The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Visual Studio? Whatever!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-03-30

TZ wrote, "Looks like somebody at Microsoft doesn't like static web pages!"

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-03

Attack of the WASPs

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-29

Werner sent us some code from the telcom industry. Before we even get to the code, we have to look at one of the comments.

// This is a hack to be
// able to compile

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-06

A Unique Solution

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-28

Ruby is a nice little language, but I think it wouldn’t have exploded in popularity like it did without Rails. Nowadays, Ruby still seems to be the first choice of early-stage startups. A big part of that is how easy ActiveRecord makes database access.

Adrian was doing some code reviews, when he came across this line:

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-29

The Truth About Internationalization

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-03-27

Booleans. One would think that simple true and false would be sufficient to represent all the possible values. However, even more than dates, they are one of the most difficult things to master in all of computer science. There are all manner of possible values and many different ways of comparing different entities.

Compounding everything is another dimension to boolean-ness: internationalization. After all, not every language uses English spellings of true and false. In high school, they made me take French, so it'd be vrai and faux. For most of us, we'd put the language-specific spelling in an application-phrases file, cache it and pick the appropriate spelling based upon the meaning of the required phrase. However, the underlying core values of truth/falsehood would still be programming-language-specific.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2018-11-14

Authentication Failure

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-26

There are certain programming problems that I generally say you shouldn’t try and solve yourself. Dates, of course, are a big one. They’re more complicated than you think, and unless you want to make managing a date handling library your life’s work, just use someone else’s.

Encryption is another. There are so many subtle ways to do it wrong that unless it’s your specialty, you’re going to screw it up. Another similar problem is authentication.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-16

Mistakes From Out of the Blue

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-03-23

"I got this email out of the blue from TI. By the way, my name isn't ALFONSO," writes Jamie.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-17

Randomly Functional

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2018-03-22

Jonathan T. had recently been afforded the opportunity to go back and tweak the very first Python-based CMS he'd ever built. Years earlier, he and another junior developer had been forced to cobble this site together with no code reviews, oversight, or help of any kind. Terrible choices had been made in the name of getting their work done.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-29

An HTTP Code

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-03-21

Peter B’s company didn’t have the resource availability to develop their new PHP application entirely in-house, and thus brought in a Highly Paid Contractor™ to oversee that project. This story could end here, and you could fill in the rest, but Peter found an… interesting block of code during the autopsy on this disaster.

Now, I want you to imagine that someone has handed you an integer. You need to know if that integer constitutes a valid HTTP status code. Now, this could get difficult, as just because a number falls between 100 and 599 doesn’t mean that it’s actually a defined status code. Then again, services may define their own status codes, and clients should understand the class of a status code, even if they don’t understand the number, so getting a 147 code isn’t wrong, so we can just probably assume any n where 100 <= n < 600 is valid enough.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-01

Bank $Security

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-03-20

Banks. They take your money and lend it to others. They lend money deposited by other people to you, either as a car loan, mortgage, or for credit card purchases. For this privilege, you give them all of your personal information, including your social security number. Implicit in that exchange is the fact that the bank should keep your personal information confidential. Security is important. One might think that such a concept would be important to banks. One would be wrong.

To be fair, the high ranking people at the banks probably believe that all of their customer information should be - and is - secure and protected. Unfortunately, there are multiple layers of middle and lower management (that we all know all too well) that might not comprehend that point.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-27

A Passion for Details

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-19

Passion projects are so common in our industry that there are some people who won’t hire you as a programmer if you’re not also programming in your free time. That’s TRWTF, honestly. There’s nothing wrong with being the kind of programmer who shows up for your 9–5 and then goes home and doesn’t touch a computer until the next day.

There’s also nothing wrong with passion projects. I have a bunch of them, usually carefully chosen to have absolutely no utility whatsoever, so they never start feeling like a job.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-25

Drunken Parsing

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-03-16

"Hi, $(lookup(BOOZE_SHOP_OF_LEAST_MISTRUST))$ Have you been drinking while parsing your variables?" Tom G. writes.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-12-03

Flushed Down the Pipe

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-03-15

No matter how much I personally like functional programming, I know that it is not a one-size fits all solution for every problem.

Vald M knows this too. Which is why they sent us an email that simply said: “We have a functional programmer on the team”, with this representative line attached.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-25

Lightweight Date Handling

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-14

Darlene has a co-worker who discovered a problem: they didn’t know or understand any of the C++ libraries for manipulating dates and times. Checking the documentation or googling it is way too much to ask, so instead they opted to use the tools they already understood- a database. We’ve seen that before.

There was just one other problem: this application wasn’t data-driven, and thus didn’t have a database to query.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-26

And Now You Have Two Problems

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-13

We all know the old saying: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” The quote has a long and storied history, but Roger A’s co-worker decided to take it quite literally.

Specifically, they wanted to be able to build validation rules which could apply a regular expression to the input. Thus, they wrote the RegExpConstraint class:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-26

Daylight Losing Time

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2018-03-12

The second Sunday of March has come to pass, which means if you're a North American reader, you're getting this an hour earlier than normal. What a bonus! That's right, we all got to experience the mandatory clock-changing event known as Daylight Saving Time. While the sun, farm animals, toddlers, etc. don't care about an arbitrary changing of the clock, computers definitely do.

Early in my QA career, I had the great (dis)pleasure of fully regression testing electronic punch clocks on every possible software version every time a DST change was looming. It was every bit as miserable as it sounds but was necessary because if punches were an hour off for thousands of employees, it would wreak havoc on our clients' payroll processing.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-15

ICANN't Even...

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-03-09

Jeff W. writes, "You know, I don't think this one will pass."

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-14

Let's Set a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-08

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you came across a method called setDate. Would you think, perhaps, that it stores a date somewhere? Of course it does. But what else does it do?

Matthias was fixing some bugs in a legacy project, and found himself asking exactly that question.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-18

Just One More Point

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2018-03-07

Tim B. had been tasked with updating an older internal application implemented in Java. Its primary purpose was to read in and display files containing a series of XY points—around 100,000 points per file on average—which would then be rendered as a line chart. It was notoriously slow, taking 1-2 minutes to process each file, but otherwise remained fairly stable.

51 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-20

The Unbidden Password

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-03-06

So here's a thing that keeps me up at night: we get a lot of submissions about programmers who cannot seem to think like users. There's a type of programmer who has never not known how computers worked, whose theory of computers in their mind has been so accurate for so long that they can't look at things in a different way. Many times, they close themselves off from users, insisting that if the user had a problem with using the software, they just don't know how computers work and need to educate themselves. Rather than focus on what would make the software more usable, they program what is easiest for the computer to do, and call it a day.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-21

A Very Private Memory

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-05

May the gods spare us from “clever” programmers.

Esben found this little block of C# code:

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-14

I Don't Always Test my Code, but When I do...

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-03-02

"Does this mean my package is here or is it also in development?" writes Nariim.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-12

What a Stream

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-03-01

In Java 8, they added the Streams API. Coupled with lambdas, this means that developers can write the concise and expressive code traditionally oriented with functional programming. It’s the best bits of Java blended with the best bits of Clojure! The good news, is that it allows you to write less code! The better news is that you can abuse it to write more code, if you’re so inclined.

Antonio inherited some code written by “Frenk”, who was thus inclined. Frenk wasn’t particularly happy with their job, but were one of the “rockstar programmers” in the eyes of management, so Frenk was given the impossible-to-complete tasks and given complete freedom in the solution.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-28

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