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"The HP Windows 7 installer software that came with my shiny new HP is somewhat quirky, and most of the time ends up with this 'FBI error'," writes Peter, "while I fail to see why FBI error should be my problem (as I reside in European country, where FBI has no jurisdiction), I would like to help it anyway, just to get it over with the installation. But I simply don't know how to 'Restart The Order'."
The phone rang. Jason stared at it for a long moment before answering. He held the handset away from his ear, as if it might leak something vile on him.
"DocGen is crashing," the caller complained. "And I've got 1,500 mailings that have to get out before the 6PM post."
When people think about "vestigial" organs, they think that we're toting around these useless lumps of flesh that just take up space in our bodies. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course- vestigial organs are organs whose original function has become redundant or superfluous, but generally have adopted some sort of secondary function. Our appendix does nothing to help us digest (its original purpose), but it does some tasks for our immune system and occasionally explodes and kills us.
So it is with our software. As any project evolves, sometimes code becomes vestigial, serving only some minor function and occasionally exploding. Randy discovered this block of code when he was tracing through a production issue.
Lennart wasn't quite out of college yet. He still had a semester to go after his co-op job, and he had used everything he'd learned from his Career Integration course to land a job with a respectably-sized, multi-national corporation. The position was end-user support for the company's Oracle installs. It wasn't an ideal position, especially considering some sentiments he agreed with-- but given the dry job market, he couldn't complain.
On his first day, he was given a desk, and a dust-coughing beige box. It was just like a computer, only slower. He spent the better part of the morning uninstalling a plethora of memory-hoggers. That, and rebooting. So much rebooting. Each uninstall brought him one logarithmic step closer to a usable computer.
Consider the following requirement. A Period can have anywhere from zero to forty eight Activities (though most will have only three) and each Activity within a Period should have a unique, non-sequential, two-digit identifier (e.g. 02, 41, 99).
Now consider how you might implement the code that generates a new identifier. Go ahead, think about it. I'll wait.
"I was working on cleaning up some old code from a system I inherited," writes Anthony Mattas, "the system is an old ASP.NET application that has been around for a while, but won’t be replaced because it generates the staff meeting template for our CEOs weekly leadership meeting."
"The app itself had a lot of redundancy since my company didn’t have a good version control solution or strategy at that time. There was duplicate stored procedures, tables, and pages in the application (this was the old developers' method of version control). Along the way I found this stored procedure:"
"And this is Colossus," Eric said with a dramatic sweep of his hand.
It was an impressive sight. The PDP-11/70 was a beast of a machine: one megabyte of memory, up to 63 concurrent jobs, and a control panel straight out of straight out of Star Trek.
It’s a generally accepted practice that passwords should be masked when being displayed to users. In addition to preventing over-the-shoulder password snooping, displaying “*****” instead of the actual password gives users a sense of security that somehow, through the magical wizardly of computers, their password is secure. Whether that’s worth the usability hassle, however, is certainly up for debate.
Adam’s colleagues take this practice very seriously, and have gone so far as to mask it from themselves. Their application is a fairly standard three-tier system – database, middle-tier objects, and user interface – and the password masking occurs smack-dab in the middle.
The list of things the Canadian government's IT group didn't like to see was a long list. High up on that list was "thirty-five contract developers sitting idle around a box of Tim Hortons donuts and racking up billable hours because they couldn't do any development with the DEV database out of commission".
A fantastic way to spend free time, if you can get it. It fell to Jody, junior DBA, to put an end to this. Before he even had time to grab coffee, he was investigating, "Error 04002, 'Unable to open file'" A quick check against the vendor's documentation gave him a few options: the datafile wasn't there, the drive was full, or there were insufficient file handles.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Singleton pattern. Simply put, it's a class that can only have a single instance, and the accessor for the instance is global.
Kristopher is certainly no stranger to the pattern, though he was thrown for a bit of a loop when he noticed this often-repeated pattern called Singleton in his new employer's codebase.
During water cooler conversation with his co-workers, whenever Dennis mentioned that he was responsible for supporting the Month End Closing system, reaction varied from a wide-eyed, agape look to a snide chuckle.
The Month End Closing system had a reputation throughout the department of being an ancient and legacy application that management had refused to upgrade over the years. Some of the comments put its true age at somewhere in the late 80’s early 90’s era which had earned it nicknames like “Ol’ Bertha” or “Methuselah” but most simply called it the “Legacy Dung Heap”.
Seen any absurdly bad code lately? Send it on in!
It couldn't be simpler, right? It takes a teeny little loop and a mod. At least, that's what Anne thought. When she was doing developer training at a certain mailhouse, she just happened to be looking into the program that printed a simple name and address block on the piece. Curious as to why it was thousands of lines of code, she dove in and saw this.
"I was trying to log into my bank's website when I got this message," L Bakker writes, "am I supposed to call their system admins and relay the message? And what part of displaying my transactions needs Audio? The other funny part is the "Restart Session" link just sends you right back to the same script that generated the error in the first place."
Have your own fun support stories? Send 'em on over!
Mr. Keyboard (from Derek)
I used to be a Genius™. Not an actual genius, mind you, but just a tech support guy who worked at the Apple Store and, therefore, got the prestigious title of Genius™.
“It can be difficult to develop complicated, J2EE software without a fundamental understanding of how Java works,” Vladimir writes, “difficult… but not impossible.”
“Following is a super-helpful class found in one of our heavily-used, enterprise beans. I don’t think it works the way the author intended it to.”
When applying, Rick appreciated Steve's interviewing style. They had a half-hour chat over coffee and he walked out with a job offer. It seemed pleasant and homey, an inviting workplace. After getting hired, Steve proved to be a smart, hands-off boss, who was a pleasure to work for. He was The perfect chief for a ramshackle web shop.
Mostly.
A few years ago, Gregory was about to start development on a quoting system, when the client pulled-out all of a sudden. “We appreciate all the work you put in so far,” they told him, “but your overall estimate was just too much; we were able to find someone else who could develop this for less than a third of your cost.”
Gregory was surprised, especially since he had bid the system fairly low. He would have considered renegotiating, but the “someone else” they found was Fred Blogs, who happened to be the VP’s son-in-law. And one thing that Gregory had learned over the years is that it’s pretty hard to compete with nepotism.
The Relational Database is dead.
It had a long, distinguished life that started in 1970 with Dr. Edgar F. Codd, but it has since seen its day. Like the sextant, slide rule, and punch card, relational databases are becoming relics of the past as the industry moves towards better, faster, and awesomer.
Mar 10
