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A long time ago, we learned the true values of boolean fields. But sometimes, {true, false, file_not_found} isn’t enough. Sometimes, you need more truthiness.
Wayne supports an application that uses its own custom macro-language to define how to generate Word documents. It’s database driven, and many of the documents depend on one notable table with 160 columns.
"Noticed this when attempting to purchase a slackline," writes Brandon Kane, "For my own sanity I had to check that 25 meters really is 82 feet."
Erik’s promotion to Senior Software Engineer came after five years of cranking out high-quality software for his employer- a large ISP. Despite his heroic efforts, not every bit of legacy software from the Dark Ages had been eradicated. Some things were best left undisturbed- so long as they still worked.
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One day, the call center’s queue montioring program stopped displaying status and call data; the service desk ground to a halt. This monitoring application was a key cog in their customer service department’s daily operations. It routed calls to available team mebers, tracked how many calls were in the queue, and calculated how much life the callers would waste listening to awful hold music. While the service desk staff welcomed not having to answer idiots’ calls, their manager, Dan, was livid.
Some time ago, Marla was asked to take a look at a problematic data load to help figure out exactly what the heck was going wrong with it and report back to management.
The process was supposed to be simple: download an XML file from a web service and then merge the data to the database, updating and inserting as needed.
Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. This is one of his stories.
The order had come from the Dean of Dresden campus herself. In an effort to maximize classroom time (and justify expenditure budgets), lecture times would now be accurate to the second. IT would be responsible for the deployment of new, centrally synchronized clocks.
The Academy graduating class of 2316 gathered in lecture hall. The moment was almost at hand. A moment they had been anticipating for the last four years. Indeed, for many of them, they had been eagerly looking forward to finding out the secret since the time they formed their first differential equation.
As the professor strode to the lectern, a murmur spread through the room. As she placed her notes on the lectern, she straightened her glasses, a hush fell over the crowd.
"The SkyDrive Pro installer has issued an ultimatum," writes Matt Wanchap, "Either that legacy access application or the SharePoint site has got to go."
Tom worked for a Belgian insurance company, which meant he knew how to say “We’re not covering that” in three languages. He was a Java developer who’d spent many years building and supporting web services. His only real complaint was Maxime, a “visionary” who’d shown up months earlier. Maxime had been hired as a project lead, and wowed business users and management alike with authoritative, buzzwordy pap. Such a snake-charmer was Maxime that he wasn’t just leading projects anymore- he did all of his own designing, coding, and testing. No one else in the entire company had such one-man-wrecking-crew privileges. Tom had never been impressed with Maxime’s drivel, but his attempts to inject reason were repeatedly shot down. Tom resolved to ignore Maxime, but that became more difficult as Maxime’s “improvements” encroached upon Tom’s domain.
One painfully bright and painfully early Monday morning, the boss didn’t even wait for everyone to grab coffee before commandeering a conference room.
“The GTS01 server slowed down considerably over the weekend,” he told them. “The network team assures us the problem’s not on their end. There are only six applications running on that box.” He called up a PowerPoint slide with a bulleted list. “Maxime, any thoughts as to what’s wrong?”
A common task for JavaScript is to do something clever, like display a random image . Those of us old enough to remember the late 90s might recall an era when that was the coolest trick you could build into a web page.
Marcus found this approach to this problem, which is the sort of code that seems just plain ugly at first glance. At second glance, you can’t help but wonder- what were they thinking?
Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. This is one of his stories.
The techs from central IT in Berlin were an hour late, to Hanzo’s’s chagrin. He and his boss Gertrude were waiting in the campus server room. The Dean of Dresden campus, after numerous complaints from staff about the internet connection, demanded that IT give them a new gateway. The old tower unit, a file server in a past life, was dropping more packets than it successfully received.
We've all written a DAO:
Aug 13
Connection con = ...;
PreparedStatement ps = con.prepareStatement("select ...");
ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery();
List<YourEntity> list = new ArrayList<YourEntity>();
while (rs.next()) {
// extract individual column values
YourEntity entity = new YourEntity(...);
list.add(entity);
}
rs.close();
ps.close();
con.close();
return list;
"Knowing how sketchy the data is that I'm importing, 'a wizard' just won't do - I need an A-List Wizard to look things over," writes Josh P..
Don't forget, The Daily WTF loves terrible emails. If you have some to share, mail in your mail!
Verizon Maintenance in Alaiowaska (from Bob)
In New York City, especially after September 11, they take security seriously. There are numerous police officers patrolling around in high-priority places. There are armed military personnel with assault weapons in-hand in heavily travelled areas. They even make you use electronic key cards to access public bicycles. Multiple levels of picture identification and key card access are required for most major institutions.
Bruce K. found this snippet of code to destroy stuff. There is no form with a password field that calls this method. It's just out there. Unprotected. Waiting for someone to figure out how to call it...
Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. These are his stories.
"Is your connection working?" Gertrude, Hanzo’s boss, asked one night. Hanzo had been hired by Dresden’s IT department just a few weeks ago.
A. Dev had just inherited a C# project to finish and maintain. The application was so infested with WTFs that the stench overpowered any working code. The story behind the application was very simple: the customer originally let the CTO's nephew develop the application as a consultant. The nephew then disappeared and upper management got worried. The CTO told management that his plan was to outsource the rest of the development of the application in order to ensure good-quality code.
Once A. Dev discovered blocks like the following, he realized that they had been not assigned with "completing the development of the application" but rather a full rewrite:
"I never thought Oracle SQL Developer could make me feel stupid for typing the wrong command," writes Dave Kieras.
//TODO: ask terry about this when he comes back from vacation //row["VERSION"] = (decimal)row["VERSION"] + 1; row.AcceptChanges(); row.SetAdded();
As a profession, we have the perfect scam for our customers. Every time technology marches far enough ahead, and support for the old technology wanes, we convince management to allow us to rewrite the widget, or better yet start over from scratch. Over 30 years. I personally have rewritten the same Mortgage Backed Securities (or equities, or Corporate Bonds, or Treasuries) trading system for a variety of customers in C, C++, Java 1.2, Java 1.4, Java 1.5 and Java 1.6. Oh, they ask for a new feature here and there, but the bulk of the functionality never changes; they just keep paying us to do what is essentially the same work over and over. It's an unintended scam truly worthy of the descriptor: caper!
Capes are cool. They create an aura of mystery. Who doesn't feel it when they see Batman swooping in? Or Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound? Capes are even more awesome when worn by someone that embodies evil. For example, Count Dracula. Or Doctor Doom. Of course, not all capes inspire awe; some inspire fear, dread and despair...
His friends would say stop whining, they've had enough of that.
His friends would say stop pining, there's other girls to look at.
They've tried to set him up with Tiffany and Indigo,
But there's something about Mary that they don't know.
Back in 1988, a small start-up company had made a name for itself by creating and selling a spreadsheet application. Keep in mind this is prior to the domination of Lotus and Excel, so it was possible for an application that met the needs of their customers and did it well to be successful. In this case, successful enough so that the start-up was purchased by a large(r) company in the Silicon Valley. Since the purchase was actually for the software (and not solely to get the talents of the engineering team), development continued in Texas with the QA process taken over by their Silicon Valley master...er...owners. Mary was assigned to be the QA person looking after the application.
Today is Labor Day in the United States and as a result, many of us have the day off in honor of the working man.
So, if you have the day off - hooray! If not, well, sucks to be you. In either case, please consider the amount of work done by the below JavaScript that Andrew T. sent our way. I hope that if the developer does not have the day off he or she takes the time to work on a better solution.
