The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Attention to Detail

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-31

The exotic and exciting life of the world-traveling contractor wasn’t exactly what Angie had been expecting. It mostly meant living in a dreary apartment on the outskirts of some city in a short drive from an industrial park where she’d go to try and keep 30-year old C code and their new ERP from fighting to the death. Six months later, she’d be off to the same apartment near the same industrial park in a different country.

When the crash came, it came hard. Hard enough that Angie ditched IT and got a temp job working in a customer service call-center for a greeting card company. She wasn’t exactly the best person on the phone, and nobody was giving her stellar marks for her cheerful demeanor during her quarterly review.

A vintage 'get well' card from 1949, with the text, 'How's the convalescent?/Down but not out'

24 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-07

Take a Byte of a Nibble

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-30

Imagine, if you will, that you have 64-bits of data. From this 64-bits of data, you need to extract a nibble, which contains the value that you care about. Now, I’m sure you’re imagining an integer with some bitmasks to extract the data, which is a perfectly sane approach.

Tomasz inherited some code from his company’s German office. It took the approach of taking the 64-bits and storing the 64-bits in an eight element byte array. Then, it extracted the values from that array with code looking like this:

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-06

Paying Taxes on Technical Debt

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2017-08-29

In the U.S., individuals are expected to file federal and state tax returns once a year by April 15. The tax forms are quite complicated, and have all sorts of sub-forms and schedules to support and detail the numbers on the main form. The tax code of the U.S. is approximately 74,000 pages of special cases.

For many items, the same data needs to be entered on multiple forms, usually as the starting point for different calculations that depend upon the same information; these are duplicated again on both federal and state returns. It follows that tax preparation software needs to put the relevant numbers in all the places that they are needed.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-04

Changing With the Times

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-08-28

Melody got tapped to do a code review on a pull-request from a veteran team-member. It was… an interesting PR, in that very, very little changed. The code was terrible before anyone touched it- for example, the C-file started with 355 lines of variable declarations inside of the main method.

It was, in fact, down around line 354 where Melody noticed the change.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-13

The Sky's the Limit!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-25

"Oh boy! I wonder how they'll top this for the end-of-week bonus prize?" writes Zak.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-29

The Security Audit

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-24

We do our best to anonymize submissions, but there’s always a chance that some dangerously identifying detail slips through. Every once in a while, a submitter contacts us to ask for a modification. More rarely, a submitter’s employer contacts us.

Our rule is to make edits more or less as requested, then move on without comment. There’s nothing about an article so sacrosanct that it’s worth going to war over.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-02

The Story of Things

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-23

Every line of code tells a story. It never just… appears. Someone made and crafted that code. There’s a story, and an explanation for how that code could be. The world, even the bad, awful corners of it, makes sense and can be understood.

For example, Luke sends us this block.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-02

Time To Transfer

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-08-22

When people think about government, they usually think about a President or Prime Minister, Senators, MPs, or what have you. But government isn't just a handful of people at the top of the food chain: there's government all the way down to the city level, quietly making the country run. Driver's licenses have to be issued, as do pet licenses. Buildings have to be inspected and certified. All those elevator certificates get printed up somewhere. Increasingly, these small functions are being computerized—in bits and pieces, in incompatible systems—and hooked up to the Internet.

51 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-02

An Emailed Condition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-21

For a change of pace, the code in this CodeSOD isn’t the real WTF. Our Anonymous submitter works for a company that handles meeting scheduling for corporate customers. This entails shipping off loads of HTML-emails, and that means using a relatively terrible WYSIWYG editor that generates code like this:

<p class="MsoNormal"><strong style="color: #003877;">Meals</strong></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:" verdana",sans-serif;="" mso-fareast-language:en-gb"="">
All breakfasts and lunches will be served in Food Capital on the ground floor of the hotel.
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:" verdana",sans-serif;="" mso-fareast-language:en-gb"="">
We look forward to hosting you for the following dinners:
<o:p></o:p></span></p>

26 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-20

Ride the URL Line

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-18

Michael R. wrote, "So, https://TfL.Gov.UK...does that bus go on the 'Information Superhighway'?"

17 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-21

Featurette: Hired!

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-17

As you know, Hired has been sponsoring the site for the past few months. I went “behind the scenes” to have a brief chat with Michael Mitchell, a full stack web engineer focused on their “Candidate Experience” features.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-23

Object Relational Mangling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-16

Writing quality database code is a challenge. Most of your commands need to be expressed in SQL, which is a mildly complicated language made more complicated by minor variations across databases. Result sets often have a poor mapping to our business logic’s abstractions, especially in object-oriented languages. Thus, we have Object-Relational-Mapping tools, like Microsoft’s EntityFramework.

With an ORM, you use an object-oriented approach to fetching your objects, and could write something like: IList<HJFRate> rates = db.HJFRates.where(rate=>rate.typeOfUse == typeOfUse) to return all the rows as objects. There’s no concern about SQL injections, no need to process the result set directly. While ORMs can generate poor SQL, or create really inefficient data-access patterns, their ease-of-use is a big selling point.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-21

Cut Short

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2017-08-15

Marcus worked on a small networking team responsible for keeping a series of UK-based garages interconnected with the world-wide web. Seymour, the Team Leader (in title only), knew far less about networking than Marcus, but that didn't stop him from acting like the big shot. Seymour was working a cash register at the original garage several years ago when the owner asked him, "You're a young guy, right? That means you know how the internet works. What can we do to make this place internet-friendly?" After taking a Networking 101 course, Seymour managed to get the garage online, then enabled it to monitor gas prices and perform credit card transactions. This made Seymour a hero to the owner, and earned him the title, "Networking Team Leader" before he even had a team.

Eventually the garage grew from a single location into a chain. When each new location opened, Seymour made it "internet-friendly", using the same techniques he learned at the original store, which usually involved sloppy cable runs and the cheapest router he could buy. When it came time to do more than just have the ISP arrive to show where Seymour to plug in the network cable, he was completely lost. Having multiple locations networked together was really advanced stuff, so he convinced the owner to hire some help.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-17

Attack of the "i" Creatures

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-14

“Mrs S” works for a large software vendor. This vendor has a tendency to quickly increase staffing to hit arbitrary release targets, and thus relies heavily on contractors. Since they’re usually doing this during a time crunch, these contractors may have a… dubious skill set.

They also don’t care. There is no documentation, no tests, and no explanation. They are just paid tho write the code, not maintain it. They’ll be on another contract before long, so it’s some other schmuck’s problem.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2023-10-23

D.O.A.

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-11

John A. writes, "Um, you know, I don't think this was a brilliant idead."

20 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-29

Protect Your Property

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-10

Given the common need to have getter/setter methods on properties, many languages have adopted conventions which try and make it easier to implement/invoke them. For example, if you name a method foo in Ruby, you can invoke it by doing: obj.foo = 5.

In the .NET family of languages, there’s a concept of a property, which bundles the getter and setter methods together through some syntactical sugar. So, something like this, in VB.Net.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-18

Disk Administrations

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2017-08-09

It was a mandatory change control meeting. Steven S.’s department, a research branch of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health in Belgium, assembled in a cramped meeting room without enough chairs for everyone. Camille, head of IT, was nonplussed.

“These orders come directly from Security,” she began. “Just last month, we monitored over a hundred attempts to break into the HCP.” The Home Care Platform was a database of citizens’ requests for doctors’ visits, prescription coverage, etc. Steven’s team had developed a mobile app that gave citizens access to HCP’s records.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-15

Drop it Like it's a Deployment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-08

Zenith’s company went ahead on and outsourced 95% of their development to the lowest bidder. Said bidder promised a lot of XML and MVC and whatever TLAs sounded buzzwordy that day, and off they went. It’s okay, though, the customer isn’t just taking that code and deploying it- “Zenith” gets to do code reviews to ensure code quality. The general flow of the post-code-review conversation goes something like:

Zenith: This code shouldn’t go into production, hell, it’s so bad that a proud parent wouldn’t even hang it on their fridge.
Management: I’ll raise your concerns.
Outsourced Team: We did the needful, please review again.
Zenith: They didn’t change anything. It doesn’t even compile.
Offshore Team: There are too many barriers, we cannot hit deadlines, your team is too strict
Managment: Yeah… I guess you’re gonna have to lay off the contractors. Don’t be so strict in your code reviews. We have to deliver software!

39 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-14

Credential Helper

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2017-08-07

John S. worked with a customer who still owned several Windows 2008/R2 servers. Occassionally during automated management and deployments, these machines threw exceptions because they weren't configured for remote management. One day, John caught an exception on a SQL box and remoted in to address the problem.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-09

A Test-imonial

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-08-04

"You know, usually these statements are just marketing B.S., but I think this guy's got the right idea," wrote Philip K.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-15

Nature In Its Volatility

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-08-03

About two years ago, we took a little trip to the Galapagos- a tiny, isolated island where processes and coding practices evolved… a bit differently. Calvin, as an invasive species, brought in new ways of doing things- like source control, automated builds, and continuous integration- and changed the landscape of the island forever.

Or so it seemed, until the first hiccup. Shortly after putting all of the code into source control and automating the builds, the application started failing in production. Specifically, the web service calls out to a third party web service for a few operations, and those calls universally failed in production.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

Synchronized Threads

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-08-02

Tim was debugging one of those multithreading bugs, where there appeared to be a race condition of some kind. The developer who had initially written the code denied that such a thing could exist: “It’s impossible, I used locks to synchronize the threads!”

Well, he did use locks at the very least.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-10

The 5% Candidate

by Jane Bailey in Tales from the Interview on 2017-08-01

There are many kinds of jackasses in this world, from the pretentious prick to the smug cynic. Each has their own flavor of awfulness, their own way of making you hate not only them but the entire world that gave birth to them. This story is about one kind of jackass in particular, perhaps the most classic flavor: the man so sure of his own greatness that he becomes enraged at the world whenever it fails to bow before his massive intellect.

74 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-18

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