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Admin
All they need now is earlybird specials, and people will show up to work early, just to hose the system.
Admin
He's obviously talking about Bostonians ...
where "park the car in Harvard yard" is pronounced more like "pawk da cah in Hawvuud yawd", "water" is pronounced more like "watuh", "Worcester" is pronounced more like "woostuh", and "data" is pronounced more like "dater".
Admin
I'm getting too old. The only one that made me LOL was the try/catch with the same exact code. That's awesome. I wish I had 14-yr-old humor again.
CAPTCHA: awesomeness
Admin
I know an ERP system which requires such a stubborness: The first call to some API returns (under some circumstances) NOK (not ok), with some warning message; calling the same API again works.
Admin
nice, but you must be a little older than I, guess you wanted to keep it "clean". I used to worked with a guy, wo was in his 20s, who thought it was funny to comeback with the "Your Mom" statement after everything you said. Now your into the humor of today!
sry just had to post it!
Admin
I worked in a place where they thought locking out the GUI interface for setting the clock was the same thing as taking away the privilege to change the clock...
Admin
Wow, I might know where this comes from. I'd been working with a trading systems vendor who'd promised to give us post-trade date files daily so we could insert the data into our database. They said their standard format was csv files, and when I asked if they were actually csv's (some use "csv" as shorthand for "delimited"). They stared a second and said yes, of course. I was a little annoyed -- I'm not a big fan of true csv's for data transmission which will include textual data. But we had code that would parse true csv's, so we said agreed.
The first sample file didn't parse correctly. There were different numbers of fields for each record. Lo and behold, there were embedded commas in the data, and no double-quoting. No, this isn't the wtf yet.
I went back and told them this, and they said they'd spend a few days working on it. After a week or two, they came back to me with their first suggested solution: move the text fields (there was more than one) which might have commas in it to the end of the record layout. When I pointed out that we actually want that data and moving those fields to the end doesn't really help, they promised to work on it some more. At this point I suggested using pipes instead, but they demurred, saying csv's were their standard format. (I'd consider this sequence, particularly their "solution", wtf 1).
Some time later, they copied me on an email instructing their dba's to remove all commas from all data in specified columns of their database. I had done enough espionage to know that their request wouldn't have just affected us (as bad as that would have been), but would have affected ALL their customers. I was sorely tempted to agree just to witness the havoc that would ensue. In the end, though, I did the right thing and told them that was no good -- we wanted the commas in the data that had commas. They promised to work on it and give us real csv's. (I'd consider this wtf 2). By this point, I told the salesperson who'd sold us the product that there was no way any of their other customers are actually using the files, and he agreed. Too bad IT had no say in whether the product was used.
After I complained at a meeting about their inability to produce usable files after several weeks, they went on the offensive. One of their supposedly technical people sent an email claiming there was no problem with the file format, the problem was with "the way you open it in Excel". At this point, I got pretty pissed, responding with something to the effect of, "Excel has nothing to do with it; we don't process it in Excel, and you don't make it in Excel -- because if you did, it would have been RIGHT!" Except it was a lot longer and more acerbic, and came much closer to accusing them of outright lying and/or stupidity. The next four people I met from that company opened their eyes very very wide when I introduced myself. >:)
At that point, they agreed to send the files pipe-delimited. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they'd redefined their "COMMA" constant to "|".
Needless to say, when the product went live we had tremendous issues with data quality, connectivity, application configuration/installation, etc. But, the files were at least formatted in a usable manner.
Admin
H:\>perl -e "print length(\" \");"
25
H:\>
Admin
lSend = (lSend = True)
Works fine in VBScript... probably would have worked in VB6 as well.
Captcha: quality ....seriously
Admin
I worked on an intranet which had an achronym of PAM... the CEO thought it was hillarious when he said he was "In Pam last night."
Admin
Imagine the Battlestar Galactica chicks making out.
Or am I the only one who does this?
[captcha=photogenic] Yes they are.
Admin
No, no. They just redefined twenty as twenty-five.
Admin
You have to do all that?
Admin
Wow, it's like a repeat of A False Detector:
(This is my favorite WTF yet... I laughed for about 5 minutes almost solid. My sides were hurting when I was done.)
Admin
% ruby
Admin
I think a good contest would be to see who can come up with the most overengineered solution to count the actual number of spaces in that "TwentySpaces" string.
GO! I'd better see some XML and web services.
Admin
I love this small "currently not thinking - just working" things.
I still remember my first: if(true)
Admin
int return_space_count(std::string spaceString) { return 25; // hrhr }
Admin
F.S. noticed that Australian airline JetStar is very careful about ensuring visitors are sent to the proper page ...
Maybe they initially wanted to make different pages for these browsers, and this code was accidently not removed after someone decided making different pages was too complicated/time-consuming/expensive/whatever.
Admin
I copied the string contents into the emacs "*scratch*" buffer and ran shell-command-on-buffer, "wc". ;-)
Admin
Of course, trying to create meaningful server names can also lead to these types of problems. I remember a Microsoft Exchange server that was being built for a mailbox restoration while I was at ISS...ah, yes. It was called ISSEXREST
Admin
This actually reminds me of one a former coworker told me about. He was on the Solomon support team. The queue in the support ticket system was SOL
Admin
Try this one on: A group of people whose job it is to make sure business requests for IT services make sense and are possible. We would call it the Business/Information Technology Clearing House.
"Hey, can we do that? Did the BITCH clear it?
"Have you asked the BITCH if we have the money for that?"
"Can't go to lunch...got a 1 o'clock BITCH session"
"I used to work in that group...now I guess I'm just a son of a BITCH"
Yeah, I could go on forever.
Admin
How about a Python version while we're at it:
> python -c "print len(' ')"
25
or
> python
>>> len(' ')
25
Admin
OK, just a preliminary attempt at a data representation here. Maybe someone can build on this.
<string>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
<char value=" "/>
</string>
Captcher == "error" -> True
Admin
Forget opera, what about lynx! I hope telnetting to port 80 is ok though...
Admin
oh, that'd need more than just javascript.
<!-- if you're using telnet, please browse to /skylights/cgi-bin/skylights.cgi -->
Admin
Well indeed. And just in case one forgets to remove an instance, a "// debug" comment takes two seconds to enter and is simple politeness to the next developer who comes along.
Admin
Admin
There's no way a girl of 3 months should be in school yet anyway. I guess that's the real WTF here.
Admin
These two, are in my opinion results of the same problem : inability to debug. I'm forced to use the second aproach when debugging under Windows CE emulator, because after the exception is thrown you cannot recreate it by using "Set Next Statement", so the only way is to repeat the call that caused exception in catch block - this time debugging step by step.
Admin
<char value=" "/> doesn't cut it. It's not exactly Enterprise-quality...
Use <character encoding="ISO-8859-1"><codepoint source="unicode"><integer format="hexadecimal">20</integer></codepoint></character>
(Captcha: "error". Something wrong with your system?)
Admin
Far more empowering! After all, Sunday and Saturday are the strongest days, the other five being, of course, Week Days... ;)
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
The Real WTF(tm) here, of course, is that they use System.out instead of System.err to print error message, and use return rather than System.exit() to signal a failure condition
Admin
Nahh... more like:
Admin
Not completely true. The problem is that there could (should) be a command line option like "-h" that shows the usage info; if this option is given, output should go to System.out. Therefore we are facing the problem that the return code of CLArgParser.doStdArgs() must represent three possible values: "success", "failure" and "help requested". It should be ovious for all regular readers of this site how to solve that:
Admin
A trap for corrupt data.
Admin
I would actually use code like F.S. presented in the midst of developing. The idea would be to set that up so it's usable immediately, and then iteratively work through making NS- and IE-compatible websites. Only when they were testable would i change the URLs to point to them. However, in this particular example I would probably put the logic in the CGI code, not in the Java...
Admin
...Script. JavaScript. Not Java.
Honestly now.
Admin
Source potpourri, what delight
Admin
Paula Bean...where are you?!?
Admin
<font face="courier new,courier">C:\> osql -E -Q "select datalength(' ')"
-----------
25</font>
<font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font face="courier new,courier">(1 row affected)
C:\>
</font>
I could have made an app that "shelled" query analyzer then just "send keys" these query, send "F5", send another set of keys to highlight the result, send "CTRL+C", "shelled" notepad.exe, send "CTRL+V", send "ALT, F, S, C:\result.txt, ENTER", then in the same app, read the contents of result.txt, "val"-ed it and put the final result in a messagebox. But I'm a bit lazy today...
Oh wait...
</font>
Admin
Yo DailyWTF, your RSS feed got bad recently. Since the ads are always changing, my feedreader reports that the items have been edited and marks them as unread. It might be worth a discussion if the feedreader is WTFed or your feed ... but i think you could change yours easily ... And my opinion is that your feed is WTFed :)
Admin
"The name of the file? AnalReport. Try keeping a straight face..."
My company had an incredible time code system: 0.1 hour resolution (so 7h45m fridays were tricky...), a whole deep hierarchy of codes for administrivia work but only one 'customer project' code, that sort of thing. Then they upgraded it to at least allow customer tasks to be broken down a little further. Except that there was only a very short text field for the description.
Is your current activity customer-related analysis work? Then just put your hours down against 'Anal Acts'...
Admin
most clueless way of counting the spaces ....
<?php
$howMushSpacesIsOutThere = 0;
$countSpacesInThisWord = " ";
while ( ($countSpacesInThisWord{$howMuchSpacesIsOutThere} != '' ? ++$howMuchSpacesIsOutThere : 0)) ;
print $howMuchSpacesIsOutThere . "\n";
?>
speaking of devil captcha: clueless, really!
Admin
wtf!!
CAPTCHA Test
Admin
I suppose it's just possible that there was som logic embedded in a trigger or something, which would be something of a wtf in itself if this was the way they went about applying said logic.