The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Variable Cash Back

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2012-03-31

"I decided not to roll the dice to find out how much '$A' was," Nick K.

77 comments - Last comment @ 2012-08-12

The Thank-You Change

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-03-29

“Where’s the thank-you change?” read the entire contents of the email from Tycho’s boss. The blank subject line – one of the boss’s many trademarks – offered no help in decoding the message.

Had Tycho not had a solid two years of experiencing working for this man, he may have made the mistake of asking for some sort of clarification. Perhaps a pointer as to which of the dozen or so applications the thank-you change referred to. Or perhaps to which of the several dozen or so change requests this may have referred to. Or if the thank-you change even referred to a change request or application at all.

102 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-02

The Gonvert

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-28

"We hired a Gontractor a few years ago," wrote Mike A, "this is some of his Gode."

"So far as I can tell, Goverting is the Pepper, MD of Converting"

86 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-16

Spammers Say the Darndest Things

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-03-27

As those of you who run a blog — or really, any website with any form on it anywhere — know, spammers are unavoidable. Add a CAPTCHA and they’ll crack it. Add a really difficult CAPTCHA and they’ll just outsource it to CAPTCHA-solving sweatshops in Kerbleckistan. Add a spam filtering comment service and they’ll just figure out a way around it. All the while, users will become more and more frustrated at how difficult it is to share a simple comment.

Generally, the spammers post links to things like counterfeit designer boots and replica watches. Sometimes they’ll pull a few words out of the article and say “how I loved your writing about BOOL, it was a good point. I agree that FILE_NOT_FOUND is important! If you like this article, you should check out these discount kitten mittens.”

151 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-11

Zip Code Functionalilty

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-26

"I recently took a job at a small interactive marketing company," writes Jason, "and, I'm sure like most small firms that hire programmers with little to no experience, the company is constantly putting out fires it started years before. One particular fire came from a client whose website just stopped working all of a sudden."

"It was a server outage or a date-based timebug, but more a message like this:

100 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-13

Captcha'd - Do Not Complain

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-03-23

Aivaras Was reading about setting domainkeys for a mail server, scrolled down to take a look at comments and understood immediately why he didn't find any.

98 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-17

Wyoming O'Clock

by Alex Papadimoulis in Representative Line on 2012-03-21

"There are so many things wrong with the project that I'm maintaining," writes Bruce.

"There's really only one way to show it all off: a representative line."

172 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-03

Let Me Sleep on It

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-03-20

"Perl is a language for getting your job done," is the underlying philosophy of the language. The only right way to write a Perl program is whatever way works. The ultimate flexibility of Perl is a breeding ground for WTFs . That's doubly true when you're new to the language, like Dave once was.

To get Dave started with Perl, his boss paired him up with Alvin, the veteran Perl programmer. He'd been using Perl since version 4, and had a reputation for wielding regexes like a scalpel. After Dave had a few days of ramp up, Alvin started sending him code from their codebase so that Dave could try and understand how their applications worked.

184 comments - Last comment @ 2022-12-17

Less-than Reputable

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-19

"When you move to a new town," writes Maynard via the Submit-to-WTF Visual Studio Add-In, "you need to take jobs at less-than reputable firms to get yourself settled in. "

"I cleaned up a lot of filthy code during my time at $company_name, but I couldn't bring myself to alter a single line of this monstrosity of a method. I think my favorite part is when the 'password' and "confirm' are each checked against a regex, and only then does it check if they are the same string."

84 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-18

The Miscellaneous Field 5 Variable

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2012-03-16

"Thanks, Google," wrote K Johnson, "8143575 is just as easy to remember as KJohnson."

118 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-23

Classic WTF: I've Got The Monkey Now

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-03-15

I'll be at Code PaLOUsa today, so here's a fun classic from a little while back. I've Got The Monkey Now was originally published on February 5, 2008.

1999 was a big year for Harvard Business School Publishing. In the past few years, they had seen their business model – selling books, journals, articles, case studies, and so forth – transform from being entirely catalogue-based to largely web-based, and it had finally come time for a major re-launch of their website.

68 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-28

GenerateApologyMessage()

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-14

"We came across this trying to sort out why the application never threw errors which said what the problem was," Tom writes, "I wouldn't have minded (much) but the random number generator was something to behold."

110 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-01

A Most Wonderful Opportunity, Multiple Frustrations, and More

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2012-03-13

A Most Wonderful Opportunity (from Ben)
I made the mistake of giving my real email address to a headhunter I met at a local dev event. So now I get emails like this...

Hi Benjamin,

I am working with one of the best known media organisations in the world. 

They are truly successful, with over £2 billion of turnover each year. The 
company is without doubt one of the flashest and coolest places to work. 
The lead developer there is so skilled that he has been given numerous 
awards for just being outstanding. 

He is a true luminary in his field and is without doubt one of the key 
figures behind the company being one of the most profitable companies out
there. Everybody can learn from him, he is essentially the Dali Lama of 
the iPhone coding world. You would be working alongside this guru in a 
small team of carefully selected developers, hand picked for their coding 
excellence and coolness. The project that you would be working on would be
predominantly iPhone native language based, but there may also be an element 
of Ruby on Rails involved too. JSON experience is also desired. 

The guru has already built, single handedly an application which enables 
all of the companies' famous magazines to be converted from PDF format to
the iPad with minimal extra work required for developers. The software 
enables HTML pages to be added to add bonus pages etc. This already 
extremely successful in the UK and is being rolled out across Poland and 
Kiev shortly.

The company itself is one of the most fine places to work, minimalist 
Scandinavian style offices with awards mounted in plexigass and titanium 
frames upon the walls, a drink fountain serving the purest chilled spring 
water fresh from the Malvern Hills. One has not lived until meeting with 
this company, an environment in which they meticulously produce the finest
quality of code, as pure as the water which emanates from the stainless 
steel spout of their drink dispenser. 

--- snip several paragraphs describing a tree in a nearby garden ---

Do get in touch immediately if you are interested in this most wonderful 
opportunity. 

Sincerly,
Jerome F-------

203 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13

Pure Eval

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2012-03-12

When Jeff saw a line like this one, he knew there was something terribly wrong in the code he had inherited.

eval(Application("buildCommon").toString());

He wasn't sure what was more troubling- the way the Application variable was being used, or the fact that C#, as a compiled language, doesn't have an eval statement.

80 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-16

Higher-Dimensional Butter Physics

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2012-03-09

Gen Carlson writes, "Google Calculator's understanding of higher-dimensional butter physics has far outpaced mine."

95 comments - Last comment @ 2012-09-13

The RubbishGenerator

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-08

"We have a bit of a dead code problem," writes R.S., "most of the time, it's different versions (sometimes older, sometimes newer) of the same class that were created as part of a good-intentioned refactoring that was never quite completed."

"And then we have mysterious classes like these."

71 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-12

The Strong Type

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-03-07

"Null reference exception, what does that even mean?" Randy whined.

"You probably didn't initialize one of your variables," Bob said.

205 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-03

QCon Tokyo 2012 & QCon Beijing 2012

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2012-03-07

When I mentioned that I'd be attending SODEC in Tokyo last year, I was surprised that someone actually took me up on the offer for some beers. Actually, about a dozen of you did, and a small group of us went out to Shibuya (you know, this place) and we all had an absolute blast.

This year, I'll be speaking at QCon Tokyo and QCon Beijing. If you haven't heard of the QCon conferences before, they're definitely worth checking out. From the (English-language) site:

9 comments - Last comment @ 2012-04-20

Dan's Epoch

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2012-03-05

"I'm involved in a big project to re-implement an old, Classic ASP application in a more modern language," writes Mike Johnson, "although I have a decent amount of Classic ASP experience, I still struggle at times interpreting the old. It is a big mess."

"A previous employee, Dan, was famous for churning out tons of code. Users loved him because he seemed responsive and always fixed their (numerous) problems quickly. Sadly he never stopped to really understand what he was doing. When faced with a new problem, he just wrote more code.

114 comments - Last comment @ 2012-08-24

The Cheapest Fare

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

"So... is Asia the problem," wonders Bernard Gatt, "or should I just go to Asia?"

84 comments - Last comment @ 2013-02-02

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