The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Perfunctory Yet Functional

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-11-29

"This system is scheduled for a reboot at 26:00 hours on Monday. Or, as it's more commonly known, 'Tuesday'," Peter G. wrote.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-12

Classic WTF: Manager of the Data Dump

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2019-11-28

It's a holiday in the US, where we catalog the things we're thankful for. I'm thankful that developers collectively learned to understand how databases work, and didn't start releasing databases that stored flexible documents with no real schema and could just be used as a data dump. That would be terrible! This classic WTF illustrates that. Originally. --Remy

J.T. is not well liked amongst the developers at his organization. As a Database Administrator, it's J.T's job to make sure that database structures and queries maintain data integrity and do not put an unnecessarily load on the server. This often gets in the way of the developers, who prefer to think of the database as a giant dump site where data gets thrown and is rummaged through to be retrieved. Things like "indexes," "valid data," and "naming conventions" are merely obstacles put in place by J.T. to make their life harder.

Generally, the submission-review-rejection procedure happens once or twice with most of the developers. But one particular developer -- a newly hired ".NET Wizard" named Frank -- turns the procedure into a daily cycle that drags on for several weeks. Following is Frank's reply to the first in a chain of rejections on a project that Frank was leading up ...

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-11

Repeat and Rinse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-27

The challenges of doing a national integration continue to plague Sergio. More specifically, the “solutions” left behind by his predecessors continue to annoy.

Sergio has inherited a system which needs to plug in to a national database. As the national integration was something which was added after the business processes were already determined, that means that certain terms/descriptors/captions/etc. are used internally than are required externally, and vice versa. So, for example, one laboratory test Sergio’s company performs might be called “QD1” internally, but is known by the government as “F3+”.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-15

Newly Singleton

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-11-26

Shery was brought on to help with a project which was “going well”. “Going well” meant that all the little icons on the project management dashboard were green, which is one of the most effective ways to conceal a project which is struggling.

Shery’s component was large, and it was complicated, and it had a well defined interface to the rest of the application. Specifically, they had a documented JSON message format which her code would receive via JMS. That meant she could do the vast majority of her work in isolation, without talking too much to the existing team, so she did.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-28

A Very Personal Role

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-25

Nohemi has a program which needs to apply role-based security. Due to their organizational needs, the rules for role names are a bit unusual. Some roles have to be a case-insensitive match. But some roles have a more flexible pattern they need to have. This is how her co-worker implemented this:

    public static String decodeRole(String role) {
        String decodedRole = "";
        if (role != null && !role.trim().equals("")) {
            if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_1_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_1;
            else if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_2_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_2;
            else if (role.trim().equalsIgnoreCase(ROLE_3_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_3;
            else if (personalContains(role.trim(), ROLE_4_STRING))
                decodedRole = CODE_ROLE_4;
        }
        return decodedRole;
    }

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-04

BSOD with a Side of Fries

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-11-22

"Yes, I'd like to have a Quarter Pounder meal with a Coke and a Blue Screen of Death on the side. To go," Bruce W. writes.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-02

What Am I?

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-11-21

Object oriented programming is the weapon of choice for many programmers, and when wielded properly, you can often rely on a mix of convention and strong types to make it clear what type of object you’re working with. Sometimes though, you need to check. In a language like Java, you have the instanceof operator, a boolean comparison which answers if obj instanceof SomeClass. Seeing a lot of that in a codebase is a clear code smell.

Sometimes, though, not seeing it is the code smell.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-21

The Support Game

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-11-20

In the 1970s, shortly before our friend Argle dared to do exactly what his boss asked of him in an efficient manner, he worked at the computer lab of a local community college. When his friend Terry was hired on as a new assistant, Argle sat down with her at the Tech Support desk for a run-down of hard-earned knowledge and best practices.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-23

Never Refuse a Fifth

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-19

Sometimes, you want your dates to look like this: 3/3/2019. Other times, you want them to look like this: 03/03/2019.

There are plenty of wrong ways to do this. There are far fewer right ways to do it, and they mostly boil down to “use your language’s date library.”

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-25

An Excelent Start to a Career

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2019-11-18

Hal was a wiz kid computer programmer at age 15 in 1976. He could make the toggle switches and LEDs on his Altair 8800 dance at will. In college, he was class valedictorian after earning his computer science degree in 1984. Hal was destined for greatness and the real world was about to get rocked.

Hal's college friend Victor, who graduated two years prior, was already running his own startup company that made Unix-based financial planning software. Remembering Hal's brilliance, Victor recruited him to join his company the day after graduation. Victor needed the wiz kid-turned-wiz adult to create the equivalent of Lotus 1-2-3 in Unix. It was a tall first project but it paid well, so Hal happily signed up. Besides, everyone knew that spreadsheets were gonna change the world.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-03-10

Every System's Preferences

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-11-15

Rob W. wrote, "Looks more like this process is responsible for customizing the entire solar system's preferences."

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-27

Sorting Out a Late Night

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-14

Karl’s trials of crunch (previously) didn’t end with a badly written brain-fart. After too many consecutive late nights, Karl noticed that their grid layout was wrong.

It did this:

Alpha	Beta
Delta	Gamma

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-19

How The Semester Ends

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-11-13

Ginger recently finished an advanced degree, and during her work, she of course had to work as a TA for a number of classes. Computer science professors are, at least in theory, capable of programming, and thus can build automation around assignments- providing students with templates to highlight specific tools and techniques, or to automate the process of grading.

Dr. Buchler taught the computer graphics course, and the ultimate assignment was to build a simple 3D game. Buchler provided a pre-scaffolded project with a set of templates that could be filled in, so the students didn’t need to worry about a lot of the boilerplate. Beyond that, Buchler didn’t offer much guidance about how students should collaborate, so students did what came naturally: they set up git repos and shared code that way.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2020-04-29

Assert Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-12

Chris V does compliance testing. This often means they trace through logic in code to ensure that very specific conditions about the code’s behavior and logic are met. This creates unusual situations, where they might have access to specific and relevant pieces of code, but not the entire codebase. If they spot something unusual, but not within the boundaries of their compliance tests, they just pass on by it.

One of the C++ code bases Chris had to go through featured this “defensive” pattern everywhere.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-19

One Way to Solve a Bug

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-11

Startups go through a number of phases, and one specific phase is the transition from "just get it done and worry about the consequences tomorrow" into "wait, maybe if we actually did some planning and put some process around what we do, we won't constantly be one step behind the current disaster."

And that's when they start to hire people who have more management experience, but are also technical enough that they can contribute to the product directly. At BK's company, the latest hire in that category is Sylvester.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-25

Watch the Skies!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-11-08

"In light of the imminent UFO strike, I may need to reconsider my flight plans...or leaving my house in general," writes Pedro.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-15

Overlapping Complexity

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-11-07

After his boss left the company, Joel C was promoted to team lead. This meant that Joel was not only responsible for their rather large production codebase, but also for interviewing new potential team members. There are a ton of coding questions that one can ask in a technical interview, and Joel figured he should ask one that they actually solve in their application: given two unordered sets of timestamps, calculate how much overlap (if any) is between the two series.

If you think about it for a minute, it's really quite simple: first, find the minimum and maximum values for each set to get the start and end times (e.g. [01:08:01,01:09:55] and [01:04:11,01:09:42]). Then, subtract the later start time (01:08:01) from the earlier end time (01:09:42) to get the overlap (01:09:42 - 01:08:01 = 00:01:41). A non-positive result would indicate there's no overlap (such as 12:00:04 - 13:11:43), and in that case, it should probably just be zero. Or, in a single line of code:

37 comments - Last comment @ 2021-10-21

The Most Secure Option

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-11-06

“The auditors have finished examining our codebase.”

That was how Randy’s boss started the meeting, and she delivered the line like a doctor who just got the tests back, and is trying to break the news gently.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2021-09-03

Time Dilation

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-11-05

A good variable name is clear and specific about what the variable does. But sometimes you can have a variable name that's perhaps a little too specific. Victoria found this representative line of Rust code:

let threeseconds = time::Duration::from_secs(60);

37 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-20

A Botched Escape

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-11-04

Nancy was recently handed a pile of "modern" PHP that weighs in at tens of thousands of lines of code.

This is how every query is executed:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-08

Airport via TCP

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-11-01

Peter G. writes, "Luggage from flight SQ978 arriving from Singapore on belt 12. Luggage from PQ968 arriving from Ko Samui on belt 6. Packets from VNC arriving from Kazakhstan on port 5900"

22 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-17

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