The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Meaty Problem

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-31

“The scales are down again, where the heck is Andre?”

Roger had heard this cry often enough that he didn’t bother to poke his head out of his cubicle to see what the issue was. He worked for a meat-packing company. Sides of beef came in one side of the building, where they were sectioned and cut into smaller, grocery-store-friendly portions, and then shipped out the other side in refrigerated trucks. Along the way, the pieces of meat needed to be weighed multiple times. When the scales went down, production stopped.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-07

Scrubbed Inputs

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-30

In this age of JavaScript everywhere, developers have to come up with all sorts of ways to work around the uglier segments of JavaScript. For example, Aaron found this block, which promises to scrub “false-y” fields.

require _ = require("underscore");

// recurses, use with care
var scrubFalseyFields = function (obj) {
    return  _.chain(obj)
        .pairs()
        .filter(function (pair) {
            var val = pair[1];
            if (_.isObject(pair[1])) {
                // recurse!
                pair[1] = scrubFalseyFields(val);
            }
            return val;
        })
        .object()
        .value();
};

21 comments - Last comment @ 2016-08-24

Tested Backups

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-29

The “Big Boss” of Initech’s Australian division ran the Sydney office as his own personal kingdom. Work- or workers- he didn’t care for was banished to the hinterlands of the Melbourne office. For example, IT services was a “useless sack of morons who only know how to spend money,” and thus the entire department was banished to Melbourne.

Stewart C. lived in Melbourne, and was a new hire not long after the exile. The Melbourne office, with a 900km buffer zone protecting it from the whims of upper management, was actually a decent place to work. At least, until Brendan arrived.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2024-01-04

The Last of His Tribe

by Jane Bailey in CodeSOD on 2016-03-28

"The best thing about working here," Jaeson was told by his boss Renee on the walkthrough of the dev area on his first day, "is that we work closely with the customers, meaning you never EVER have to cash checks the salespeople wrote: you're only held to what your team promised." This sounded good to Jaeson, who was considerably more concerned about getting away from his previous company's open floor plan than the possibility of customer interaction, but hey, he'd take the icing on the cake. It sounded like he was in for a very productive time.

"Let's see, where to put you," mused Renee, glancing over the pods of cubicles. "Aha, I think Zebra Tribe will work." Zebra Tribe, it turned out, was the name of a scrum team; Jaeson would be working closely with the other members of that tribe, as they were called, in the coming months in order to accomplish tasks during sprints.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-11

An Identity Crisis

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-03-25

Ari S. writes, "Not only was the poor computer running Windows XP, it also had to suffer through having the Apple keyboard and mouse attached to it.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-28

You Can't Always Count on Regular Expressions

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2016-03-24

After spending the most of the afternoon searching, trying to solve a rather vexing issue, Adam found exactly the solution he was looking for and wanted to squirrel it away for later reference.

Sure - he could have added to "Favorites" in his browser like on every other website in the world, but there was something about the "bookmark" button on this particular site that called to him. It was more than a dumb link, it was a counter telling you how many people had bookmarked a resource, and you could bookmark it yourself.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-05

A Signed Release

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2016-03-23

Brody and his team of contract developers were nervously awaiting a major update to TexOil's member website to go live. Between a complete overhaul of the site and massive database changes, it would be difficult to roll back if anything went awry. They were only responsible for developing the software, however. The task of the actual deployments fell to Lars' release team.

The development and testing process had been rigorous, but Brody felt confident in his code after receiving UAT signoff the week before. There was even time for extensive load and stress testing this time around. Brody spent most of the weekend running builds and packaging up the code and database scripts so that Lars and Co. could prep the deployment first thing Monday.

Lars strolled in an hour late Monday morning, seemingly unconcerned with the magnitude of the release before him. "Hey Lars," Brody greeted him. "It wasn't fun, but I got everything packaged for you guys to do your thing. So you should probably get started so we can hit the ground running tonight."

22 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

Finding the File

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-22

There’s one challenge we rarely think about when writing file-handling code: how do we know where the file actually is? Josh H. inherited some C# code that puts a lot of thought into that. A lot.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

The New(ish) TDWTF

by Patrick Roach in Announcements on 2016-03-21

You might have noticed some updates to the site, although if we did our job right you won’t notice half of them.

What’s New?

We are saying goodbye to Discourse, our old forum and comments system. In its place reintroducing an in-house built system, thanks to the hard work of our newest team member Ben Lubar.

73 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

Back Away Slowly

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2016-03-21

It'd been two hours since Mike had gone to bed. Two slow, miserable hours of counting sheep, staring at the barely visible ceiling, and trying to shake off the stress of the last few weeks at work.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

Adequate Enough

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-03-18

"Dell TechDirect's password policy is a lot like their computers," writes John, "Not the greatest, not the worse...just 'ok'."

41 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

String Cheese

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-17

Imagine you’re a Java programmer. You need to iterate across a list of strings. Your natural instinct might be to just use a for loop, and that’s proof that you’re not a true enterprise Java programmer.

Diether’s company is home to true enterprise developers, and they know how to get things done.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-21

Admin From Hell

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2016-03-16

"Hello, everyone!"

Daniel's eyes slowly rose from his desk as his manager entered the room.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-21

Encryption By Analogy

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2016-03-15

Last week, US President Obama said something that is usually the sort of line we give the “idiot boss” character in one of our stories. From Ars Technica:

“I am not a software engineer,” Obama made his beliefs wholly clear. “You cannot take an absolutist view on this. If your view is strong encryption no matter what and we can and should create black boxes, that does not strike the balance that we’ve lived with for 200 or 300 years. And it’s fetishizing our phones above every other value. That can’t be the right answer.”

79 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-08

Code Changes Over Time

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-14

Code changes over time. Most of what developers do is manage changes to code. Dana inherited some pretty awful PHP, and decided to take some time to improve performance and make sure any errors thrown by the PHP were actually displayed nicely for the user.

While looking at the file-upload module, Dana found this:

18 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-22

In Soviet Russia, Birthday Translates You!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-03-11

"Chrome translator apparently has issue with the numbers 11 and 30 when translating mail.ru to English," wrote Marc B., "Interestingly, the Russian version of the site displays the numbers properly, so WTF Chrome?"

38 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-18

The Self Test

by TJ Mott in CodeSOD on 2016-03-10

I consider code cleanup to be important, almost as important as actually writing code, especially since I spend a lot of time doing maintenance and support. During idle time, I enjoy digging through existing code to find overcomplicated algorithms and dead code and see what I can simplify or even delete. While there may not be an immediate benefit, it makes future debugging far easier if you trim out dead code and shorten 3,000 line C files to 500 line ones. And quite often, subtle and difficult-to-diagnose bugs simply go away.

While doing this on one of our products, I found a very old public API that appears to have never been completed. At least I hope so, because there’s no way any of it does anything remotely useful.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-14

It Can't Be Done

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2016-03-09

Decades ago I had several clients who insisted upon having two PCs on their desk. One would boot up into the word processor and the other would boot up into a spreadsheet program. No amount of instruction could teach these people that a computer can not only run multiple programs, but it can run them at the same time. To this day, these folks are still my clients, and happily paying me to support this arrangement.

Some people simply can not be trained.

56 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-10

JavaScript Obfuscation

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-08

We have to be careful about the articles we publish on TDWTF. We have a responsibility to our submitters, to protect their identity and anonymize the details of their stories. We have a responsibility to our readers- mostly to be entertaining.

Last week’s JSF–k story failed one of our readers. Poor Blazej didn’t find it entertaining- it gave him upsetting flashbacks to his own experience with a similar event.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-09

The Swing of Things

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2016-03-07

While studying Java in college, Eugene had the great misfortune of being hired by a company that specialized in Java Swing applications. (For those of you who don’t know, Swing is a cross-platform framework for desktop GUI applications.) He was quickly swept aboard a new project: taking a new client’s poorly-implemented, buggy, and unstable PHP website and upgrading it to a new, clean, Java-based version.

The team quickly stumbled into a major roadblock. “This has to be a web application?” questioned Rob, the team lead. “You can’t do web with Swing. Why don’t we just write them a Swing application?”

17 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-07

An Error is Worth 10 Words

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2016-03-04

"This was a screenshot I took of an error message I got many years ago (when Win95 was fairly new) after opening one too many instances of Word," Andrew H. wrote.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-30

Widgety Gadgety Boo

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2016-03-03

Ancient Coder submits for our review the following migraine-inducer:

This was a bug report about a very minor issue, a little warning box was not popping up. Simple, I thought, and I estimated it would take an hour to fix. Little did I know that someone had already poked at this issue and made this amazing log entry. I spent about half an hour trying to understand this code before I backed away, slowly.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-04

The Swamp Cooler

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-02

Joe took a job as a programmer at a small shop. It was a huge pay cut, but his current employer was locked in a death-spiral of declining revenue, declining collections, and declining sales. It was time to get out, and his local market didn’t have a lot of options.

“We’re a small shop, so we’ll need you to help out with general IT stuff,” Joe’s boss, Jimmy, said. By “help out”, what Jimmy actually meant was “be the helpdesk tech, server tech, and if you have time, write some code”. On an average day, Joe’d be running from user desktop to user desktop, installing Excel or removing malware, before hustling to the server room to manually reboot a locked up box, then on his way out the door, he’d push some changes to the company’s website and pray nothing was wrong.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-07

The Monthly Report

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-03-01

“Karen, you need to run the monthly report while Ivan is on vacation,” Bruno asked.

“Wait, isn’t that just a scheduled job?”

17 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-21

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