The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Go Fish

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2010-07-30

Chas Ryder writes, "false... fish... yeah, I get those mixed up all the time."

91 comments - Last comment @ 2011-01-03

The Suicide Door

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-07-29

At the university where Diogo worked, the Computer Science program outgrew its status as an unloved child of the Mathematics department. It was to become its own department, and that meant it finally deserved its own building. Since the university in question had a very strong architecture program, the university searched for the biggest names to design the building.

Enter Laurent. He flew in to consult and prepare designs for the building; he was fresh off a project in Dubai and his next port-of-call was Tokyo. He was a name that could name names. The exterior renders he provided were stunning, full of glass and sweeping lines. The designs leapt up on a desk, stomped their feet and screamed, "I AM MODERN AND TECHNOLOGICLYISH!" To the casual spectator, they were fantastic. As Diogo discovered, when you actually had to live in the building, things got much worse.

216 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-17

Strong Web Design

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-07-28

North Korea is a strange place. From what I've read, it's as close to Hell on Earth as any other place, and their sole economic output appears to be YouTube videos featuring their Mass Games. Oh, and don't even get me started on that whole Dear Leader thing.

But no matter, North Korea is pretty full of itself and, as Rick O'Shay noticed, their website coding is no different: it's really, really strong. See for yourself on the Official webpage of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (yes, it's a .com):

137 comments - Last comment @ 2023-03-01

The Tim Problem

by Scott Selikoff in Feature Articles on 2010-07-27

While many developers sit behind a desk, only seeing the sun on their way to and from the parking lot, Mike felt lucky that he got to travel all around the country performing installations of his company's enterprise software. He enjoyed seeing new places, exploring the local nightlife, and most importantly for a business traveler, expensing everything to a corporate account.

Having installed the software hundreds of times and in dozens of cities, the process had become routine for Mike. He'd send the client's IT administrator a list of requirements, verify that he'd have the appropriate access, and when he'd arrive on-site, spend an hour or two configuring the software. His job after that was to monitor training classes given by a coworker he traveled with, while brushing up on his Freecell.

Something Different

112 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-15

The 0th Month

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2010-07-26

Kevin S. works on websites for a living.

Well, actually, "work" might not be an adequate description considering that part of Kevin's job requires that he is half clarvoyant and half mountain sherpa when it comes to digging through the several huge codebases globbed together abominations of open source, third-party components that he is expected to support.

140 comments - Last comment @ 2011-01-02

APIEpicFail

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2010-07-23

"Considering what happened," wrote Ben, "I felt this error message to be quite self explanatory."

116 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-07

The Command Center Administrator, and More

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2010-07-22

The Command Center Administrator (from Joshua Knarr)
A job listing email for a "Command Center Administrator" recently found its way to my inbox. The message was from ACME COMMERCE, which was apparently an UP AND COMING company that would be HUGE AND SUCCESSFUL if they could keep their INTERNET STORE FRONT FOR SPORTING GOODS going. The position was offered to me in fits of caps lock, and it was tough to understand if they were merely excited, or if someone was playing Mad Libs with Job Listing Generator 3.0. I decided they were simply excited to be expanding, so I dutifully sent along my résumé and asked if they had a job description for the Command Center Administrator position.

Moments later, my phone rang. It was Krishna from ACME COMMERCE. "Very nice résumé," she said, "we would like to interview you! What time can we set this up?"

153 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-09

Testing Fundamentals

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-07-21

As we learned in Unit Tested, when you require that developers — especially those "certain" developers — write more unit tests, you'll get exactly what you ask for: more unit tests.

Johnny Biggg, whose company recently mandated this, knows this all too well. Although the ratio of testing-to-functional code went up, the quality (or lack thereof) remained about the same. Well, that is, unless you consider how often arrays can fail in JavaScript.

85 comments - Last comment @ 2010-07-29

Similar to Snail Mail

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-07-20

When you work in IT, your family turns to you as the ultimate computer expert. Since Reggie worked in IT for the direct mail industry, not only did he get carpet bombed with the usual computer questions, but also with questions about the piles of junkmail his family received. "Why do they send so many? How do they afford that?" "Is the furniture store really going out of business?" "I got the same thing twice. Do you think I can double up the coupons?"

Reggie could never quite make them understand that there were many companies in the direct mail industry, and that his company only provided address lists. He knew less about the actual mail his family recieved than they did. No explanation helped; his association with the industry made him an expert on all things postal.

196 comments - Last comment @ 2010-09-25

Compare.java

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-07-19

Tom G. recently joined a team that maintained a fairly large Java client/server application. His first task was fairly simple: prepare for a switch to a different server farm by going through the code to make sure it was portable and wouldn't be affected by a new server, IP address, and so on.

After a few days of browsing through line-after-line of tedious code, Tom found a pretty unique "helper" class: Compare.java. In addition to swathes of unnecessary comparison code, there was equalsAllowNull. Enough was enough, so Tom got up, walked over to his colleague who worked on another project all together, and vented about ridiculousness of Compare.java, and the rest of the code.

91 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-09

Bill Rounding

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2010-07-16

"I was a bit surprised to see a debit for my phone bill for $40.01 instead of the normal $40.00," writes Ben Hitchcock, "looking at the actual statement cleared things up."

90 comments - Last comment @ 2010-07-21

Classic WTF: Prisoner of Process

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-07-15

Prisoner of Process was originally published in Alex's DevDisasters column in the August 01, 2007 issue of Redmond Developer News

When Eric C. arrived at his new job, it was with a huge sense of relief. His old workplace had been a haven for cowboy coders and anarchic hackers, where the only semblance of consistency was in everyone's preference to modify code directly in production.

94 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-13

Bulletproofed Boolean

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2010-07-14

"Some time ago I was checking the business logic that a friend had done for a system." writes Brian, "While I was debugging, I found this awesome piece of code. I understand that application logic should be bulletproofed to handle any kind of data condition passed to it, nulls, double and single quotes, etc., but I felt this to be an example of over-engineering a solution."

public boolean isBooleanFalse(boolean value) {
   boolean response = false;
   if (value == true) {
       response = false;
   } else {
       response = true;
   }
   return response;
}

142 comments - Last comment @ 2022-06-21

Classic WTF: Banking So Advanced

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-07-13

We're still on Summer Break here at The Daily WTF, which means it's time to bring back another classic. But in the mean time, please send in your stories so we'll have plenty to work with when we return next week.

Now what's particularly fun about Banking So Advanced is that it was originally published back on October 17, 2007... and is still relevant today. The article links have not changed and the "unique" code remains the same. Consider what that means in Internet Time: back then, Twitter was little more than a silly idea that most everyone found ridiculous. Okay, so clearly, not that much has changed in the past few years, but I should note that this online banking site is still optimized for "Netscape Navigator 4.75 or higher; Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0; and AOL 6, 7, or 8."

A while back, I wrote about US financial institutions, their failure to implement two-factor authentication, and the absurdity that has become Wish-It-Was Two Factor authentication. I thought that'd be the last I'd write about the topic, but when Steven King pointed me towards his bank, Synergy One. I couldn't resist a follow-up.

102 comments - Last comment @ 2010-07-19

Database Abnormalization 101

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2010-07-12

Working as a DBA in academia, Paul received a notice that a certain newly migrated user schema, specifically the one used by the enrollment tracking system, had swelled to 281 tables and was growing. This had struck Paul as being very strange since the tracking system wasn't all that complicated.

When a student is registering for a class, and want to know if there's room left, they need two pieces of information - the Course ID and the Semester Number.

102 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-02

Train Crash

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2010-07-09

Karsten wrote, "seeing the whole undergound train shut down and reboot during the ride was a bit scary."

93 comments - Last comment @ 2013-09-18

Classic WTF: The Pie T Department

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-07-08

It's the summer break for The Daily WTF! Please send in your own stories so we'll have some fun ones to share when we return. In the mean time, here’s a fun classic. "The Pie T Department" was originally published on August 8, 2007.

Many years ago, Dan B. worked at a large accounting firm that had several small, satellite offices spread throughout the world. The offices shared data -- mostly email -- via a dial-up based file synch operation that would run several times throughout the day. Since these offices were so small, they didn't need IT support on staff; instead, they'd rely on the IT staff at the central office for help.

98 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-16

RePLaCeD

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-07-07

Varg's colleague had an awfully difficult problem challenge to solve: remove the language parameter ("lang") from a query string.

Well, difficult for Varg's colleague. Though most of us would apply some substring finesse, this particular developer hammered away with a brute force approach.

115 comments - Last comment @ 2010-07-25

Classic WTF: Anything You Can Do Lyle Can Do Better

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-07-06

It's the summer break for The Daily WTF! We're working on some fun new stories now, but in the mean time, here’s a fun classic. "Anything You Can Do Lyle Can Do Better" was originally published on May 21, 2008.

If Lyle could be summed up in one word, it'd be "competitive." If he could be summed up in three words, it'd be "ultra-competitive jackass." If you had $21.00 on you, Lyle would make it a point to have $21.50. If you estimated that a task would take you twelve hours, it'd take Lyle eleven hours and 45 minutes. If a distant relative died, somehow two of Lyle's distant relatives died. He was the kind of guy that would play basketball against a nine year old to win, then he'd make fun of the kid for losing, then he'd make fun of the kid for crying. If a stranger asked Lyle what time it was, he treated it as a challenge.

55 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-15

Toto...or titi?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2010-07-02

"This one had me so confused it made me ponder my existence," writes Jack M.,"and I remain subscribed to the list."

123 comments - Last comment @ 2010-07-30

Reality Support, Telephatic Support, and New Thing Support

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-07-01

Reality Support (from Stuart Whelan)
Many, many years ago I used to be on-call support for the local hospital and emergency department. The IT system consisted of Wyse serial terminals connected to a Sun system running RealityDB. The software was PMS, the Patient Management System, and I dealt with PMS every day, all day.

I should note, RealityDB had the best error message I have ever seen in my career: “Reality is corrupted”. And also my favorite confirmation message: “Are you sure you wish to destroy Reality?”

125 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-14

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