The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

DATE_NOT_FOUND

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-29

So it’s once again February 29... that one time every four years when newspapers do their fluff pieces about people who only have a birthday every four years, and you find all kinds of obscure bugs in your code. I managed to save two examples from the last leap day that I thought would be best shared today.

The first is from Eric, who wrote "my client is an alcohol company, and I run their website. They have a members-only section of their site that requires that you to enter your birthdate. If you're less than 21 years old, they kick you out and won't let you onto the site until you come back on and lie about your date-of-birth."

209 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-17

Database Changes Done Right

by Alex Papadimoulis in Alex's Soapbox on 2012-02-28

Throughout my software development career, I’ve seen my fair share of debates over how databases should be developed. And like most disagreements over technical pedantry, the participants are generally well-intentioned but grossly inexperienced. So much so that it wouldn’t matter if they use foreign keys or not. Though “elegant”, their software will become an unmaintainable mess after a few short years. But regardless, one counter-argument that constantly rears its ugly head goes something like, “but what if we have to change it later?”

In other debates, that question can be quickly rebutted with “uh, we just change it then,” but when the discussion is on databases, it actually holds water. It’s as if the database is a marble statue that, once shipped to production, should never be changed... and if it must, there had better be a damn good reason.

126 comments - Last comment @ 2024-03-26

The Regex Code Review

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-02-27

Ding! A new e-mail appeared in Jed's and the other developers' inboxes on the floor. It was from his coworker Bob, and it read:

"Jed, the term-validation process of CAPBACS is a performance bottleneck that's costing our company thousands in lost sales every month. This change must go in ASAP. While I appreciate your feedback and input, I don't believe that your experience working on the Web places you in a position to critique my work. Thanks!"

217 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-12

Sponsor Appreciation, High Tech in Arkansas, License to Enumerate, and More

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-02-24

We've got some great companies that sponsor The Daily WTF. And all they ask in return... just take a moment or two to check out what they do. It's some pretty cool stuff.

TDWTF Sponsors

SingleHop - SingleHop Dynamic Servers combine the flexibility of Cloud Hosting with the private resources of a Dedicated Server. The best of both worlds. Try today for 50% off 1st month. Deployed in 1 hour. Try it today with coupon code "BOOM".

New Relic is basically a magical, real-time performance and user monitoring tool that works on virtually any web platform: Java, Ruby, PHP, .net, Python, Ruby on Rails. I'm not sure how it works (magic?), but it's incredibly easy to use and is pretty inexpensive.

Monetate - their testing, targeting and personalization platform for online retailers is used on leading websites like Best Buy, Sports Authority and Urban Outfitters. If you’re a problem-solver who is passionate about rich web applications, scaling Internet applications to billions of page views, and working with big data, then you’re a perfect fit for our close-knit and agile team.!

Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the free, and easy-to-use, web-based deployment and release management tool. Going far beyond Continuous Integration and into Continous Delivery, BuildMaster delivers a series of robust features unparalleled by other build-promote-deploy-distribute tools. They're also behind the upcoming ProGet, a NuGet package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds.

Amazon DynamoDB - is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a new Amazon DynamoDB database table, scale up or down request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics.

And now for something completely off-topic...

102 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-06

The Phony

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-22

"My first impression of my predecessor was a positive one," writes Michal Ochman, "he was well-spoken, sharply dressed, and seemed to be an all-around nice guy."

"My first impression of my predecessor's code was also positive — it was sanely structured, well-commented, and all-around seemed pretty clean. And then I started actually looking through it. It was filled with a lot of... well... this."

343 comments - Last comment @ 2024-03-14

Steve's Email

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-02-21

For a ramen-fueled college student, a job offer that actually involves doing the work you're in school to learn and has a paycheck that can't be beat flipping burgers is a wonderful score. For Ted, that score came from a company run by alumni from his school that gave out pretty plum gigs to top students.

They were a support company, that contracted out to run the IT infrastructure for other companies. While the support company actually cut Ted's check, they were a small company. 90% of their business came from a single customer, the PubCong publishing conglomerate. It was for PubCong that Ted would be actually working.

96 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-07

The Sentimental Query

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-20

After weeks, months, or even years of setting up and preparing to sell, it’s always exciting to get those few customers. Depending on the venture, it may not be worth popping open a bottle of Champagne, but no matter how small the sale, one can’t help but take a few moments to pause and smile before struggling to get that next batch of sales.

By the time the 13,853rd customer rolls around, no one blinks an eye. It’s just business as usual. That is, unless you work at Ruben’s company. When a new customer record is created, their server not only takes a moment to celebrate, but it nearly brings down the entire server with this unique way of finding the next available customer number:

127 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-06

Departing in 9999 Minutes

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-02-17

Wout van Poppel remarked, "Yesterday's newspaper didn't really contain any interesting news, but at least the photo captions were interesting."

96 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-03

The Lemming Switch

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-16

"The way in which project requirements meet developers at our company is a WTF in and of itself," writes Kevin, "but suffice it to say that a certain developer was tasked with writing a Windows Service that would periodically review a list of files from the network and purge them if necessary."

"Of course, to this certain developer, 'Windows Service' means something that is left running on a desktop somewhere. In his world, VB6 is also a 'simpler, cleaner, and easier to use' platform, and thus is his platform of choice... to this day. Here's what he delivered after a couple days of work."

127 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-21

I've Got Your Number

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-02-15

"The system is down!" cried the voice at the end of the phone. "We've run out of numbers!"

"You've… run out of numbers?" asked Daryl.

120 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-01

The Applet Redirect

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-13

"One of our sites is partially maintained by a third-party vendor with developers based out of Kerbleckistan," writes Nathan, "they'll sometimes 'forget' to use version control and instead just write directly to production. This has naturally caused some frustrating 'lost feature' problems when they remember to use source control, and somehow this all falls on me to mitigate."

"To avoid constantly breaking things, I wrote a script that monitors file changes to production and commits any changes to a branch in the repository. I'll then merge their changes into the working mainline. It's usually a few JSP files with some text or a link updated, but recently, when I went to fetch the current status, I was greeted by this friendly result:

149 comments - Last comment @ 2012-05-14

Flexible Spending

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2012-02-10

"I spotted this at the Airport of Valencia in Spain," wrote Peter P, "looks like they have quite weird temperatures there..."

92 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-15

SQL MUGging

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-08

"We're replacing an old PHP website," writes Roggo, "to examine the existing functionality and test the install, we were given access to the live site. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the code that we are soon to replace. The first file I opened was called mug_password_forgotten.php; I was greeted by line 8:"

$sql = "select muguser_id, muguser_directory " . 
       "from mugusers " . 
       "where muguser_active = 1 " . 
       " and muguser_email = '" . $_POST["email"] . "' ";

166 comments - Last comment @ 2012-09-26

The 10 Key, Mr. Kashmere, and More Support Tales

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-02-07

Mr. Kashmere (from John A)
Mr. Kashmere is one of our middle school teachers. There had been a merger of two schools, and everything had changed: administration, policies, procedures... and technology. One of the new technologies they had picked up as a small school was Google Apps, including Gmail.

When I heard that Mr. Kashmere was having trouble getting new e-mail, I was curious, and figured I should go have a look at what the problem was.

120 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-12

Dirty Code

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-02-06

Ever since being hired, Adam had spent most of his time working on new projects.

He was aware that there was an "old system" running out there and would someday be shut down and his efforts were to help this come about, but he never had the opportunity to cross paths with it. Based on what he had heard though, this was a very, very good thing.

152 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-03

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by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2012-02-03

"I saw this on my way home from work," Daniel Moore writes, "thank goodness CVS is doing something about Maryland's crippling shortage of whooping cough!"

87 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-15

The Percent Conversion

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-02-02

"Lucky me," writes Joe from the Submit-To-WTF Visual Studio Add-In, "I just inherited a home-grown system information application."

"Judging from the code the previous programmer wrote, this is sadly one of the better pieces."

175 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-07

TDWTF Sponsors
		SingleHop - SingleHop Dynamic Servers combine the flexibility of Cloud Hosting with the private resources of a Dedicated Server. The best of both worlds. Try today for 50% off 1st month. Deployed in 1 hour. Try it today with coupon code "BOOM".
		New Relic is basically a magical, real-time performance and user monitoring tool that works on virtually any web platform: Java, Ruby, PHP, .net, Python, Ruby on Rails. I'm not sure how it works (magic?), but it's incredibly easy to use and is pretty inexpensive.
		Monetate - their testing, targeting and personalization platform for online retailers is used on leading websites like Best Buy, Sports Authority and Urban Outfitters. If you’re a problem-solver who is passionate about rich web applications, scaling Internet applications to billions of page views, and working with big data, then you’re a perfect fit for our close-knit and agile team.!
		Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the free, and easy-to-use, web-based deployment and release management tool. Going far beyond Continuous Integration and into Continous Delivery, BuildMaster delivers a series of robust features unparalleled by other build-promote-deploy-distribute tools. They're also behind the upcoming ProGet, a NuGet package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds.
		Amazon DynamoDB - is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a new Amazon DynamoDB database table, scale up or down request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics.

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