The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Yep. Nothing pretentious about the US, or that comment.

What "looks" or "sounds" right depends on what you're used to. If you represent dates by saying June 5th, then 06/05/2009 makes sense to you. If you're used to seeing 5th June, well then 05/06/2009 will look right to you.

CAPTCHA: There's no time like the "praesent"

alegr · 2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Kasper:
Can you then save up to 31% if you click in all three places?

Only if you do that in a single click at once.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

TrueWTF is on second one that there is both finnish and sweadish even if only 5% of finnish people speaks sweadish...

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Getting an error while displaying the error is not necessarily a WTF, although it'd be weird if it's in a windows dialog box. A web application I work on has a similar message, usually triggered on SQL server errors. The normal error screen will try to render a pretty box with a menu above - database access is needed to show the menu. So if an error occurs, a php define is set. If an error occurs when the define is already set, both sets of parameters are dumped and die() is called.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

I thought Apple's were 100% bug free?

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

rox_midge:
I hate to interrupt the always hilarious article-parodying comments, but I want to point out the lameness of the last one. It's a widget. It fetches its data via XML. If there is a problem fetching the XML data, it has to tell the user about that somehow.
Maybe it's lazy, because they could have changed the background to make it more obviously an error condition, but as an "Error'd" it's pretty weak. I mean, what's next?

I went to this website and clicked on a link, but the server couldn't find the page, so it returned a properly formatted HTML page that said "Error 404". Hilarious!
</oblig_tdwtf_is_getting_weak_comment>

Umm, maybe it's funny because it looks, not like an error message, but like the "Word of the Day" is "There was a problem reading the XML". If it had left the "Word of the Day" text blank and popped up a clearly-identified error box with that message, I wouldn't have found it funny. And it's doubly funny because I think "Reading XML is generally a pain in the neck and XML is way over-used" is the sort of Word of the Day that I would be likely to post.
Of course, if you didn't find it funny the first time, any explanation of why it's funny usually kills any humor value it might have had. You see, OF COURSE the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side. It's funny because you expect the person to explain why the chicken wanted to cross the road, not just to repeat the obvious.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Dinnerbone:
TRWTF is that it took 5~ months for that first screenshot to get posted (Check the date)

I like the fact that the high is 4 degrees, the low 2 degrees, and currently 5 degrees. WTF? Oh, wait, it's weather.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Kensey:
The numeric date formatting wars amuse me, because all the "right" solutions people get so invested in are suboptimal. The way to do it correctly is unambiguously, which rules out any pure-numeric format (because there's no way to tell by inspection whether 06-05-2009 is June 5 or May 6).
The only unambiguous way to do it is either YYYY-Mmm-DD or DD-Mmm-YYYY. So I would write 05 Jun 2009 and even non-English-speakers know that Jun represents the month (even if they don't know what month).

Right. Now sort the file by date. . .

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

bramster:
Kensey:
The numeric date formatting wars amuse me, because all the "right" solutions people get so invested in are suboptimal. The way to do it correctly is unambiguously, which rules out any pure-numeric format (because there's no way to tell by inspection whether 06-05-2009 is June 5 or May 6).
The only unambiguous way to do it is either YYYY-Mmm-DD or DD-Mmm-YYYY. So I would write 05 Jun 2009 and even non-English-speakers know that Jun represents the month (even if they don't know what month).

Right. Now sort the file by date. . .

Which is why I prefer the YYYY-MM-DD method, or YYYYMMDD. Sorting by date works great (sorts nicely), and with a 4 digit year, it's completely obvious of the format, betcause YYYY-DD-MM is nonsensical.

YYYY-MM-DD is also pretty universal globally - even governments tend to use that format.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Whereas I, in England, would say "It's the second of May." The difference in abbreviated formats comes from the difference in language. Because of the confusion, I've taken to writing dates as "2 May 2009" (using the 3-letter abbreviation for months of five or more letters). Anyone who knows any version of English will understand that. Anyone who doesn't know English is likely to have problems understand more than just the dates in what I'm writing.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

m0ffx:
Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Whereas I, in England, would say "It's the second of May." The difference in abbreviated formats comes from the difference in language. Because of the confusion, I've taken to writing dates as "2 May 2009" (using the 3-letter abbreviation for months of five or more letters). Anyone who knows any version of English will understand that. Anyone who doesn't know English is likely to have problems understand more than just the dates in what I'm writing.

I don't understand.

chrismcb · 2009-06-02 Reply Admin

m0ffx:
Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Whereas I, in England, would say "It's the second of May." The difference in abbreviated formats comes from the difference in language. Because of the confusion, I've taken to writing dates as "2 May 2009" (using the 3-letter abbreviation for months of five or more letters). Anyone who knows any version of English will understand that. Anyone who doesn't know English is likely to have problems understand more than just the dates in what I'm writing.

Over here in the good ol' US of A we don't say silly things like "Fourth of July."

A new road construction project is just getting underway, so they posted a sign to inform people of the upcoming road closure. The sign read "Road Closed June 09 to Oct 2010" The sign was only 8 characters across, but still couldn't they have been consistent?

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Flipper:
"Save up to 15%" means "there's no way in hell you're going to save more than 15%, no matter how high your score". And "save up to 10%" means "you're not even going to save more than 10%". So they're probably both true. You're going to save 2% at best. Maybe nothing.

While I sort of agree, I think "up to" implies that it should somehow be possible to save the maximum. I believe most of the world has laws regarding misleading advertising which address (among other things) this issue.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Flipper:
JuanCarlosII:
I don't see how the last one is a WTF at all. If it can't retrieve data becasue say, it isn't connected to the internet, what else is it supposed to output?
Well, it could output, maybe, something like "I can't retrieve data because I'm not connected to the Internet." Or at least some kind of clue more specific than "There was a problem". There was? How do you know? What problem? File not found? Then say so. No connection? No reply from DNS server? Timeout? Computers are crammed full of problems. Don't just say "It didn't work". Give the poor user a clue already.

AND, by all means display an error message, but what's wrong with changing the look of the page to do that (ie getting rid of the 'word of the day'. A little more effort, perhaps, but a user can quite easily mis-interpret an error message among other totally normal looking messages.

If an error occurred, make it damn clear to the user that what they're seeing is not expected, don't add 'in line' error messages. If this means you have to load the data before rendering the page, or that you have to make the page refresh if an error occurred, so be it.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

YYYY-MM-DD rulez ok:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Speaking of pet peeves... why did you put the six last in one thousand one hundred ninety six? Because it is the least significant digit. Why do we write times with the hours on the left and the seconds on the right? hours are more significant than minutes, which are more significant than seconds....

So WhyTF do you think d/m/y is the way to go?

Agree, Y/M/D makes a lot more sense...you can sort dates of the form 20090128 nicely

That being said, at least D/M/Y has an order (from most granular to least), unlike M/D/Y which seems muddled. Of course, I doubt people in D/M/Y countries would use sec, min, hour for time...although without the sec part they sort of do (not in writing it down, but in saying it, eg "twenty past twelve", rather than "twelve twenty"

Question, though, in countries where they use M/D/Y are people more likely to say "March('s) 6th" than "6th of March"? (ie is this a linguistic thing more than anything else?)

Of course to open the can of worms fully, I'll quote a teacher I once had "...the Americans, who never learnt to speak English properly..."

Kensey · 2009-06-02 Reply Admin

eby:
Kensey:
The only unambiguous way to do it is either YYYY-Mmm-DD or DD-Mmm-YYYY. So I would write 05 Jun 2009 and even non-English-speakers know that Jun represents the month (even if they don't know what month).

ISO 8601

ISO 8601 dates are only unambiguous in the context of ISO 8601. Without that or some other context, looking at the string "2009-10-11" I don't know which of two possible dates you mean.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Koro:
The "error displaying this error" looks fake to me.
While it is possible that by some wicked logic, somebody would want to reentrantly show a dialog while the first is painting/creating (as it seems to be the case here), the one thing that would not make sense at all it the "half-painted, without an exclamation mark" icon in the background dialog. An icon's a bitmap, so it would either have painted, or not. The exclamation mark is part of the bitmap data, so as the yellow background part pixels would be transferred on screen, so would the exclamation mark.

I won't pretend to understand how the icon is displayed, but I must say I have seen similar (half-loaded) icons on mesg Boxes when my computer starts to play funny buggers. Admittedly, this is usually when processes are starting to hang, so it would be unlikely that another message box would (successfully) be displayed over the top, unless it came from another process, in which case it wouldn't refer to the hung one. I tend to agree, looks like Shenannigans to me....

Kensey · 2009-06-02 Reply Admin

bramster:
Kensey:
The only unambiguous way to do it is either YYYY-Mmm-DD or DD-Mmm-YYYY. So I would write 05 Jun 2009 and even non-English-speakers know that Jun represents the month (even if they don't know what month).

Right. Now sort the file by date. . .

Special formats for special purposes. If I have a list of data, I'll format the data in the way that makes the most sense -- in that case context would resolve the ambiguity since if I see 2008-01-03, followed by 2008-01-07, followed by 2008-03-05, it's natural to assume those dates are sequential unless explicitly told otherwise.

If I'm writing dates standing alone in text, I'll use the form that's most unambiguous on its own.

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Oh, so because you say "May 2nd" and not "2nd May" then d/M/Y makes more sense than M/d/Y. I'll keep in mind that you are the absolutely authority on such things. I could make an equally pretentious sentence based on "May 2nd", so the whole argument about the latter being more pretentious is a crock.

Both formats make sense to people who use them. I think I'll go with those here who seem pro YYYY-MM-DD - It makes more sense than either of the other two because it can be ordered easily (that is, without having to tokenise a string).

Oh, and grow up you twat!!!

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Non-English Speaking Bloke:
m0ffx:
Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Whereas I, in England, would say "It's the second of May." The difference in abbreviated formats comes from the difference in language. Because of the confusion, I've taken to writing dates as "2 May 2009" (using the 3-letter abbreviation for months of five or more letters). Anyone who knows any version of English will understand that. Anyone who doesn't know English is likely to have problems understand more than just the dates in what I'm writing.
I don't understand.

Quelle da inglese dicono "Oggi e' el secondo di Maggio". La differenza e' la formata della lingua. Poi, scrivo le date "2 Mag. 2009" (uso 3-lettera abbrivazione per i mesi chi ha cinque o piu lettere). Qualche capisce inglese, capisce lo. Qualche non capisce inglese, avera probleme capire piu che date nella mia scritte.

Der englischmann werdet "der Zweiter Mai" sagen. Der unterscheid von den Sprachen kommen....

etc....

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Blogel:
Crash:
Don:
B:
In Finland it is d.m.y.
One of my pet peeves is the day format in some backwater countries. Using 05/06/09 for 06 May 2009 and not 05 June 2009 just sounds wrong on too many levels. It's like saying one thousand ninety six and a hundred instead of one thousand one hundred and ninety six...
Over here in the civilized world we all moved on to d.m.y. back in the early 1900's.. about time y'all caught up!

Actually mm.dd.yyyy makes perfect sense. When someone asks me the date I say its May 2nd, 2009(optional). We do not say, "Well good fellow it happens to be the 2nd day of May in the year of our lord 2009". So it does appear that 5/2/2009 makes perfect sense when you live in a less pretentious society. Thank you!

Oh, so because you say "May 2nd" and not "2nd May" then d/M/Y makes more sense than M/d/Y. I'll keep in mind that you are the absolutely authority on such things. I could make an equally pretentious sentence based on "May 2nd", so the whole argument about the latter being more pretentious is a crock.

Both formats make sense to people who use them. I think I'll go with those here who seem pro YYYY-MM-DD - It makes more sense than either of the other two because it can be ordered easily (that is, without having to tokenise a string).

Oh, and grow up you twat!!!

Seeing as we all (always, it seems) get so upset about how the rest of the world uses dates all wrong, why don't we drop month and day, and use ordinal dates instead... Today is 2009-153 (or would you prefer 153-2009 ?)

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Fresh vegetables are NOT going to still be edible by August 2009, so there is no ambiguity in the date format in this context.

captcha=facilisis: too easy!

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

silent d:
Koro:
The "error displaying this error" looks fake to me.
While it is possible that by some wicked logic, somebody would want to reentrantly show a dialog while the first is painting/creating (as it seems to be the case here), the one thing that would not make sense at all it the "half-painted, without an exclamation mark" icon in the background dialog. An icon's a bitmap, so it would either have painted, or not. The exclamation mark is part of the bitmap data, so as the yellow background part pixels would be transferred on screen, so would the exclamation mark.

The error handler must have repainted the first error dialog, just so it would be clear to the user that the first error couldn't display properly.

That is so obviously a fake I'm surprised it got posted; they must be running out of actual good images to post.

Even if the first dialog was somehow partially repainted, the icon wouldn't be missing the exclamation point, as it's a flat bitmap, not a layered image.
That dialog is modal, so there would be no way for the second one to pop up.
It's from Uncyclopedia
Other obvious fakeness

QED

2009-06-02 Reply Admin

Kensey:
ISO 8601 dates are only unambiguous in the context of ISO 8601. Without that or some other context, looking at the string "2009-10-11" I don't know which of two possible dates you mean.

Is there anyone using 2009-10-11 to mean the 10th day of the 11th month? As far as I know, if the year comes first and it's hyphen separated, that's always an ISO 8601 date. It's about as ambiguous as assuming these dates are in the Gregorian calendar; i.e. not really.

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

I saw these three ads

That's the real WTF

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Koro:
The "error displaying this error" looks fake to me.
While it is possible that by some wicked logic, somebody would want to reentrantly show a dialog while the first is painting/creating (as it seems to be the case here), the one thing that would not make sense at all it the "half-painted, without an exclamation mark" icon in the background dialog. An icon's a bitmap, so it would either have painted, or not. The exclamation mark is part of the bitmap data, so as the yellow background part pixels would be transferred on screen, so would the exclamation mark.

Amen. There'd be no yellow to paint in the exclamation mark's pixels. Plus, why the irregular dark blue border if it was real?

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

The XML thing is not a WTF, but is actually point on.

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Alex, I'm aware that you may not be using a Mac yourself, but at least spell the operating system's name right. I don't go around calling Windows “WinDowsVista.” It's “Mac OS X” or “OS X.” “OSX” just makes you look like you haven't done your research; which I suppose would be a correct conclusion.

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Rnd(:
TrueWTF is on second one that there is both finnish and sweadish even if only 5% of finnish people speaks sweadish...

It gets worse in the actual country. You have universities that have a college of economics in Finnish and across the street is the college of economics in Swedish and considering at almost everyone speaks english there is probably a college of economics in english a few block away.

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Of course the last one is wrong. That's the trouble with you computer programmers. The user doesn't give a damn about the black magic of XML and doesn't understand what it is. The app should have told the user that is wasn't working in plain English and discreetly displayed/logged an error code for diagnostic purposes.

ComputerForumUser · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Hasn't anyone heard of CMYD? 5th June 2009 would be 2006-09-05. What's so hard to understand about that?

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

And obviously it should not display the error message as a "word of the day". Geez guys come on get a grip.

A Nonny Mouse · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

rohypnol:
I've a question, please... In the one with the DefaultText, is the expiration date format d.m.y or m.d.y ?
Thanks, Tom

you did that on purpose, didn't you :)

WWWWolf · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Neil:
Villirucola - sounds like some kind of horrible food poisoning to me.

The real WTF for me was "okay, what the hell is 'wild rucola'?" About three seconds of Wikipedia later, "okay, why the hell it's in Italian 'rucola' when there's a perfectly usable Finnish term, 'sinappikaali'?" I mean, I could understand if you used Italian names for pasta or something, but unlike the art of cuisine, botany isn't a highly technical form of rocket science with clear and specific technical terms of foreign origin =)

merpius · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

ComputerForumUser:
Hasn't anyone heard of CMYD? 5th June 2009 would be 2006-09-05. What's so hard to understand about that?

Wow... this is the perfect date format.

merpius · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex, I'm aware that you may not be using a Mac yourself, but at least spell the operating system's name right. I don't go around calling Windows “WinDowsVista.” It's “Mac OS X” or “OS X.” “OSX” just makes you look like you haven't done your research; which I suppose would be a correct conclusion.

Please tell me you're a fanboi; no one else should get this upset about something so stupid.

If you do not consider yourself a fanboi then you may want to do a careful self evaluation. I suggest this test: consider carefully how upset you would be if someone called your Mac an overpriced security risk. If the answer is not "not upset at all." Then you are probably a fanboi (given existing evidence). This is not to say that you should cease being a fanboi, but rather simply accept and embrace the reality.

Pim · 2009-06-03 Reply Admin

merpius:
If the answer is not "not upset at all." Then you are probably a fanboi (given existing evidence).

Notwithstanding the full stop in the quoted text, you should not have used a capital T there. My spell checker also flags "fanboi", but I'll let that pass for now.

2009-06-03 Reply Admin

When the dates are for humans I use the name of the month. When the dates are for computers I use yyyymmdd. That isn't hard is it ?

Yesterday I got a printout from the library stating when the DVDs I borrowed should be returned.

It listed the date of borrowing as "June 2, 2009", then below listed the return dates as "07/06/09". WTF. when the hell is that ?

2009-06-04 Reply Admin

In Danish one would say 1096 as one thousand six and ninety

tgape · 2009-06-04 Reply Admin

I've witnessed the political wars of a programming group which produced several programs which could display an error reporting the error message. However, it did it right: the second error message actually contained the error message that couldn't be reported before.

What happened was, senior programmer D insisted upon writing his own fancy error dialog, because the standard X Windows error dialog ran too slowly and used too much memory[1]. Neophyte coder J saw the code, and thought words similar to, "Wow. This is horrible. I should save this code to post to the Daily WTF in about 10 years, when it finally exists." Sadly, as a neophyte coder, he didn't manage to accomplish that laudable goal. However, he did note a number of potential problems, and reported them in the next team meeting, in front of everyone, including the manager, and the visiting director.

Senior programmer D saw his career flash before his eyes. Every potential problem was, in fact, quite likely, in real world scenarios. And everyone who might possibly have any say in his promotions/demotions and pay changes was in the room to hear it. So he did what any old programmer in his position would do: he denied everything, and explained that the neophyte programmer just didn't know what he was talking about, because he was too inexperienced.

After the meeting, the manager asked J to add a fix. But D reviewed all of J's changes. How could J insert this fix without him realizing it?

The answer was exceptions - all of the problems in question raised distinct exceptions, which would never be caught. So, T put in a change to add a global exception handler. Since all of the exceptions other than the ones in the error handler were caught elsewhere, all of the caught errors were in the error handler.

Unfortunately for D's career, he reviewed the code, but did not understand its scope, nor did he run it. He perceived it to be another local exception handler, and thus he would need to demonstrate how that local part now handled less well. He accepted the change, and started to prepare his rigged demo.

All of the other coders now found that the program was much more stable than before; in fact, it was rock-solid, instead of crashing randomly once or twice a day. However, it presented a curious double error message about once or twice a day, with the first error (the one under the other) blank.

The manager was especially fond of the new behavior, and directed D to change the second error message to include 'while attempting to display an error message stating[2]'. D did what he felt any senior programmer would do. He modified the code to automatically dismiss the first error window before displaying the second. This caused the program to crash about a third of the time it attempted to programmaticly close an error window.

The manager was overjoyed at this response. He instructed senior programmer B to remove D's access to the revision control system, demoted D to junior programmer, cut his salary, and had J promoted to junior programmer, with a provisional code review side job (no salary increase.) Finally, he gave himself a bonus of half of D's pay cut.

Then he had J make the coding change he'd told D to make. J did a little extra, and determined the mapping between the error messages that would've displayed and the error messages it was displaying. They were mostly the same, but there were a couple which were different (but still basically 1-1 on the translation.) For example, the null pointer exception became an out of memory error.

The exception handling code was then locked at that revision, until a couple years later, when D quit. The manager then had senior programmer J rip all of the old error messages out and just use the system error messages.

For what it's worth, at the start, I was neophyte programmer T. By the end, I was neophyte sysadmin T.

[1] While it was probably true that X's error messages were excessively resource intensive, normally one fixes this by ideally submitting code changes to the reviewers of the X window system, or more realistically, replacing them with ones own leaner, more robust version. D chose the WTF route, and reused memory (hopefully) allocated elsewhere in the program to partially compensate for the fact he coded like a raving wombat, and so his error dialogs were more resource intensive than the system ones. And they didn't check any return values.

[2] The error messages for why it couldn't display the error message were usually the same as the original message. In the couple of cases that it wasn't, N didn't think the user would appreciate the difference - after all, he certainly didn't.

tgape · 2009-06-04 Reply Admin

Kensey:
The numeric date formatting wars amuse me, because all the "right" solutions people get so invested in are suboptimal. The way to do it correctly is unambiguously.

I agree completely. For example, ASR dates[1] work just fine: 1993-09-5741.

[1] I am so bloody looking forward to the end of this September...

2009-06-06 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex, I'm aware that you may not be using a Mac yourself, but at least spell the operating system's name right. I don't go around calling Windows “WinDowsVista.” It's “Mac OS X” or “OS X.” “OSX” just makes you look like you haven't done your research; which I suppose would be a correct conclusion.

Come on, like no one's ever written "WinXP" or "Win98". But no, it must mean that they do not know how to write the name of the OS and haven't done their research rather than that they're just lazy or made a typo. Cut the BS.

Daniel Beardsmore · 2009-06-06 Reply Admin

Well, the following screenshot is not fake:

[image]

Rumpus FTP client for Macintosh. Extremely bug-ridden and stupid piece of shit. It must have had all of two error check conditions in the entire source code.

The most spectacular bug of all -- and the developer implied that this is by design -- is that upload resume, doesn't. It simply wipes what's there already, and writes the resumed part in its place, effectively replacing one incomplete part of the file with another. He steadfastly refused to implement upload resume, but also refused to return a "Not implemented" error, so it just ate the file instead.

Filenames longer than 31 chars (the pre-OS X limit) were accepted and stored, but folder names were not, throwing up a useless error (see below). Changes to filenames that resulted in a new name > 31 chars were silently ignored. You could store a long filename, but not rename to one. A long name to long name rename also failed.

Any reported errors only came out as "550 Command failed for unknown reason"; fortunately the program implemented optional debug-level logging that included OS error codes. I ran the server permanently in debug-level logging so that I could read off OS error codes; the Mac knew what absurdities Rumpus was trying to commit, but Rumpus didn't get it.

Drawing a dialog like that was, sadly, a one-off.

Damn, am I glad to be rid of that program.

Screenshot from Other GUI oddities. A lot more variation than Error'd, too.

2009-06-06 Reply Admin

The "error displaying error" thing is clearly fake.

2009-06-10 Reply Admin

Days are fractions of a month. Months are fractions of a year. That's why dd/mm/yyyy makes MUCH more sense.

But what can you expect from people who can't use the metric system?

2009-06-11 Reply Admin

Scott:
OHHH... so it's a backwater country if it uses MM/DD/YY.

Of course it is. The order of importance. When is the assignment due? - The 16th. (this month) - The 16th of October. (this year) - The 16th of October 2011. Or, month first: - In June. (-But this IS June!) - In October. (-When in October?)

10, 10, or 15?

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