The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Nagesh:
Anonymous:
Nagesh:
Anonymous:
dohpaz42:
In the breakroom of my company, there is a quote on the "quote board" that says, "Broken gets fixed; shoddy lasts forever".
You have a breakroom? What luxury! We don't even have a water cooler, much less a breakroom or kitchen. Aye, and we used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.
But you try and tell the young people today that...

Best work for CMM level 5 company then.
I'm not getting into a pissing match with you but my company is CMMI Level 5 and AS9000 certified. It doesn't change the fact they're tight-fisted bastards.

Are you seriously still working to CMM? That was superseded about 10 years ago.

We have one old poster in our canteen that says "Beyond CMM 5". We are definitely CMM (i)
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

Don't tell him that, tell the gullible managers/execs who pay his company to turn out garbage, bug-ridden code... But hey, they're CMM(i) certified, right? It says so right next to the sink in our canteen...

amischiefr · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

"A new job is like a child. At first, it appears completely harmless and full of wonder. It's only after you've invested grinding years of your life into it, surrendering sleep and any sense of fun, that you discover that it's a complete disappointment and will never amount to anything, never respect you, and it certainly isn't going to take care of you during your twilight years. "

Funniest shit i have read in a long while.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

toshir0:
A new job is like a child. At first, it appears completely harmless and full of wonder. It's only after you've invested grinding years of your life into it, surrendering sleep and any sense of fun, that you discover that it's a complete disappointment and will never amount to anything, never respect you, and it certainly isn't going to take care of you during your twilight years.
I couldn't go past this utter stupidity...
You being a sociopathic moron doesn't imply that everyone is, boy.

Wow... Rage much?

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

frits:
Chuck:
Anonymous:
Even 754 rainbow-bright unicorns couldn't make this job any better.
I only got to about 250 rainbow-bright unicorns before Firefox crashed, but you're probably right.

I got to 755 and then everything went all fire-and-brimstone and the intro to Slayer's "Hell Awaits" played on a continuous loop.

Sweet - you went to heaven?

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
You have a breakroom? What luxury! We don't even have a water cooler, much less a breakroom or kitchen. Aye, and we used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.

You were lucky! I had to get up every morning at 3 o'clock, half an hour before I went to bed, work 26 billable hours at the office and pay the company for permission to come to work, and when I got home Mom and Dad would kill me and dance around on my grave singing Hallelujah!

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

SeySayux:
Flaming Foobar:
Macro King:
Some idiot had been reading about the IEEE 754 standard floating-point format and 754 coincidentally happened to match their house number.

While you certainly could be right, I'd wager it's something along the lines of:

legacy.h:
#define MAXSEGSZ 65536
frm.h:
#define MAXNFRMCTL (MAXSEGSZ/sizeof(struct frm_ctl_t)) /* 754 - DON'T CHANGE!!!1 -Chris 10/12/1992 */
I'm not such a Windows wizard, so correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't sizeof return a size_t, which has to be integral? 86.917771883289125 is certainly a strange value for a struct's size.

SeySayux

86 maybe?

Code Slave · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Sadly, I already know the drill with an App like this.

Step 1) Split the database into code and data MDBs (it's sad that this is so common that MS had to build a function into Access to do this). Step 2) Migrate the data MDB to MS SQL Server.

Now the data's safe, you stop hitting the 2GB limit, and you stop any idiot from willie-nillie adding/dropping columns/tables/views. They at least have to have admin access on the Server first.

Then and only then can you start migrating the App portion (if you EVER do) to better tech or fixing the VBA (again if you EVER do).

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Steve The Cynic · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

BentFranklin:
SeySayux:
I'm not such a Windows wizard, so correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't sizeof return a size_t, which has to be integral? 86.917771883289125 is certainly a strange value for a struct's size.

SeySayux

86 maybe?

Nope - that would give a limit of 762. Of course, there are eight structs' worth of gobble at the front of the segment, which brings us down to ...

wait for it

... 754.

Wheeeeeeee!

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

frits:
I got to 755 and then everything went all fire-and-brimstone and the intro to Slayer's "Hell Awaits" played on a continuous loop.

Really? I would have thought Anthrax's cover of "Ball of Confusion" to be more appropriate...

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Are you seriously still working to CMM? That was superseded about 10 years ago.

Not in India, you big silly.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Lone Marauder:
Anonymous:
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

WTF?

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

No brain access:
They were using it to map a sharepoint page to an access table... which was then queried by a .net application.

KILL! KILL THE INNOCENT!

I think that just made me blow a sanity fuse.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Before you write unnecessary comments, maybe you should learn French in the first place...

Signed: A native French speaker.

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

dohpaz42:
In the breakroom of my company, there is a quote on the "quote board" that says, "Broken gets fixed; shoddy lasts forever".

I just added that quote permanently to our team project whiteboard.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Ok, obviously the reply didn't show where it should have been...

this is in reference to

From the frist control to the 754th: "Access - let the bonne temps rouler"

Either way, I did a bit of Access, and it doesn't take much for it to crash with slighly complicated forms. Anything beyond home business handling a dozen of customers shouldn't be implemented in Access. Period. You will be sorry for it otherwise :-)

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Bill's Kid:
Nagesh:
Management is messing around with worker heads. This is sucker position for computer programmer.

This is a normal position for a programmer.

Best work for CMM Level 5 company, then.

How many times do we have to explain this to you? We don't give a shit about your stupid certificate. It makes you sound retarded.

Nagesh · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Hoodarino, You are amusing me only.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
Nagesh:
Bill's Kid:
Nagesh:
Management is messing around with worker heads. This is sucker position for computer programmer.

This is a normal position for a programmer.

Best work for CMM Level 5 company, then.
How many times do we have to explain this to you? We don't give a shit about your stupid certificate. It makes you sound retarded.

And ten years out of date.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

QJ:
dogbrags:
If it aint broke don't fix it. There are still millions (billions?) of lines of cobol code running mission-critical apps, that haven't changed in decades. Hows that for scary?

A job I recently left had me maintaining FORTRAN that I wrote some 20 years before because I was the only one left in the company who knows FORTRAN. They never replaced it with new technology because it was such a well-designed and bug-free system. But now I've left they may have to.

#1 rule of system maintainability: If you cannot maintain it, it is broken.

So congratulations, you spent twenty years maintaining an app that broke in the worst way the day you left.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

CG:
Ok, obviously the reply didn't show where it should have been...
this is in reference to

From the frist control to the 754th: "Access - let the bonne temps rouler"

Either way, I did a bit of Access, and it doesn't take much for it to crash with slighly complicated forms. Anything beyond home business handling a dozen of customers shouldn't be implemented in Access. Period. You will be sorry for it otherwise :-)

If you are using Access for ANYTHING, you will be sorry.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Nagesh:
Anonymous:
dohpaz42:
In the breakroom of my company, there is a quote on the "quote board" that says, "Broken gets fixed; shoddy lasts forever".
You have a breakroom? What luxury! We don't even have a water cooler, much less a breakroom or kitchen. Aye, and we used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.
But you try and tell the young people today that...

Best work for CMM level 5 company then.
I'm not getting into a pissing match with you but my company is CMMI Level 5 and AS9000 certified. It doesn't change the fact they're tight-fisted bastards.

Are you seriously still working to CMM? That was superseded about 10 years ago.

We tried to get CMMI Level 5 certified once. After a couple of hours, one of the auditors started to cry, and another one of them went into the bathroom and threw up. Then they all left, and never came back.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

[quote user="Anonymous"] YHBT. YHL. HAND.[/quote] WTF?[/quote]

If I had to guess, I'd say: "You Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day."

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

iToad:
Anonymous:
Nagesh:
Anonymous:
dohpaz42:
In the breakroom of my company, there is a quote on the "quote board" that says, "Broken gets fixed; shoddy lasts forever".
You have a breakroom? What luxury! We don't even have a water cooler, much less a breakroom or kitchen. Aye, and we used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick the road clean with our tongues.
But you try and tell the young people today that...

Best work for CMM level 5 company then.
I'm not getting into a pissing match with you but my company is CMMI Level 5 and AS9000 certified. It doesn't change the fact they're tight-fisted bastards.

Are you seriously still working to CMM? That was superseded about 10 years ago.

We tried to get CMMI Level 5 certified once. After a couple of hours, one of the auditors started to cry, and another one of them went into the bathroom and threw up. Then they all left, and never came back.

Isn't CS running off an Access DB?

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

An Old Hacker:
CG:
Ok, obviously the reply didn't show where it should have been...
this is in reference to

From the frist control to the 754th: "Access - let the bonne temps rouler"

Either way, I did a bit of Access, and it doesn't take much for it to crash with slighly complicated forms. Anything beyond home business handling a dozen of customers shouldn't be implemented in Access. Period. You will be sorry for it otherwise :-)

If you are using Access for ANYTHING, you will be sorry.

Amen.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

[quote user="Someone who can't be bothered to login from work"][quote user="Anonymous"] YHBT. YHL. HAND.[/quote] WTF?[/quote]

If I had to guess, I'd say: "You Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day."[/quote]

No, I don't think he lost... He doesn't live in India. ducks

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
An Old Hacker:
CG:
Ok, obviously the reply didn't show where it should have been...
this is in reference to

From the frist control to the 754th: "Access - let the bonne temps rouler"

Either way, I did a bit of Access, and it doesn't take much for it to crash with slighly complicated forms. Anything beyond home business handling a dozen of customers shouldn't be implemented in Access. Period. You will be sorry for it otherwise :-)

If you are using Access for ANYTHING, you will be sorry.

Amen.

Yeah. Agreed.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Lone Marauder:
Anonymous:
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.
WTF?

Please, allow me to translate: "Nagesh's post was not an accurate representation of his place of employment; rather, he was attempting to draw other readers into arguments for his own amusement. It is evident by your reply that he has succeeded. I hope that you recover speedily from his deceit and from any disappointment this revelation of his motives may bring you."

Power Troll · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

haha, Nagesh is killing it today. Props, my man.

Anyway, wtf does CPA stand for here?

TFA:
I knocked this out in a few hours back in my CPA and it sorta just kept growing.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Macro King:
my guess:
Some idiot had been reading about the IEEE 754 standard floating-point format and 754 coincidentally happened to match their house number.

With the words 'surely that'll be enough controls for anyone!' they typed in the immortal line of code.

MAX_CONTROLS = 754

Later that day they got hit by a bus in the only example of justice ever to be dispensed upon Microsoft's programmers.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Abso:
Anonymous:
Lone Marauder:
Anonymous:
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.
WTF?

Please, allow me to translate: "Nagesh's post was not an accurate representation of his place of employment; rather, he was attempting to draw other readers into arguments for his own amusement. It is evident by your reply that he has succeeded. I hope that you recover speedily from his deceit and from any disappointment this revelation of his motives may bring you."

Oh right, thanks for the translation to adult. I guess "Lone Marauder" confused me with one of his 14 year old friends he likes to "sext" or whatever it is the tweens are doing these days. If he was little older and spent a bit more time here he'd know that Nagesh is 100% serious, he's brought up his company's precious CMM certification countless times before.

Nagesh · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

CG:
Before you write unnecessary comments, maybe you should learn French in the first place...
Signed: A native French speaker.

Sorry, I don't get you. Is this not English website? Why do you want people to learn French? Am I asking anybody to learn Hindi?

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

I suppose I should also provide the reverse translation: "No, I'm much too smart to be trolled, so Nagesh must be serious."

frits · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Abso:
Anonymous:
Lone Marauder:
Anonymous:
Having a pretty poster on your wall does not make you CMMI compliant. You do realise that CMM and CMMI are separate models that require separate appraisals, don't you? Compliance with CMM does not automatically make you compliant with CMMI. You need to go through the whole appraisal process again and the process areas have been considerably expanded so it's far harder than gaining CMM compliance. It sounds like your company are working to a completely obsolete standard.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.
WTF?

Please, allow me to translate: "Nagesh's post was not an accurate representation of his place of employment; rather, he was attempting to draw other readers into arguments for his own amusement. It is evident by your reply that he has succeeded. I hope that you recover speedily from his deceit and from any disappointment this revelation of his motives may bring you."
Oh right, thanks for the translation to adult. I guess "Lone Marauder" confused me with one of his 14 year old friends he likes to "sext" or whatever it is the tweens are doing these days. If he was little older and spent a bit more time here he'd know that Nagesh is 100% serious, he's brought up his company's precious CMM certification countless times before.

After all, he's a registered user. Additionally, his forum avatar is certainly Indian-looking. Furthermore, he has a list of all his favorite Bollywood stars in his signature.

Well, I'm convinced...

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I guess "Lone Marauder" confused me with one of his 14 year old friends he likes to "sext" or whatever it is the tweens are doing these days.

Righteous burn dude!

frits · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Sudo:
frits:
Chuck:
Anonymous:
Even 754 rainbow-bright unicorns couldn't make this job any better.
I only got to about 250 rainbow-bright unicorns before Firefox crashed, but you're probably right.

I got to 755 and then everything went all fire-and-brimstone and the intro to Slayer's "Hell Awaits" played on a continuous loop.

Sweet - you went to heaven?

Not quite. The only part that played was the bit before the music kicked on. An eternal tease, if you will.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

An Old Hacker:
QJ:
dogbrags:
If it aint broke don't fix it. There are still millions (billions?) of lines of cobol code running mission-critical apps, that haven't changed in decades. Hows that for scary?

A job I recently left had me maintaining FORTRAN that I wrote some 20 years before because I was the only one left in the company who knows FORTRAN. They never replaced it with new technology because it was such a well-designed and bug-free system. But now I've left they may have to.

#1 rule of system maintainability: If you cannot maintain it, it is broken.

So congratulations, you spent twenty years maintaining an app that broke in the worst way the day you left.

Yeah, I think I know that Fortran guy, because I work on the team he just left. First, we haven't replaced his position, because he didn't do anything whatsoever in the last 3 years he was here. Second, his idea of version control was to tar up his entire 150 megabyte directory structure once every couple months or so. Yeah, his code is still running, but we are so replacing it with an industry standard module as soon as we can cut the tentacles it wove into practically everything in sight.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Macro King:
my guess:
With the words 'surely that'll be enough controls for anyone!' they typed in the immortal line of code.

MAX_CONTROLS = 754

Later that day they got hit by a bus and since then everyone has been too scared to change it.

Does this make me a cynic?

That bus was running just a little bit late. If only the tragedy had happened that morning, or optimally, sometime before Access was developed...

CAPTCHA: genitus (adj) of or having only one genital.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

An Old Hacker:
CG:
Anything beyond home business handling a dozen of customers shouldn't be implemented in Access. Period. You will be sorry for it otherwise :-)
If you are using Access for ANYTHING, you will be sorry.

Not true. If you use Access for the purpose* Microsoft designed it, you'll be rolling in cash and OTHERS will be sorry.

Said purpose being to impress newbs with something you can hammer together in a few minutes, take their sucker-money, and run like hell.

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

AnnoyingCowherd:
Macro King:
my guess:
With the words 'surely that'll be enough controls for anyone!' they typed in the immortal line of code.

MAX_CONTROLS = 754

Later that day they got hit by a bus and since then everyone has been too scared to change it.

Does this make me a cynic?

That bus was running just a little bit late. If only the tragedy had happened that morning, or optimally, sometime before Access was developed...

CAPTCHA: genitus (adj) of or having only one genital.

This alleged limit does not apply in data binding scenarios.

boog · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

frits:
Anonymous:
...Nagesh is 100% serious, he's brought up his company's precious CMM certification countless times before.

After all, he's a registered user. Additionally, his forum avatar is certainly Indian-looking. Furthermore, he has a list of all his favorite Bollywood stars in his signature.

Well, I'm convinced...

Also, he has an extensive knowledge of Indian cuisine.

But if that's not enough, one time when he was trolling in the forums, I asked him if he was a troll and he said "I'm not a troll". There you have it. Not a troll.

Nagesh · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

It is better to use some DB like MySQL instead of Access. Access makes everything difficult later. Also SQL Server is not shabby considering support available. Most easy to setup. Please consider free version of SQL Server or Oracle Express edition, if mySQL is too tough to comprend. before touching access with a pole.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
It is better to use some DB like MySQL instead of Access. Access makes everything difficult later. Also SQL Server is not shabby considering support available. Most easy to setup. Please consider free version of SQL Server or Oracle Express edition, if mySQL is too tough to comprend. before touching access with a pole.

Oh, shit. Looks like you guys were right, I've been royally trolled...

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Abso:
Anonymous:
Lone Marauder:
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
WTF?
Please, allow me to translate: "Nagesh's post was not an accurate representation of his place of employment; rather, he was attempting to draw other readers into arguments for his own amusement. It is evident by your reply that he has succeeded. I hope that you recover speedily from his deceit and from any disappointment this revelation of his motives may bring you."
Oh right, thanks for the translation to adult. I guess "Lone Marauder" confused me with one of his 14 year old friends he likes to "sext" or whatever it is the tweens are doing these days. If he was little older and spent a bit more time here he'd know that Nagesh is 100% serious, he's brought up his company's precious CMM certification countless times before.

Abso:
I suppose I should also provide the reverse translation: "No, I'm much too smart to be trolled, so Nagesh must be serious."

Dangit, why does this site even have a reply button? I don't think I've ever seen anyone deliberately reply without quoting, and it's confusing when they do, but yet there's that button tempting/tricking me into doing it.

Remy Porter · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

I'm not sure what you actually mean...

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Remy Porter:
I'm not sure what you actually mean...

Oh, sure, go around providing counter-examples on me.

In light of that, I suppose what I mean is that I'm a whiner who can't pay attention and who should just write a greasemonkey script to hide that button already.

hoodaticus · 2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Abso:
Remy Porter:
I'm not sure what you actually mean...
Oh, sure, go around providing counter-examples on me.
In light of that, I suppose what I mean is that I'm a whiner who can't pay attention and who should just write a greasemonkey script to hide that button already.

Just turn off Javascript and submit some script to remove all reply buttons from the page.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Abso:
Remy Porter:
I'm not sure what you actually mean...
Oh, sure, go around providing counter-examples on me.
In light of that, I suppose what I mean is that I'm a whiner who can't pay attention and who should just write a greasemonkey script to hide that button already.

A greasemonkey script? How about just remembering to use the quote button instead the reply button? Gloves, man, gloves.

2011-04-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Nagesh:
It is better to use some DB like MySQL instead of Access. Access makes everything difficult later. Also SQL Server is not shabby considering support available. Most easy to setup. Please consider free version of SQL Server or Oracle Express edition, if mySQL is too tough to comprend. before touching access with a pole.
Oh, merde. Looks like you guys were right, I've been royally trolled...
//
//         (   )
//      (   ) (
//       ) _   )
//        ( \_
//      _(_\ \)__   Merde!
//     (____\___))
//
.

FTFY

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