The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Observable Queries

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-31

Rachel is doing some Python/Django work on an application that, among other things, handles a pile of Internet addresses, a mix of IP addresses and domain names. Since each of those has a very different query path (domains could be filtered on the TLD or the name portion of the domain, for example), Rachel implemented some helper objects built on Django observables, the IPAddressObservable and the DomainObservable.

This way, when someone wanted to search the database for an address, some code like this could run:

6 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-01

Internal Networking

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-08-30

Circa 1999, Drake C was working on a video game for a large publisher. The game in question was a flight simulator with multiplayer dogfighting capabilities. Or at least, it was supposed to have multiplayer capabilities- in Drake's case, it just had a series of ugly crashes.

The networking library came from the publisher, so Drake reached out to Karl, the developer of said library. They spent some time going back and forth over the phone and email, trying to troubleshoot it. Eventually, Karl tapped out. "I'm stumped," he admitted, "but I'll tell you what, we've got another team working on Weighty Cogs II, and they've already got multiplayer working. I'll get them to send you their code, so you can take a look. Should have it to you by this afternoon."

20 comments - Last comment @ 2022-11-03

Optional Ternaround

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-29

As we frequently discuss here, many versions ago, Java added functional programming expressions, which can allow a developer to write very expressive, simple code. Of course, we don't cover any of those uses, because that's all fine.

Kevin L used to work for a Fortune 500 company, and that company was full of developers who got very excited about those functional programming features in Java. Very excited. Too excited, if we're being honest.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-05

Win A Few, Lose A Few

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-08-26

Today's amusements include a couple of twofers: one from a mouse, and two not-quite-canonical Error'ds that still manage to be pretty double you tee effy.

First up, an eponymous anonymous shared what unlimited looks like. "Thanks for the additional disk space," they squeaked. "That should cover me for a while." I suspect this is some kind of network drive, as I vaguely recall having seen something similar decades ago.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-05

Expanded Conditionals

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-25

A common anti-pattern is the "expanded conditional". You know the drill:

if (a == b && b != c)
{
    return true;
} else {
    return false;
}

31 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-11

C, But Worse

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2022-08-24

Alyssa worked in a shop building small runs of custom hardware. Recently, she tackled a project that involved an Arduino talking to an LCD screen. Since several programmers had just left their jobs, she was the last programmer standing and thus on her own for this assignment. One of the engineers who'd worked there before her had really liked a particular brand of programmable displays because they came with software that allowed non-programmers to design serial-driven user interfaces, and had its own onboard processor. That was what Alyssa wound up using for this project.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-19

Constantly Magic

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-23

Here's one you've seen before. Somebody Fran works with heard that magic numbers were bad, and that you should use constants, so they did this:

const ZERO = 0, ONE = 1, TWO = 2, THREE = 3;

36 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-31

Accessible Booleans

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-22

For twenty years, Initech didn't have any sort of internal IT or anyone doing any sort of cohesive software purchasing or internal development strategy. Of course, as the company grew, they needed customized applications. With no official approach to doing this, the users did the best they could, using the developer tool installed on nearly every corporate Windows workstation: Microsoft Access.

That's when Kris got hired, along with a pile of other developers. The team had one simple mission: convert these Access applications into "real" applications.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-05

Figures Never Lie

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-08-19

As always, dates are hard, memory management is hard, and localization is hard, but nothing, nothing is as hard as multiplication.

Sushi fan Ben A. found the freshest fish in western NY. "After an earlier email thanking me for a non-existent recent order," he confides, "Beyond Menu has helpfully clarified that they can predict the future."

32 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-06

Padded Mailers

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-08-18

Veteran developer and frequent contributor, Argle, once worked for a company which handled shipping. On April 3rd, 1988, a C function which used to work stopped working. What's so special about April 3rd of that year? Why, that's when the United States Post Office changed their rates.

The post office changed their rates on a fairly regular cadence, of course. The previous change had been in 1985. Thus the developers had planned ahead, and decided that they wanted to make the rates easy to change. Now, this was mid-80s C code, so they weren't quite thinking in terms like "store it in a database", but instead took what felt like the path of least resistance: they created a lookup table. The function accepted the weight of a piece of postage, checked it against a lookup table, and returned the shipping price.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-24

Flexing Bits

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-17

In the mid-00s, famous Web plugin Flash tried to make a pivot. It wasn't going to be for games or little animations anymore, it was going to be for Enterprise Applications, and they called it Flex.

Flex was a pile of XML files and ActionScript which would be compiled together into a Flash-based UI that would work in every browser (with the Flash plugin). This was a terrible idea to begin with, and was basically killed pretty quickly by Apple releasing the iPhone without Flash, but for a brief moment, it was a product people used. It's was "donated" to Apache in 2012, as what I can only assume was a White Elephant.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-11

The Mailroom Elevator

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-08-16

Bruce W's employer was best described as The Mega Bureaucracy. It's the kind of place where it takes twenty weeks to provision web servers, because of the number of forms, checkpoints, and management sign-offs involved. The Mega Bureaucracy did all of this because it kept their environment "stable", and equally important, "secure".

Speaking of security, the Mega Bureaucracy needed to expand its offices, and went out and constructed two new fourteen story office buildings which would serve as their headquarters. These offices needed to be validated for security, and Bruce was invited to be on the team that would perform the assessment. The first area they visited was the mailroom which served both buildings.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-19

Trees are Faster

by Remy Porter in Tales from the Interview on 2022-08-15

Mindy recently had an interview. It started off quite well. The company seemed to be well run, the first few folks Mindy talked too seemed nice enough. And then she sat down with their lead developer, Davin.

"What's your experience with SQL Server stored procedures?" Davin asked.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2023-07-12

Ungrounded Galoshes

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-08-12

There's no real theme to be gleaned from this week's submissions, just the usual sort of things and a tiny serving of irony courtesy of Google.

Undercover QA engineer Randy O. somehow provoked British Gas to refuse to quote him a meaningful fee. "I uploaded my meter readings to the British Gas website, and they updated my estimated bill," he explained. "When they want me to pay it I may just say NaH." And that's no lye.

6 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-19

Ordering Off This Menu

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-11

While browsing one day, Emma clicked a link on a site and nothing happened. That was annoying, but Emma wasn't about to give up. She tried to get the URL out of the link, only to discover that there wasn't a URL. Or a link. A quick trip to the DOM inspector highlighted what was going on:

<div id="I32" align="left" onclick="ItemClick(3,2)" 
onmouseout="RollOut(3,2,false)" 
onmouseover="RollOver(3,2,false)" 
style="position: absolute; top: 43px; left: 1px; width: 176px; height: 16px; font: bold 8pt Arial; color: rgb(1, 35, 69); background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 255); padding: 2px; cursor: pointer; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 255, 255);">Project Office</div>

19 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-22

Duplication

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-10

NoSQL databases frequently are designed to shard or partition across many nodes. That, of course, makes enforcing unique IDs different than you might do in a SQL database. You can't efficiently have an autoincrement sequence, and instead have to have something like a UUID.

But if you've designed your NoSQL database badly, or your input data isn't well sanitized, you might find yourself in a situation where you can't guarantee uniqueness without validating every row. That's a bad place to be, but it's probably how the code Remco found started its life.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-15

A Tip

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-09

David was poking around in some code for a visualization library his team uses. It's a pretty potent tool, with good code quality. While skimming the code, though, David found this mismatched comment and code:

    def get_tip(self):
        # Returns the position of the seventh point in the path, which is the tip.
        if config["renderer"] == "opengl":
            return self.points[34]

        return self.points[28]  # = 7*4

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-16

Around 20 Meg

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-08

Michael was assigned a short, investigatory ticket. You see, their PHP application allowed file uploads. They had a rule: the files should never be larger than 20MB. But someone had uploaded files which were larger. Not much larger, but larger. Michael was tasked with figuring out what was wrong.

Given that the error was less than half a megabyte, Michael had a pretty good guess about why this was.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-18

Movement Activated

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2022-08-05

England and the United States, according to the old witticism, are two countries separated by a common language. The first sample deposited in our inbox by Philip B. this week probably demonstrates the aphorism. "I'm all in favor of high-tech solutions but what happens if I only want (ahem) a Number One?" he asked. I read, and read again, and couldn't find the slightest thing funny about it. Then I realized that it must be a Brit thing.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-20

Image Uploading

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-04

The startup life is difficult, at the best of times. It's extra hard when the startup's entire bundle of C-level executives are seniors in college. For the company Aniket Bhattacharyea worked for, they had a product, they had a plan, and they had funding from a Venture Capitalist. More than funding, the VC had their own irons in the fire, and they'd toss subcontracting work to Aniket's startup. It kept the lights on, but it also ate up their capacity to progress the startup's product.

One day, the VC had a new product to launch: a children's clothing store. The minimum viable product, in this case, was just a Magento demo with a Vue Storefront front-end. Strict tutorial-mode stuff, which the VC planned to present to stakeholders as an example of what their product could be.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2023-03-22

Junior Reordering

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-03

"When inventory drops below the re-order level, we automatically order more," was how the product owner described the requirement to the junior developer. The junior toddled off to work, made their changes. They were not, however, given sufficient supervision, any additional guidance, or any code-reviews.

Dan found this in production:

38 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-12

The Contract Access Upgrade

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2022-08-02

Microsoft Access represents an "attractive nuisance". It's a powerful database and application development platform designed to enable end users to manage their own data. Empowering users is, in principle, good. But the negative side effect is that you get people who aren't application developers developing applications, which inevitably become business critical.

A small company developed an Access Database thirty years ago. It grew, it mutated, it got ported from each Access version to the next. Its tendrils extended outwards, taking over more and more of the business's processes. The ability to maintain and modify the database decayed, updates and bugfixes got slower to make, the whole system got slower. But it limped along roughly at the speed the business required… and then Larry, the user who developed, retired.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-11

A Sniff

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2022-08-01

In November of 2020, the last IE release happened, and on June 15th of this year, the desktop app officially lost support on Windows 10. But IE never truly dies.

Eleanor inherited a web application for a news service. And, you won't be shocked that it's still doing user-agent sniffing to identify the browser. That's just plain bad, but by the standards of user-agent sniffing, it's not terrible code.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-10

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