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Brian was working on landing a contract with a European news agency. Said agency had a large number of intranet applications of varying complexity, all built to support the news business.
Now, they understood that, as a news agency, they had no real internal corporate knowledge of good software development practices, so they did what came naturally: they hired a self-proclaimed "code guru" to built the system.
Gabe enjoys it when clients request that he does updates on old software. For Gabe, it's exciting: you never know what you'll discover.
Jan 24Public Sub AspJavaMessage(ByVal Message As String)
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=""JavaScript"">" & vbCrLf)
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("alert(""" & Message & """)" & vbCrLf)
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("</SCRIPT>")
End Sub
Let's say you had input in the form of field=value, and you wanted to pick that "value" part off. In C#, you'd likely just use String.Split and call it a day. But you're not RK's co-worker.
public string FilterArg(string value)
{
bool blAction;
if (value.Contains('='))
blAction = false;
else
blAction = true;
string tmpValue = string.Empty;
foreach (char t in value)
{
if (t == '=')
{
blAction = true;
}
else if (t != ' ' && blAction == true)
{
tmpValue += t;
}
}
return tmpValue;
}
"Personal Mountains" was hearing dire rumors about one of the other developers; rumors about both the quality of their work and their future prospects at the company. Fortunately for Personal Mountains, they never actually had to work with this person.
Unfortunately, that person was fired and 30,000 lines of code were now Personal Mountains' responsibility.
It was an extraordinarily busy week at Error'd HQ. The submission list had an all-time record influx, enough for a couple of special edition columns. Among the list was an unusual PEBKAC. We don't get many of these so it made me chuckle and that's really all it takes to get a submission into the mix.
Headliner Lucio Crusca perseverated "Here's what I found this morning, after late night working yesterday, sitting on my couch, with my Thinkpad on my lap. No, it was not my Debian who error'd. I'm afraid it was me."
I've had the misfortune to inherit a VB .Net project which started life as a VB6 project, but changed halfway through. Such projects are at best confused, mixing idioms of VB6's not-quite object oriented programming with .NET's more modern OO paradigms, plus all the chaos that a mid-project lanugage change entails. Honestly, one of the worst choices Microsoft ever made (and they have made a lot of bad choices) was trying to pretend that VB6 could easily transition into VB .Net. It was a lie that too many managers fell for, and too many developers had to try and make true.
Maurice inherited one of these projects. Even worse, the project started in a municipal IT department then was handed of to a large consulting company. Said consulting company then subcontracted the work out to the lowest bidder, who also subcontracted out to an even lower bidder. Things spiraled out of control, and the resulting project had 5,188 GOTO statements in 1321 code files. None of the code used Option Explicit (which requires you to define variables before you use them), or Option Strict (which causes errors when you misuse implicit data-type conversions). In lieu of any error handling, it just pops up message boxes when things go wrong.
Imagine you're building a PHP web application, and you need to display different forms on different pages. Now, for most of us, we'd likely be using some framework to solve this problem, but even if we weren't, the obvious solution of "use a different PHP file for each screen" is a fairly obvious solution.
Dare I say, too obvious a solution?
XML is, arguably, an overspecified language. Every aspect of XML has a standard to interact with it or transform it or manipulate it, and that standard is also defined in XML. Each specification related to XML fits together into a soup that does all the things and solves every problem you could possibly have.
Though Owe had a problem that didn't quite map to the XML specification(s). Specifically, he needed to parse absolutely broken XML files.
Inheritance is one of those object-oriented concepts that creates a lot of conflicts. You'll hear people debating what constitutes an "is-a" versus a "has-a" relationship, you'll hear "favor composition over inheritance", you'll see languages adopt mix-in patterns which use inheritance to do composition. Used well, the feature can make your code cleaner to read and easier to maintain. Used poorly, it's a way to get your polymorphism with a side of spaghetti code.
Greg was working on a medical data application's front end. This representative line shows how they use inheritance:
An abstitution, an assortment, time travel, bad language, and an error'd.
First up, Jeremy Pereira pushes the boundaries of this column by sharing something right. "Sort of an anti-WTF. It took them 44 minutes to realise they'd made a boo-boo." They probably were notified, but it's still pretty good time to repair. Especially considering the issues we know of that last for years and years.
José received a bit of VB .Net UI code that left him scratching his head.
While IsNothing(Me.FfrmWait)
If Not IsNothing(Me.FfrmWait) Then
Exit While
End If
End While
It was time to start developing version 2 of Initech's flagship software product. This meant planning meetings. So many planning meetings.
The most important one, for the actual development team, was the user story meeting. The core of these meetings was a few folks from the programming team, including Steve, the director of architecture, Brian, and a variety of product owners, responsible for different segments of the overall product.
As we saw yesterday, padding can be hard.
Jasmine received a set of tickets all complaining that the file download portion of an ASP .Net application took too long. Users frequently had to wait for up to 15 minutes before their browser finished downloading the output of the web application.
It's been a minute since some bad date handling code. Wesley inherited this C# blob which exists to generate timestamped filenames.
// filename format = yyyyMMddhhmmss_<bipad>.dat
char c0 = '0';
this.m_FileName =
DateTime.Now.Year.ToString() +
new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Month.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Month.ToString() +
new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Day.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Day.ToString() +
new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString() +
new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString() +
new String(c0, 2-DateTime.Now.Second.ToString().Length) + DateTime.Now.Second.ToString() +
"_" + new String(c0, 5-publication.Bipad.ToString().Length) + publication.Bipad.ToString() +
".dat";
I don't think they exist.
Choosy Chris P. wants more choices, carping "You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means."
Today's anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn't the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we'll get to the code, but there's so much more to the story.
Our submitter, let's call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. "Mini", of course, meant "refrigerator sized".
Let's say you have a database table containing a list of countries. Given the primary key of a country in that table- an arbitrary ID field- you need to look up the name of that country.
Curtis's predecessor dropped this solution:
One of the "features" of the Oracle database is that, in addition to the "wonderful" PL/SQL language for building stored procedures, you can also write stored procedures in Java.
Now, the skills of "being a good database programmer" and "being a good Java programmer" are not necessarily overlapping, especially when you're deep in the world of Oracle's approach to programming. Which is where this submission, from Tomas comes from.
Unfortunately for Elena, the laboratory information management system (LIMS) her team used was being sunsetted by the vendor, Initech. She's a biochemist working in a pathology department, and this software is vital to tracking the tests need, the tests already run, and providing critical notifications about abnormal test results.
Since Initech was sunsetting that product, the hospital system put out an RFQ for a replacements, and after a multi-year bidding process, offered the contract for replacing the software to Initech.
In this week's episode we have some more adventures in shipping and misadventures with dates. I just asked "Hey Google, how many days are there in February THIS year" and they answered confidently "28 days." I briefly considered autoplaying that query on this page to see how many of your devices would answer correctly, but then I decided I should autoplay a command to order me a pizza and then I thought better of the whole thing.
Following up on an earlier submission, Dave P. reports "Much to my amazement, the package did arrive in time for Christmas, but just barely. USPS really came through on their end, taking less than 2 days to deliver the package, after the original delivery service took 12 days to find the USPS dropoff facility." Hah! Somebody owes me a nickel!
Amanda's company wanted to restrict access to a service by filtering on the requestor's IP address. Yes, this is a terrible idea. So they wanted to make it a bit smarter, and also filter on various subnets. But they had a LOT of different subnets.
So the result was this: