The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Design for the Future

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-05-31

There are dark things lurking in source control. There are blocks of code so twisted and ill-conceived, so warped that any unlucky programmer that happens upon them is sent screaming and gibbering to the pages of a CodeSOD. There are also subtle horrors; evil squirming things that lurk beneath simple, normal facades. Or perhaps not so normal; beware what waits inside a VB6 front end and a DCOM back end.

Rick had once browsed through some application code to estimate some minor upgrade to the Contract Manager application. The code, of course, was a proxy for documentation that didn't exist. There wasn't much to it; a small server side DCOM library with a handful of classes and a VB6 client with a small army of pretty straight-forward looking screens. In production, the client and server would communicate across a moderately slow WAN. He made his assessment and forgot all about it. The customer decided the changes weren't worth the cost, and Rick didn't hear of the application for some time.

158 comments - Last comment @ 2011-06-05

Assortment of Awesomeness

by Alex Papadimoulis in Souvenir Potpourri on 2011-05-27

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers (and, now mini-buttons) to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Now with TDWTF Buttons).

Derek Glover (San Jose, CA) sent this incredible assortment of awesomeness.

58 comments - Last comment @ 2011-06-27

Bring Some Gloves, Finding the G-spot, and More Support Stories

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-05-26

High-tech Office Equipment (from Mike E)
One of my favorite support tickets:

******************************************************
* TICKET #BX-4314321      *CLOSED*        2009-05-18 *
******************************************************
*                                                    *
* ASSIGNED  : Michael E-----                         *
* DEPT CODE : T1-SUP                                 *
* CUSTOMER  : Mary L------                           *
* HARDWARE  : Other - "Stapler?"                     *
* RESOLUTION: CLOSED-WITHDISPATCH                    *
*                                                    *
*                                                    *
* __ ISSUE __                                        *
*                                                    *
*   Mary called me direct to request that I or some- *
*   body in IT unplug the electric stapler that was  *
*   on her desk.                                     *
*                                                    *
* __ TROUBLESHOOTING __                              *
*                                                    *
*   #2009-05-18 9:33 AM #                            *
*   I advised that she can safely unplug the stapler *
*   by locating power cord. She was not comfortable  *
*   with performing those steps.                     *
*                                                    *
*   #2009-05-18 12:40 PM#                            *
*   Unplugged stapler and placed it on her desk, as  *
*   she was at lunch.  Will re-open ticket if she    *
*   requires help plugging it back in.               *
*                                                    *
******************************************************

130 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-07

Ask Rumen Again

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-05-25

"As you might imagine," Misho writes, "there is a lifetime supply of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot when you work on a project that Rumen helped develop."

"But this one in particular stood out."

128 comments - Last comment @ 2011-06-26

The Brains of the Operation

by Brad Morgan in Feature Articles on 2011-05-24

It was 10:30PM and Felix had finally arrived home after a long day at the office. As he entered his apartment, the amber glow of his machine's new message light greeted him. He hit play.

"Felix! Where have you been?!" the voice opened with faux-casual enthusiasm, "listen - I've got a great gig for you! It's a legal services firm, and they're looking for a fresh-thinking problem-solver to help them leverage their IT infrastructure to maximum efficiency. Give me a call, we'll make it happen! Ciao."

221 comments - Last comment @ 2011-06-08

Disgruntled Bomb: Java Edition

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-05-23

A little while back, we had a Bring Your own Code called The Disgruntled Bomb that sought to answer, "what is the worst thing a disgruntled employee could leave behind in the source code?"

The comments were great and featured all sorts of solutions. Most were in C and C++, but there were few unique ones like a cronjob and even an incredible one-liner for .NET.

97 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

A Really Cold Winter

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2011-05-20

"I didn't realize how cold of a winter it was until reviewing pics from a skiing trip," Lee Hasiuk, writes "at least it was few tenths of a degree warmer than absolute zero."

114 comments - Last comment @ 2011-07-08

The Special Test Page

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-05-19

Among the fringe benefits offered by John Ashby's company was the "employee discount purchase program." It's commonplace in many large organizations, and basically allows employees to use the company's bulk-buying discounts for personal computers and the like. The prices were rarely that great, especially when compared with what one could get at the local office warehouse with a coupon, but no matter – it was a popular program, especially for managers, and especially for their printers.

The year was 1998, and digital photography was entering the realm of upper-middleclass hobby. Costing a mere $699.99, the Sony Digital Mavica captured images at a stunning 0.3 megapixels and stored them on 3.5” floppy disk using its integrated disk drive. It was the must-have toy, and nearly all of the managers had one.

106 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-07

Invisible Developers?

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2011-05-18

Earlier this year, Manuel started working as a consultant in a big service company.

The project he was assigned to has an interesting history - the entire dev team that started the project over a year before had suddenly evaporated a couple of months before he arrived.

84 comments - Last comment @ 2011-05-22

Labview Spaghetti

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-05-16

"Most software developers haven't had the ~~misfortune~~ opportunity to work with National Instrument's Labview," writes Alex, "it's a unique, development environment designed to automate processing and measuring equipment in laboratory setups."

"That said, you certainly don't need to be an expert to understand why the following program is a problem. It's a small selection of a program which controls some of my company's test equipment."

277 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-06

A Problem Has Been (The Sequel)

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2011-05-13

"Saw this on the way home," writes Jason C., "Could this be turning into a trend?"

96 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-01

Classic WTF: Faulty by Design

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-05-12

Faulty by Design was originally published on December 4th, 2007.

After 18 long months, it was finally time to celebrate. David M. and his fellow dev team members received word that their latest build had passed QA testing and was ready for delivery.

110 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-12

Serious Failure

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2011-05-11

"If you've got a public-facing web site that gets millions of hits a day," Luke writes, "chances are you have a middle-tier services layer you hit via HTTP. And every now and then, some of those HTTP requests will fail."

"What's the best way to handle this condition? Get to a known condition by shutting down the entire JVM and Application Server, of course!"

51 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-12

The Might of the PEN

by Lorne Kates in Feature Articles on 2011-05-10

Today's article may seem like a Classic WTF-- but only if you were at Penguicon. If you were there, you got to hear me do a live reading of these article during The Daily WTF: Unplugged. And if you weren't there, then here's your chance to read it in today's The Daily WTF: Unplugged: Plugged Back In. I'd like to thank the fine folks at Penguicon for having Alex and I as guests. The entire convention was a blast!

Oh, and apologies in advance if you're hoping for a Frist. Someone in the audience already called dibs on that.

133 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-14

Count on it every day!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2011-05-06

Writes Casey B., "As it turns out, there are two conditions which must be met before one can count on it every day."

139 comments - Last comment @ 2011-05-27

No, Continue, Chancel?

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2011-05-04

Robert V. writes, "I was investigating an issue that came up with one tool in our test automation framework and found following code:"

Select Case DataConnection.GetDataCellValue(_
                "Document Marketing", DataConnection.CurrentBlockID, _
                "TaxExemptionMatrix", "ClickButton", iRow)
   Case "No", "NO", "no"
      Connector.Connection.PressItem("0", 2, "3", 0) 'No
   Case "Continue", "CONTINUE", "continue"
      Connector.Connection.PressItem("0", 2, "1", 0) ''Continue   
   Case "Chancel", "CHANCEL", "chancel"
      Connector.Connection.PressItem("0", 2, "2", 0) 'Chancel
   Case Else
End Select

130 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-14

Classic WTF: The Intermittent Hum

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-05-03

Between Penguicon, SODEC, and an unusually hectic week at work prepping for a new release of BuildMaster, I didn't get a chance to do a new article today. But, I do have a fun classic: The Intermittent Hum was originally published on December 3rd, 2007.

R. Young got his first job as a developer right out of college. He was a Programmer Consultant I, which meant that he'd be sent to a client site to fix bugs in some old system. But on his first assignment, he got lucky: the client actually wanted him and the junior-level programmer to develop a small application.

62 comments - Last comment @ 2011-06-08

The Vista Fix

by Alex Papadimoulis in Representative Line on 2011-05-02

"I was hired on to take things over from a fellow named 'Trent', who was known for writing some stunningly awful code," Michael writes, "I was not only to be tasked with rewriting one of our two main software products into a modern language (compared to the VB6 in which it was currently built), but in the short term I was also tasked with maintaining the older versions. "

"Before I started, I tried out our software (consumer utility stuff, registry cleaning, startup items and the like) and found it was crashing on my system. It turned out that the startup items had an issue for Vista users - Trent had hardcoded all of his directories rather than use environment variables, and so Vista systems would attempt to open a folder that simply did not exist.

190 comments - Last comment @ 2011-09-20

Recent Articles