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Decreasingly hungry thrillseeker Weaponized Fun has second thoughts about the risk to which they're willing to expose their palate. "In addition to Budget Bytes mailing list not knowing who I am, I'm not sure they know what they're making. I'm having a hard time telling whether 'New Recipe 1' sounds more enticing than 'New Recipe 3.' I sure hope they remembered the ingredients."
I'm a JSON curmudgeon, in that I think that its type-system, inherited from JavaScript, is bad. It's a limited vocabulary of types, and it forces developers to play odd games of convention. For example, because it lacks any sort of date type, you either have to explode your date out as a sub-dictionary (arguably, the "right" approach) or do what most people do- use an ISO formatted string as your date. The latter version requires you to attempt to parse the sting to validate the data, but validating JSON is a whole thing anyway.
But, enough about me being old and cranky. Do you know one type JSON supports? Boolean values.
Today's anonymous submitter spent a few weeks feeling pretty good about themselves. You see, they'd inherited a gigantic and complex pile of code, an application spread out across 15 backend servers, theoretically organized into "modules" and "microservices" but in reality was a big ball of mud. And after a long and arduous process, they'd dug through that ball of mud and managed to delete 190 files, totaling 30,000 lines of code. That was fully 2/3rds of the total codebase, gone- and yet the tests continued to pass, the application continued to run, and everyone was just much happier with it.
Two weeks later, a new ticket comes in: users are getting a 403 error when trying to access the "User Update" screen. Our submitter has seen a lot of these tickets, and it almost always means that the user's permissions are misconfigured. It's an easy fix, and not a code problem.
Paul's co-worker needed to manage some data in a tree. To do that, they wrote this Java function:
Dec 24private static boolean existsFather(ArrayList<Integer> fatherFolder, Integer fatherId) {
for (Integer father : fatherFolder) {
if (father.equals(fatherId))
return true;
}
return false;
}
Denise's company formed a new team. They had a lot of low-quality legacy code, and it had gotten where it was, in terms of quality, because the company had no real policy or procedures which encouraged good code. "If it works, it ships," was basically the motto. They wanted to change that, and the first step was creating a new software team to kick of green-field projects with an eye towards software craftsmanship.
Enter Jack. Jack was the technical lead, and Jack had a vision of good software. This started with banning ORM-generated database models. But it also didn't involve writing raw SQL either- Jack hand-forged their tables with the Visual Table Designer feature of SQL Server Management Studio.
"Math is hard, especially timely math," explains The Beast in Black.
A Representative Line is a short snippet that makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code." A CodeSOD is a longer snippet, which also frequently makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code," but also is bad in ways that require you to look at the relationship between the lines in the code.
I bring that up, because today's code sample is a long section, but really, it's just a collection of representative lines. Each line in this just makes me die a little on the inside.
Sawyer was talking with a co-worker about how their unique session IDs got created. The concern was that they were only five characters long, which meant there could easily be collisions.
They started by looking at the random number generation function.
Knowing the kinds of readers we have here, I strongly suspect that if you drew a Venn diagram of "TDWTF Readers" and "TikTok Users" those circles wouldn't overlap at all. But TikTok is in the news, and because my partner uses TikTok, I'm getting second hand smoke of all of this, I think there's some interesting things to talk about here.
If you've been avoiding this news, good for you. For a long recap, Ars can bring up up to date.. But as a quick recap: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is based in China, and subject to Chinese laws. TikTok, like every other social media company, is basically spyware, tracking your behavior to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Over the past few years, all three branches of the US government have decided that the "Chinese ownership" is the problem here (not so much the spying), and passed a law to ban it unless a US company buys it. The whole thing has turned into an idiotic political football, with Biden saying that his waning days of the Presidency wouldn't enforce the ban anyway, and then the whole thing turns into a Trumpist political football as the incoming President is playing Calvinball and making decrees that he did not (at the time) have any authority to make in the first place.
Janet's company had a glut of work, and thus didn't have the staffing required to do it all. It didn't make sense to hire on any new full-time employees, so they went the route of bringing on a few highly paid consultants, specifically ones who specialized in one specific problem: talking to a piece of hardware purchased from a vendor.
The hardware in question was a scientific which communicated over a serial line. This device provided a lot of data that represented decimal values, but that data was not encoded as an IEEE float. Instead, they used two integers- one for the data, and one representing the number of decimal places.
Casanova Matt swings for the fences. "OKCupid (they don't capitalize the K, but I do, for propriety) must have migrated their match questions through Excel during a recent site revamp. These answers should obviously be 1-2 and 3-4, but maybe I could have 2 with Jan and 4 with Margaret (Mar to friends)."
Roger took on a contract to fix up a PHP website. During the negotiations, he asked some questions about the design, like, "Is it object-oriented or more procedural?" "No, it's PHP," said the developer.
Which about sums it up, I suppose. Have some date handling code:
Keige inherited some code which seems to be part of a drawing application. It can load brush textures from image files- at least, sometimes it can.
static public Brush GetImageBrush(string serviceCode, string imageName, string language)
{
Brush BorderChannelGroupBrush;
BitmapImage image = null;
int point = imageName.LastIndexOf('.');
string languageImagename = imageName.Substring(0, point) + "-" + language + imageName.Substring(point);
try
{
image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, languageImagename);
}
catch { }
if (image == null)
{
try
{
image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, imageName);
}
catch { }
}
if (image != null)
{
BorderChannelGroupBrush = new ImageBrush(image);
}
else
{
BorderChannelGroupBrush = Brushes.White;
}
return BorderChannelGroupBrush;
}
David was integrating a new extension into their ecommerce solution, and found this un-representative line:
$this->model_sale_manageorder->exportOrder(substr($selectid,0,strlen($selectid)-1));
Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.
It didn't go great.
Someone online said we run a Mickey Mouse outfit. Angered beyond words, we consulted [email protected] and they threatened to find that guy and sue him. So to anyone else who thinks this column is Goofy, you should know that the world's definitive authorities insist that it absolutely is not.
But these guys? This website actually is kind of goofy, according to resolutioner Adam R. who crowed "Someone forgot to localize some text for the new year!"
Antonio's team hired some very expensive contractors and consultants to help them build a Java based application. These contractors were very demure, very mindful, about how using ORMs could kill performance.
So they implemented a tool that would let them know any time the Hibernate query generator attempted to perform a cross join.
Bejamin's team needed to generate a unique session ID value that can't easily be guessed. The traditional way of doing this would be to generate cryptographically secure random bytes. Most languages, including PHP, have a solution for doing that.
But you could also do this:
Today's anonymous submission is a delightfully simple line of JavaScript which really is an archetype of a representative line.
$json = "{";
Ted's company hired a contract team to build an application. The budget eventually ran out without a finished application, so the code the contract team had produced was handed off to Ted's team to finish.
This is an example of the Ruby code Ted inherited:
Happy 2025 to all our readers. I can already tell this year's columns are going to be filled with my (least) favorite form of WTF, the impossible endless gauntlet of flaming password hurdles to jump over or crawl under. Please comment if you know why this week's column has this title and why it doesn't have the title Swordfish.
Peter G.
starts off our new year of password maladies with a complaint that is almost poetic.
"Between desire and reality.
Between fact and breakfast.
Between 8 and -6:00.
Madness lies, lies, lies..."
Ash's company outsourced to an offshore vendor.
This is an example of what they got back:
Twenty five years ago today, the world breathed a collective sight of relief when nothing particularly interesting happened. Many days begin with not much interesting happening, but January 1st, 2000 was notable for not being the end of the world.
I'm of course discussing the infamous Y2K bug. We all know the story: many legacy systems were storing dates with two digits- 80 not 1980, and thus were going to fail dramatically when handling 00- is that 1900 or 2000?