The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Pythonic Wheel Reinvention

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-31

Starting with Java, a robust built-in class library is practically a default feature of modern programming languages. Why struggle with OS-specific behaviors, or with writing your own code, or managing a third party library to handle problems like accessing files or network resources.

One common class of WTF is the developer who steadfastly refuses to use it. They inevitably reinvent the wheel as a triangle with no axle. Another is the developer who is simply ignorant of what the language offers, and is too lazy to Google it. They don’t know what a wheel is, so they invent a coffee-table instead.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-04

As the Clock Terns

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-01-30

“Hydranix” can’t provide much detail about today’s code, because they’re under a “strict NDA”. All they could tell us was that it’s C++, and it’s part of a “mission critical” front end package. Honestly, I think this line speaks for itself:

(mil == 999 ? (!(mil = 0) && (sec == 59 ? 
  (!(sec = 0) && (min == 59 ? 
    (!(min = 0) && (++hou)) : ++min)) : ++sec)) : ++mil);

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-03

The Mystery of the SmallInt

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-01-29

PT didn’t provide very much information about today’s Representative Line.

Clearly bits and bytes was not something studied in this SQL stored procedure author. Additionally, Source control versions are managed with comments. OVER 90 Thousand!

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-05

#TITLE_OF_ERRORD2#

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-01-26

Joe P. wrote, When I tried to buy a coffee at the airport with my contactless VISA card, it apparently thought my name was '%s'."

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-05

The More Things Change: Fortran Edition

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-01-25

Technology improves over time. Storage capacity increases. Spinning platters are replaced with memory chips. CPUs and memory get faster. Moore's Law. Compilers and languages get better. More language features become available. But do these changes actually improve things? Fifty years ago, meteorologists used the best mainframes of the time, and got the weather wrong more than they got it right. Today, they have a global network of satellites and supercomputers, yet they're wrong more than they're right (we just had a snowstorm in NJ that was forecast as 2-4", but got 16" before drifting).

As with most other languages, FORTRAN also added structure, better flow control and so forth. The problem with languages undergoing such a massive improvement is that occasionally, coding styles live for a very long time.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-30

Make Your Apps Better with Raygun

by Scot Devera in Sponsor Post on 2018-01-24

I once inherited an application which had a bug in it. Okay, I’ve inherited a lot of applications like that. In this case, though, I didn’t know that there was a bug, until months later, when I sat next to a user and was shocked to discover that they had evolved a complex work-around to bypass the bug which took about twice as long, but actually worked.

“Why didn’t you open a ticket? This shouldn’t be like this.”

28 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-30

All Saints' Day

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-01-24

Oh, PHP. It's the butt of any number of jokes in the programming community. Those who do PHP often lie and pretend they don't, just to avoid the social stigma. Today's submitter not only works in PHP, but they also freelance: the bottom of the bottom of the development hierarchy.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-24

Archive This

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2018-01-23

Michael W came into the office to a hair-on-fire freakout: the midnight jobs failed. The entire company ran on batch processes to integrate data across a dozen ERPs, mainframes, CRMs, PDQs, OMGWTFBBQs, etc.: each business unit ran its own choice of enterprise software, but then needed to share data. If they couldn’t share data, business ground to a halt.

Business had ground to a halt, and it was because the archiver job had failed to copy some files. Michael owned the archiver program, not by choice, but because he got the short end of that particular stick.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-27

Alien Code Reuse

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-01-22

“Probably the best thing to do is try and reorganize the project some,” Tim, “Alien”’s new boss said. “It’s a bit of a mess, so a little refactoring will help you understand how the code all fits together.”

“Alien” grabbed the code from git, and started walking through the code. As promised, it was a bit of a mess, but partially that mess came from their business needs. There was a bunch of common functionality in a Common module, but for each region they did business in- Asia, North America, Europe, etc.- there was a region specific deployable, each in its own module. Each region had its own build target that would include the Common module as part of the build process.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-06

Alphabetical Soup

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-01-19

"I appreciate that TIAA doesn't want to fully recognize that the country once known as Burma now calls itself Myanmar, but I don't think that this is the way to handle it," Bruce R. writes.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-23

The Least of the Max

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-18

Adding assertions and sanity checks to your code is important, especially when you’re working in a loosely-typed language like JavaScript. Never assume the input parameters are correct, assert what they must be. Done correctly, they not only make your code safer, but also easier to understand.

Matthias’s co-worker… doesn’t exactly do that.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-26

In $BANK We Trust

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-01-17

During the few months after getting my BS and before starting my MS, I worked for a bank that held lots of securities - and gold - in trust for others. There was a massive vault with multiple layers of steel doors, iron door grates, security access cards, armed guards, and signature comparisons (live vs pre-registered). It was a bit unnerving to get in there, so deep below ground, but once in, it looked very much like the Fort Knox vault scene in Goldfinger.

At that point, PCs weren't yet available to the masses and I had very little exposure to mainframes. I had been hired as an assistant to one of their drones who had been assigned to find all of the paper-driven-changes that had gone awry and get their books up to date.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-17

Why Medical Insurance Is So Expensive

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2018-01-16

At the end of 2016, Ian S. accepted a contract position at a large medical conglomerate. He was joining a team of 6 developers on a project to automate what was normally a 10,000-hour manual process of cross-checking spreadsheets and data files. The end result would be a Django server offering a RESTful API and MySQL backend.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-15

Tern Back

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-01-15

In the process of resolving a ticket, Pedro C found this representative line, which has nothing to do with the bug he was fixing, but was just something he couldn’t leave un-fixed:

$categories = (isset($categoryMap[$product['department']]) ?
                            (isset($categoryMap[$product['department']][$product['classification']])
                                        ?
                                    $categoryMap[$product['department']][$product['classification']]
                                        : NULL) : NULL);

57 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-03

Hamilton, Hamilton, Hamilton, Hamilton

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-01-12

"Good news! I can get my order shipped anywhere I want...So long as the city is named Hamilton," Daniel wrote.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-16

Dictionary Definition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-11

Guy’s eight-person team does a bunch of computer vision (CV) stuff. Guy is the “framework Guy”: he doesn’t handle the CV stuff so much as provide an application framework to make the CV folks lives easy. It’s a solid division of labor, with one notable exception: Richard.

Richard is a Computer Vision Researcher, head of the CV team. Guy is a mere “code monkey”, in Richard’s terms. Thus, everything Richard does is correct, and everything Guy does is “cute” and “a nice attempt”. That’s why, for example, Richard needed to take a method called readFile() and turn it into readFileHandle(), “for clarity”.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-17

Warp Me To Halifax

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-10

Greenwich must think they’re so smart, being on the prime meridian. Starting in the 1840s, the observatory was the international standard for time (and thus vital for navigation). And even when the world switched to UTC, GMT is only different from that by 0.9s. If you want to convert times between time zones, you do it by comparing against UTC, and you know what?

I’m sick of it. Boy, I wish somebody would take them down a notch. Why is a tiny little strip of London so darn important?

52 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-03

Whiling Away the Time

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-01-09

There are two ways of accumulating experience in our profession. One is to spend many years accumulating and mastering new skills to broaden your skill set and ability to solve more and more complex problems. The other is to repeat the same year of experience over and over until you have one year of experience n times.

Anon took the former path and slowly built up his skills, adding to his repertoire with each new experience and assignment. At his third job, he encountered The Man, who took the latter path.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-15

JavaScript Centipede

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-08

Starting with the film Saw, in 2004, the “torture porn” genre started to seep into the horror market. Very quickly, filmmakers in that genre learned that they could abandon plot, tension, and common sense, so long as they produced the most disgusting concepts they could think of. The game of one-downsmanship arguably reached its nadir with the conclusion of The Human Centipede trilogy. Yes, they made three of those movies.

This aside into film critique is because Greg found the case of a “JavaScript Centipede”: the refuse from one block of code becomes the input to the next block.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-08-26

The Elephant in the Room

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-01-05

Robert K. wrote, "Let's just keep this error between us and never speak of it again."

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-09

Legacy Hardware

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-01-04

Thanks to Hired, we’ve got the opportunity to bring you another little special project- Legacy Hardware. Hold on tight for a noir-thriller that dares to ask the question: “why does everything in our organization need to talk to an ancient mainframe?” Also, it’s important to note, Larry Ellison really does have a secret lair on a volcanic island in Hawaii.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-08

Insert Away

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-01-03

"Troy! Troy!"

23 comments - Last comment @ 2022-06-05

Encreption

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-02

You may remember “Harry Peckhard’s ALM” suite from a bit back, but did you know that Harry Peckhard makes lots of other software packages and hardware systems? For example, the Harry Peckhard enterprise division releases an “Intelligent Management Center” (IMC).

How intelligent? Well, Sam N had a co-worker that wanted to use a very long password, like “correct horse battery staple”, but but Harry’s IMC didn’t like long passwords. While diagnosing, Sam found some JavaScript in the IMC’s web interface that provides some of the stongest encreption possible.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2023-05-17

2017: Nature, In Its Volatility

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2018-01-01

Happy New Year! Put that hangover on hold, as we return to an entirely different kind of headache, back on the "Galapagos". -- Remy

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.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-10

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