Recent Articles

May 2013

Every Last Cent!

by in Error'd on

"I'm going write a strongly worded letter and make sure I get every last 0.00000000000001E7 cent!" writes Jay F.

71 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-06

Servers Wild

by in Feature Articles on

Victor’s first task of the day was basic maintenance, applying OS patches and security updates to the staging servers under his wing.  If nothing blew up after a day, he’d proceed to their production counterparts. The routine for each staging server update began with a blanket email notification to developers. If no one objected after 15 minutes, he’d install the patches and reboot.

Light from the rising sun had just started to glint off the herd of skyscrapers outside Victor’s window. That early in the morning, most of the people who might whine about needing five more minutes were crawling along the interstate or idling in an eight Hummer-deep Starbucks drive-thru. His first several updates completed without a hitch. Victor grabbed a quick cup of breakroom coffee during one of the reboot windows. Any time things went this smoothly, it sent his Murphy-sense tingling, but he forced himself to walk slowly and bask in the early-day calm.

110 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-25

Now Wait for Next GetYear()

by in CodeSOD on

Bob was watching the sales telecast for WidgetCo when his boss approached him. “We got a big problem, and it needs to be fixed fast.” Before Bob could object, she grabbed his laptop and ushered him down the hall.

The VP of Sales stood outside the conference room where the telecast was taking place. He shoved a tablet under Bob’s nose, which showed a line graph of WidgetCo’s sales from January 2012 until now. The graph took an enormous plummet on January 1, 2013. “Son, this has got to be fixed, or I won’t have a graph to show our record sales!”

91 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-10

Classic WTF: Top Entries of OMGWTF Part 1

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To help inspire you to enter something great in the Second Olympiad of Misguided Geeks on The Daily WTF, here's the top entries from the first time we did this.

Readers’ Choice: Entry #100175 (Ivan Milyakov's OMG!OCRCAL)

With nearly 30% of the vote (and that’s after filtering for duplicates, such as Mr. 156.34.232.142’s 183 votes) the OMG!OCRCAL was clearly the readers’ choice. And how couldn’t it be with an English-based configuration file and a horrid OCR-based input?

16 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-04

Announcing the Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at The Daily WTF - Part 2

by in Announcements on

We know what you're thinking - summer is approaching making it the perfect time of year for a programming contest!

It's been a long time since we last did this, but we at The Daily WTF are excited to announce the Olympiad of Misguided Geeks at The Daily WTF Part 2 (or OMGWTF2 for short).

83 comments - Last comment @ 2022-01-01

Classic WTF: Effective Immediately

by in Feature Articles on

It's Memorial Day here in the US, giving us the day off, so here's a Classic WTF to tide you over until tomorrow.

Photo Credit: sparktography @ FlickrEvery job has its quirks. That’s what Kirk reassuringly told himself on his first day of work after meeting the company’s most egregious quirk, The Colonel. Kirk wasn’t quite sure if the impeccably-dressed man’s gruff introduction – which solely consisted of looking Kirk up, then down, then up again, and scoffing “that’s a pretty sad excuse for a Double Windsor” – was in jest or contempt, so he stuck with a the more palatable label of quirky. Fortunately, by the time Kirk realized that deranged was much more appropriate than quirky, he knew that he’d never have to personally work with The Colonel: the chain-of-command simply wouldn’t allow for it.

52 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-06

A Pixel of a Different Color

by in Error'd on

"I thought that I knew a thing or two about subpixels, but Google has proven to me that there are some subtle differences that I was not aware of," writes Joerg T..

76 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-30

Bogotesting, Amazing Local Talent, and More Support Stories

by in Feature Articles on

Bogotesting - Submitted by Theo
I was helping a teammate debug an issue today, and I found myself at a loss when perusing the entry for the bug in our issue tracker. I present to you, Bogotesting: 

Test Set: Negative Test Case 1337
Test: Bang around on keyboard in all areas of the application
Run: 11-17 till 12-01
129 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13

The More Things Change...

by in CodeSOD on

Change. It's something we all live with every day. We change our clothes, jobs and sometimes even spouses. Change can be a good thing. Some say not to fear change, but to embrace it! Wisdom tells us to always be prepared for change. Bill U's company likes to be prepared for change.

They have a lot of DAOs to access the data in his company's database. There is a base class that can be extended to make it easier when writing all that annoying, pesky SQL. This class has some helpful functions for getting and closing connections (sane stuff), and then there are the constants for SQL 'literals'. The class contains some helper functions where the constants are used, and some other functions where the constants are not used. This way if they change the database vendor and the definition of a SPACE changes, they can mostly just fix the constants and the data layer will still work.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2013-09-19

The Firing Offense

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Egon was fortunate enough to land a front-line support job fresh out of college, but he didn’t enjoy a single minute of it. He continued to slog thru the seven circles of Helldesk for about a year until he found an opportunity to move on. An opening at nearby WTF University’s Electronic Engineering department needed to be filled by a well-rounded IT guy. Egon didn’t think he had much of a chance to land the job, but desperation made him try.

The head of the Engineering department, Bill, invited Egon in for an interview. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Bill said. “We don’t have anyone to keep our computer systems running right now since the last guy left on a ‘Mission’ to South America. We’re in a bind here so if you know the difference between a computer chip and a potato chip, you’re qualified enough.” The interview didn’t get any harder. He explained to Bill what knowledge he had and asked what the workload and hours would be like. “Oh, I don’t know. We don’t care what hours you work as long as you’re available if we need you. If nothing is going wrong with the computers, feel free to make yourself at home in our lab and do some ‘research’ of your own. Would you be able to start next week?”

109 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-03

The Truth of the Matter

by in CodeSOD on

When Ben found this block of code, he had some questions: who wrote it, and what was it supposed to do? 

if (showOptionsButton == true)
   showOptionsButton = false;
if (showOptionsButton == false)
   showOptionsButton = true;
126 comments - Last comment @ 2023-08-28

Screw You Oracle Interceptor!

by in Error'd on

"I work for an IT department in a large department store and while scanning through some old code, I ran upon this gem," writes Steve C., "I can't say that I disagree!"

61 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-24

Kilobits and Drillbits

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Kristian stood on the deck of the USS Marianas, the sun in his face. The Marianas and her sister ship, the USS Abyssal Explorer, were a two-boat exploration team, scouring the Atlantic for oil deposits not yet tapped by offshore rigs. The sea rolled beneath him, far calmer than it had been the day before. It was a perfect day off the coast of Brazil in the south Atlantic.

So perfect, the satellite connection would be five by five to download all those patches that the Marianas urgently needed.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-28

Habla Currency

by in CodeSOD on

Adam worked for a company that sold check printing machines. It was not a particularly large company, but the machines were cutting edge when it came to the latest and greatest technologies to prevent check fraud. So while the company was doing well enough, until now the company was selling equipment solely in the United States. At least, that is, until one of the more enterprising sales people decided to ‘branch out’.

In this case, the branch was a small Mexican bank. It was not known how the salesperson even made contact with the bank. There were rumors flying around that it involved a drunken night in Cabo and a lost wager in a cock fight. And maybe a tiger in a bathroom. But none of this is germane to Adam’s story.

109 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-02

Speak No Evil, Pat

by in Feature Articles on

It was with a great deal of enthusiasm that Pat, fresh out of college, joined Multinational Bank. Their technology division was the pride of the financial industry, and the on-boarding session Pat received did not disappoint: he was treated to a full day of slideshows on compliance, whistle-blowing, and, most importantly, ethics.

When on-boarding was complete, Pat's first port of call was one of the bank's many conference rooms. His team was in the process of taking over a project from a remote office via a flurry of emails and conference calls. These were simpler times, before Cisco's robust line of telepresence solutions. If the bank had deployed videoconferencing, as they would a few years later, Pat's story might have turned out very differently.

72 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-20

The Impossible Blob

by in CodeSOD on

BlobConfig.config not found, said the error console of The Blob-- the "insane in every way" system Sep's company produced.

Because a millisecond earlier, The Blob erroneously determined Sep's computer already had a copy of the config file, and didn't automagically create it.

142 comments - Last comment @ 2024-05-31

Where I Come From, We Don't Need July

by in Error'd on

"Someone FINALLY got it right!!" Farz wrote, "In my native language, we don't have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!"

59 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-18

Fire Rescue, Troubled Widgets, and Other Support Stories

by in Feature Articles on

The company that Karl J. works for recently signed a contract with a big North American corporation and everybody’s really excited at the prospect. Practically overnight, their flagship product - a platform-as-a-service solution – would gain a boost of about 40,000 users and an accompanying in-stream of cash too.

But there was one detail that made everybody, well mostly management, feeling nervous: their client insisted on having 24/7 support. But, you know what? That’s OK! Karl’s employer hired a 3rd party agency to do the grunt work of front-line support and escalate non-trivial issues when they would arise, around the clock.

74 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-10

Cheaters Never Prosper

by in Feature Articles on

"That's quite an impressive resume, Fred," Avi said. The phone interview had gone well so far; among the several hundred applicants for Senior Developer at BigBoxCo, Fred's qualifications put him among the top five Avi had spoken to. Fred himself was amiable, if slightly over-confident.

"Thanks, Avi," Fred replied. "I hope I have what you're looking for."

146 comments - Last comment @ 2014-07-30

England DevOps Talks/Workshop and a London Meet-up

by in Announcements on

I'll be heading to England next week to talk about DevOps and Cloud Stuffs.

London Get-together!

Who's up for a pub nite? I'm thinking somewhere in London on Friday, May 24 and/or Saturday May 25. If you're up for getting together for some dinner and drinks, please drop me a line and we'll figure something out. And hey, first round's on me!

7 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-18

A Cascade of Failure

by in CodeSOD on

Ben sent in the following snippet from a PHP site. His description of the site as a whole is unpublishable in most countries, but among his frankly shocking profanity he pointed out a lack of error checking and comments, and an abundance of unreadable inline code and confusing, unnecessary functions.

When Ben tried to describe the following routine though, he broke down, weeping openly. While we wait for him to regain his composure, let's ponder the depth of wrong present in this code:

65 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-05

Trust Your Instincts

by in Feature Articles on

I'm not looking for a new job, but a head-hunter called (from a five year old resume) with a position that sounded pin point perfect. Since there is nothing going on at work, I thought I'd check it out.

At the interview, I met some mid and senior level developers, and the team lead. They asked the usual technical, problem solving and how-would-you-x type of questions. I answered fairly well, and established a decent rapport while trading war stories. They seemed to feel the same way, as they grabbed the manager to chat with me afterward.

118 comments - Last comment @ 2013-08-11

What's This?

by in Error'd on

"I just wanted to know what a certain pending charge meant on my credit card, unfortunately the help text popup didn't know either," writes Alex N.

69 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-10

Slacking Off

by in Feature Articles on

“It’s a small, dynamic company.” “We’re growing, and growing fast!” “Our agile team needs some strong management, and we think you’re right for the job.” “Your paycheck is going to be so large Ed McMahon will deliver it.”

Michael had heard this pitch before, but this time, he decided to take the position. The IT director, Lisa, had her head on straight and a clear vision for what she wanted from Michael and his new team. Those eight developers and eight testers had languished without any meaningful oversight for the better part of a year. The result: a team behind schedule, over budget, and the best developers fleeing for better prospects.

153 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-23

Re-Inventing the Alphabet

by in CodeSOD on

Michael listened as his co-worker Draughon droned on at lunch. "I just don't trust hashes, man. I never understood any of the algorithms behind them, and I don't trust anything I don't understand."

"But MD5 is a well-documented algorithm," Michael countered.

113 comments - Last comment @ 2023-08-07
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