is how it ended up here, afterall). You see, James' colleague understood that hard coding things is bad. He even resisted coding "0", even though it is only used once, and even though it is used a few lines below the constant ... now that's good.
What better way to give unsuspecting developers a challenge than to redefine some straightforward numeric constants to completely arbitrary values? How about hiding the #defines in different header files and randomly flipping between the using the constant (CTR_DTE_DATA_RATE_300) and its value (5) throughout the code. Don't you wish you were Carl Kritzinger?
I don't think today's post is an example of anyone's egregious incompetence, but it still made me say you-know-what. Now, as I mentioned before, I think IntellSense is the greatest productivity gain since the mouse. But, I'm not sure it's helping Eric Nesser so much ...
The .NET developers out there have likely heard that using a StringBuilder is a much better practice than string concatenation. Something about strings being immutable and creating new strings in memory for every concatenation. But, I'm not sure that this (as found by Andrey Shchekin) is what they had in mind ...
Nov 04
