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cablito sends in a snippet from his colleague's ultra-fast, multi-tasking-friendly masterpiece that reverently obeys the TTC rule. That's Third Time is the Charm for those who aren't intimately familiar with the Universal Law stating “If at first you don't succeed ... don't worry, because you sure as hell will on the third try!“
XML is an absolutely wonderful innovation. It allows us to easily describe and share just about any data immaginable. Of course, there's always gotta be someone (as Tim points out) who has to go and ... well ... see for yourself ...
Dave Milner contributes this story to TheDailyWTF:
With the advances in .NET, everyone is using delegates as event handler / listeners.
Matt Kucera sends some code from what appears to be a POP3 Web client. While I sort-of understand the concept behind abstracting the most obvious names (nothing new here, after all), I question if the author could have thought of a better name for strMsgICN75964 ...
Jason Mauss doesn't not unenlighten none of us with this fun story:
When I first started with a company I used to work for - I was left with the job of slogging through a bunch of code for some legacy VB4 application they wanted to upgrade to VB.NET. While the logic of the app wasn't too difficult to translate, it was snippets of code like this that left me wondering who they hired to write the original code.
This isn't the first time that we've been introduced to abstracting the ever-changing symbols we use (such as the @ or < symbols) into easier to change, constant variables. But, this snippet of code from Sergio Pereira really got me thinking.
[simplified it to protect the innocent]
SQL XML? Pssh, been there, done that.
SQL HTML? Now you're talking! Who needs an N-Tier architecture when you just generate your entire website in Stored Procedures? It's real easy and efficient, as Nicolai A. Kollner's colleague demonstrates:
Ray Suker sends in a function from a system he inherited from the Guru who designed it before him:
Note: CUSTOMER_1-4 edited to protect the innocent
Normally, if an individual's gender is male, I would just assume that person prefers being referred to as a “he“ or “him.“ For females, I think they feel that “her“ is an appropriate adjective to describe their personal property. In the instances where this isn't the case, a database table that Brian Desmond came across is prepared to handle it:
Here's a short ditty from Brian Peddle, who reminds us that we all need to be very serious about political correctness:
Many years ago I worked in tech support. We supported a server based product. While working there we had a woman tech support person, from Russia I believe. She wasn't very good and eventually was let go. During her exit interview she said that she was glad to be fired because she was sick of hearing about how big the men's penises were.
Confused by this the manager called in the senior support person and asked her if she had ever heard the guys talking about their penis size. She said never. As she walked by her desk she heard one of the support people say, "He is hung." She went back to the manager and said, "They are talking about the servers, not their penises."
I really appreciate descriptive function names. They sure make maintenance easier. And stub-functions are also great for cases when you know you'll expand how the system works later on. Leave it to Joseph Anderson to find out exactly what happens when you bring these two concepts together ...
Today's story is a Boss story (my favorite type), and is from Bernhard Hofmann himself:
Our boss, who has recently changed his title to CTO (Chief Technology Officer), presents us with our own daily WTF. We were privy to some of his more notable drivel earlier today. My repeated thoughts of WTF made me think that I really need to share this with people who might appreciate it.
My email seems to be down for now, so today's “good practice“ example comes from yours truly. A software tester I work with was pretty excited that he was able to hack a web-based calendar application built for a college. The system was in production for a while, and he was supposed to test a minor tweak made to it. Now, I'm not going to tell you how he gained administrator privileges, but I will present the URL of the system and see if you can figure it out:
Since BrainBench.com is giving away free access to their tests, I thought I'd take a stab* at one. They randomize the order of the answers just incase you remembered that The number of files with a manifest in a multi-file assembly is “D“. Now, this gets particularly tricky, as Phil Scott shows from an online test he took, when the answers are letters themselves ...
Jason Hucks shares an anecdote that reminds us that duct tape can, in fact, be used for anything ...
I was pretty stoked to see this submission from Stian Søiland. We've all seen developers do all sorts of crazy things, from completely avoiding regular expressions to not bothering to use INNER JOINs or even basic WHERE clauses. But this?!? I think takes the cake ... or at least comes pretty close ...
When asked to fix an application here at NTNU that lets students create their own mailinglists, I stumbled over this python script that tries to synchronize database entries with Mailman.
I believe that VisualStudio.NET is by far the best development tool ever and Intellisense is the greatest productivity gain since the mouse. With that said, I have a slight feeling that pop-up help for the rfind() method of the Standard Template Library's basic_string class could be just a bit more helpful. Of course, I'm not a C++ fellow, but it does seem just a touch vague. Reminds me why I stay away from it ...
Andrew Cain gives us the opportunity to peek at a remarkably bad UI from a behind-the-scenes perspective. While I can't say I've actually seen the web page for this code, I have a very strong feeling that we may in fact be looking at a web version of FileMatrix. In addition to the concept of “interface design simplicity,“ the author seems completely forgotten about LOOP constructs to help with the 30+ grids ...
I've been working quite a bit XML lately, so this submission from Simon naturally piqued my interest. We're told that this datastructure is a pivotal part of a system and the developer behind it is adamant against using a more normalized structure.
Addy Santo sends in a interesting example of portability ...
A friend of mine started a gig as a solutions architect on a classic "project from hell". Since then he has spent 90% of his time cat-herding a clueless team of developers. Among the tidbits he shared with me, this one stood out especially:
Marc Holmes sent in a code snippet that explores a whole new programming paradigm using CASE statements and FOR loops ...
Jun 04
