The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

BentFranklin:
fritters:
Daniel:
Who wants to bet that this solution was vulnerable to "watermelon | rm -rf / "

Ah yes, the dreaded watermelon attack.

Gallagher!

Isn't he dead, or bludgeoned somewhere?

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

The site sorely needs a 'self masturbateory' section where people can post inane stories about how great their aptitude for hacking & programming is.

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

bob:
The site sorely needs a 'self masturbateory' section where people can post inane stories about how great their aptitude for hacking & programming is.

I once solved a problem on ProjectEuler....It was the most elegant VB that I have ever written

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

Infoseek.com used to be better than Altavista, which sucked compared to astalavista.sk

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

The first contribution I made to the WWW was an mIRC script to draw a big ASCII penis.

I win.

2011-12-14 Reply Admin

HotBot, baby, HotBot.

dsadsajl;jl;jdsajhkl;

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

AltaVista is what we had before there was Google. No one "AltaVista'd" but we would search via AltaVista.

(caption: vulputate: it that manipulating a fox?)

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Reminds me of the time I wired the output of a laptop audio to a 65V phantom power mixing desk with similar results.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

pitchingchris:
Charles Duffy:
Jeff:
But really, who hasn't done this?
Someone who can't code without a GUI IDE, that's who.

Or someone who known how ls works under the hood, and cares about the efficiency of the software they write. A search algorithm that's O(n) over the number of terms in the index is... let's say, not ideal. And that's before we get to the number of syscalls, the expense of fork/exec, etc.

Your words are true, but not everybody knew all about algorithm analysis and running times coming out of high school at the time.

Well . that's the real WTF.

If they spent less time in school over fake languages that noone gives a F* about or even java for that matter, maybe they would have a chance to learn something useful, i.e. how does the machine work and why is it fast or slow.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

fritters:
I'm afraid I've done similar things, but to be fair, some of it (at least in the early days) was out of necessity.
For my eighth grade science fair I did the venerable "which brand of battery lasts longest" (Duracell, of course) and had a bunch of voltage-over-time graphs to plot. Today's kids would just create graphs in Excel and throw the results in a PowerPoint slide show, right? Well back then, all I had was my Apple ][ and no software to speak of other than the built-in BASIC interpreter.

What to do? Why, I wrote my own etch-a-sketch program, of course, and drew my own graphs as on-screen bitmaps, which I saved to disk by dumping the raw buffers in RAM corresponding to the video memory. Then to display the slide show I wrote a program to read a buffer, pause, then read the next one, in sequence.

Did programs exist to do this sort of work on the Apple ][? Quite possibly, but certainly none that I could afford to buy nor wait for a diskette to be mailed to me.

What's less excusable is how I was still using a home-made PHP based simple content management system that was a mess of includes, global variables, and header/footer files up until 2009, when I finally realized that I could just use WordPress.

Well if your code was worse than wordpress... there's prolly a lot you could submit here ;)

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Steve H.:
Steve The Cynic:
Don't forget the experiment one of the British PC magazines did not long after the Pentium 4 came out. It was a fry-off, so to speak, between a couple of contemporary AMD processors, a P4 and a PIII. The test involved rigging a machine so the CPU cooler could be removed (heatsink and fan) while the machine was running.
The PIII locked up, but was still usable after the power was removed and the cooler put back.

The P4's thermal protection slowed it to a crawl, but it continued running while the cooler was off, and worked normally when the machine was repaired.

The AMD processors died fairly thoroughly. They had a high-range thermometer of some sort, and measured one of them at 570 degrees C.

Ahh yes. Good old Tom's hardware.

And that was before they were sold, when they still had some relevant stuff to say .. good old times.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

John_R:
The first contribution I made to the WWW was an mIRC script to draw a big ASCII penis.
I win.

I sincerely hope you mean you posted it on WWW and not the other, stupid thing.

Pim · 2011-12-15 Reply Admin

I know what you mean! You mean U... hey, what's that whooshing sound?

DaveK · 2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Simon N:
Reminds me of the time I wired the output of a laptop audio to a 65V phantom power mixing desk with similar results.

Any time you're going to plug your expensive musical gear into some random venue's PA system of unknown safety and quality, you should be using DI boxes.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

populus:
populus:
And, what's you fucking comment, dick? That you're smart? Hell, yeah, you're smart. Learned more than changing background colors since then? What else did you accomplish, genious?

And, what's your fucking point, dick?

That should say.

When seting up joke, do not be forgeting to changing sock pupet handel

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
populus:
populus:
And, what's you fucking comment, dick? That you're smart? Hell, yeah, you're smart. Learned more than changing background colors since then? What else did you accomplish, genious?

And, what's your fucking point, dick?

That should say.
When seting up joke, do not be forgeting to changing sock pupet handel

My sock puppets like Wagner, thank you very much.

I think that was a correction, BTW.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Nagesh #2:
Nagesh:
populus:
populus:
And, what's you fucking comment, dick? That you're smart? Hell, yeah, you're smart. Learned more than changing background colors since then? What else did you accomplish, genious?

And, what's your fucking point, dick?

That should say.
When seting up joke, do not be forgeting to changing sock pupet handel
My sock puppets like Wagner, thank you very much.

I think that was a correction, BTW.

That would be slightly amusing if there was a famous composer by the name of Handel.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

When I was twelve years old, I wrote my first point-and-shoot game on my Commodore 64. The next year, I burned-out that very same C64 by trying use its sound chip for placing phone calls. At fourteen, I taught myself Pascal and wrote a little program that hid itself in memory and snooped on my classmates’ and teachers’ passwords as they typed them in. There was no question about it. Before I even entered high school, I was a bona fide computer genius.
By the time I graduated high school, I was ready to take on the world – or, more specifically, the World Wide Web. With my technical acumen, I had no problem finding a job as a “webmaster” at a local marketing company. My job mainly consisted of creating and copying static HTML pages on different servers for different websites, but every now a client needed something a little more exciting. And, as obviously the most qualified guy there, I always volunteered.

One client – a fairly large print magazine – wanted to not only bring their content online, but maintain it themselves. With my two months of HTML experience, I was just the person to implement a content management system!

After spending a few hours googling on AltaVista, I quickly became an expert on CGI. I then picked up a copy of “Teach yourself C/C++ in 21 days”, read the first few chapters, and was ready to write my very first CGI script, or “web application” as you’d call it today.

First things first, I re-invented and re-implemented the request parsing wheel. That took a few solid weeks to do, and another couple to debug until it became stable. And then I wrote a simple, file-based dynamic content management system: HTML files were created from the “create article” form contents, saved to the disk with a date-based file name, and the appropriate index.html files were updated to link to the file name. As I was wrapping things up, my boss delivered some great news: the client now wanted a site search feature for the site.

Confession doesn't mean boasting about yourself.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Moonraquel:
The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

Excuse me sir. Excuse me, but the reason coders that BASIC is the same reason that people with actual sports cars hate kids that put spoilers on their civics and try to race them at stop lights.

Also, I see what you did there with coder <> programmer.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Anna-Kaisa Herpmunen:
Nagesh #2:
Nagesh:
populus:
populus:
And, what's you fucking comment, dick? That you're smart? Hell, yeah, you're smart. Learned more than changing background colors since then? What else did you accomplish, genious?

And, what's your fucking point, dick?

That should say.
When seting up joke, do not be forgeting to changing sock pupet handel
My sock puppets like Wagner, thank you very much.

I think that was a correction, BTW.

That would be slightly amusing if there was a famous composer by the name of Handel.

Thanks sexy!

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

L.:
Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

I have no idea how stating my legitimate opinion could be construed as a troll. If you really think there was "never any good reason" to use Access, then you're flat-out wrong.

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrow paradigm of what is "good," does not mean it has not provided tremendous value to businesses. At a time when one's only options for creating a windows application were C++, where access to the Win API was so arcane that it required a thousand lines of code to handle just a simple form action, and Visual Basic, which was finicky at best in its early years. Neither came with built-in data access, either. Along came Access, which was a Godsend. One could rapidly create user interfaces for displaying and managing data, as well as a pretty powerful reporting engine.

Yes, it was useless the moment you added a second user, but that was never its intent (though you could externally connect to a SQL Server database, and it worked surprisingly well). Access was meant to be a RAD single-user database, to automate someone's data retrieval and boost his productivity.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Every now I make a comment on this site.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

RE "googled on AltaVista": I just saw some television program where a character sat down at a computer and said, "Let me Bing his name and see what we can find." And I thought to myself, did the writer use "bing" as a verb all by himself, or did Microsoft pay the studio to have that line put in the script?

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Moonraquel:
Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

That brought a tear to my eye.

The invention of COBOL has been a boon for the progress of computing. Before COBOL, it was impossible to write complex invoicing systems with any practical use.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

L.:
pitchingchris:
Charles Duffy:
Jeff:
But really, who hasn't done this?
Someone who can't code without a GUI IDE, that's who.

Or someone who known how ls works under the hood, and cares about the efficiency of the software they write. A search algorithm that's O(n) over the number of terms in the index is... let's say, not ideal. And that's before we get to the number of syscalls, the expense of fork/exec, etc.

Your words are true, but not everybody knew all about algorithm analysis and running times coming out of high school at the time.

Well . that's the real WTF.

If they spent less time in school over fake languages that noone gives a F* about or even java for that matter, maybe they would have a chance to learn something useful, i.e. how does the machine work and why is it fast or slow.

This *10000000000000000000000000000000

I don't mind Java, C# or even some of the drag'n'drop programming stuff (WebMethods, anyone?). I don't even mind people using them, but I have a major issue with people who are taught only high level languages, and have no concept for what is actually going on.

Take automatic Garbage Collection (as an example). While it makes it safer for the lazy coder, it is important that anyone who uses a language with such a feature have some understanding of what's going on, and how memory works. Too often, I see spurious creation of objects and the like in such languages, that show a carefree attitude toward memory. Of course, for the Sudoku game you make to run on a home desktop this is of little consequence, but doing such things in an server based application the resource consumption increases based on the number of users.

I recently saw someone using one of these languages implement a bit field as a String (of 1's and 0's) - of course all the functionality available in String might make it look efficient, but that's where at least a basic understanding of what is going on under the hood is important.

Perhaps we have to draw a line somewhere, but I think the lower-level a language people are forced to use when they study the more likely they will be to apply sound principles in using higher level languages. Of course, people are scared to teach C because C programmers will (apparently) never get their head around this new OO stuff.

Perhaps OO is the problem? Perhaps OO principles encourage bloated Objects and Data Structures.... Hmm...bet I made some friends with that thought

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Nag-Geoff:
Moonraquel:
Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

That brought a tear to my eye.

The invention of COBOL has been a boon for the progress of computing. Before COBOL, it was impossible to write complex invoicing systems with any practical use.

Instead we're in a situation where people over-engineer systems just so they can use a complex invoicing system.

Why can't people use simple invoicing systems? It would make the world a better place.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Hugh:
Nag-Geoff:
Moonraquel:
Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

That brought a tear to my eye.

The invention of COBOL has been a boon for the progress of computing. Before COBOL, it was impossible to write complex invoicing systems with any practical use.
Instead we're in a situation where people over-engineer systems just so they can use a complex invoicing system.

Why can't people use simple invoicing systems? It would make the world a better place.

As my good friend Pratchett writes, the world is being overrun by people who want to turn it to a better place.

If you find anybody who wants to make the world a better place, the safest option is to run from him as far away as possible.

Matt Westwood · 2011-12-15 Reply Admin

someone:
When I was twelve years old, I wrote my first point-and-shoot game on my Commodore 64. The next year, I burned-out that very same C64 by trying use its sound chip for placing phone calls. At fourteen, I taught myself Pascal and wrote a little program that hid itself in memory and snooped on my classmates’ and teachers’ passwords as they typed them in. There was no question about it. Before I even entered high school, I was a bona fide computer genius.
By the time I graduated high school, I was ready to take on the world – or, more specifically, the World Wide Web. With my technical acumen, I had no problem finding a job as a “webmaster” at a local marketing company. My job mainly consisted of creating and copying static HTML pages on different servers for different websites, but every now a client needed something a little more exciting. And, as obviously the most qualified guy there, I always volunteered.

One client – a fairly large print magazine – wanted to not only bring their content online, but maintain it themselves. With my two months of HTML experience, I was just the person to implement a content management system!

After spending a few hours googling on AltaVista, I quickly became an expert on CGI. I then picked up a copy of “Teach yourself C/C++ in 21 days”, read the first few chapters, and was ready to write my very first CGI script, or “web application” as you’d call it today.

First things first, I re-invented and re-implemented the request parsing wheel. That took a few solid weeks to do, and another couple to debug until it became stable. And then I wrote a simple, file-based dynamic content management system: HTML files were created from the “create article” form contents, saved to the disk with a date-based file name, and the appropriate index.html files were updated to link to the file name. As I was wrapping things up, my boss delivered some great news: the client now wanted a site search feature for the site.

Confession doesn't mean boasting about yourself.

"Father I have sinned it is three weeks since my last confession. Last night I went to the bar and picked up the most gorgeous girl I've ever seen in my life and I took her home and we had hot passionate sex for hours till we fell asleep exhausted and when I woke up she cooked me breakfast and, well yeah."

"And that is what you wish to confess?"

"Well no I just had to tell someone!"

Matt Westwood · 2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Moonraquel:
Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

My father did something similar, but because he wasn't tempted to try something harder (COBOL) he's fortunately still alive. He's still a hopeless BASIC addict, and he's even dabbled with C, but I've managed to dissuade him from trying out Java.

If only he'd stuck to a bit of harmless recreational FORTRAN.

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

Nag-Geoff:
Hugh:
Nag-Geoff:
Moonraquel:
Jack Foluney:
I wrote a system like this in highschool that made me cringe. It was done in GW basic for a manufacturing company my dad was the manager for. They used it for over 10 years which is scary!!

My father wrote several applications for businesses in BASIC that were used all through the 90's - maybe even today. Not because he wanted to but because that was the company way. (He later switched to a place where he could program in COBOL. While he is now dead, his COBOL programs are still up and running and serving over 1000 users every day.)

The reason why coders (as opposed to programmers) hate BASIC is that it's efficient and easy to learn. The reason why coders hate COBOL is that it's the best tool for the job (writing business applications) and where's the fun in that?

That brought a tear to my eye.

The invention of COBOL has been a boon for the progress of computing. Before COBOL, it was impossible to write complex invoicing systems with any practical use.
Instead we're in a situation where people over-engineer systems just so they can use a complex invoicing system.

Why can't people use simple invoicing systems? It would make the world a better place.

As my good friend Pratchett writes, the world is being overrun by people who want to turn it to a better place.

If you find anybody who wants to make the world a better place, the safest option is to run from him as far away as possible.

Goodbye - Nice meeting you

2011-12-15 Reply Admin

gwea:
Ivan:
TRWTF is "googling on AltaVista" phrase.
Yah, should be "AltaVistaring"

You're clearly British :-)

Severity One · 2011-12-16 Reply Admin

...but every now a client needed something...

Only every now? Not every again as well?

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
L.:
Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

I have no idea how stating my legitimate opinion could be construed as a troll. If you really think there was "never any good reason" to use Access, then you're flat-out wrong.

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrow paradigm of what is "good," does not mean it has not provided tremendous value to businesses. At a time when one's only options for creating a windows application were C++, where access to the Win API was so arcane that it required a thousand lines of code to handle just a simple form action, and Visual Basic, which was finicky at best in its early years. Neither came with built-in data access, either. Along came Access, which was a Godsend. One could rapidly create user interfaces for displaying and managing data, as well as a pretty powerful reporting engine.

Yes, it was useless the moment you added a second user, but that was never its intent (though you could externally connect to a SQL Server database, and it worked surprisingly well). Access was meant to be a RAD single-user database, to automate someone's data retrieval and boost his productivity.

Right ... At a time when one had so many other options like having an actually centralized database server, a real application and stuff, Access was the best choice for those who understood only windows and thought fail was acceptable.

So cool.

The very idea of not having a centralized datastore deserves heavy corporal punishment.

The very idea of using access when one should be using a database .. just the same.

It's like Excel, it's an evil that must be destroyed.

Besides, you're thinking microsoft space, like most people who are only half-technical ... as if the capability to create real solutions could come from people who managed to stick the words "windows" and "server" together after laughing hysterically for several weeks.

Yes, you can do a lot in Excel or Access, but it's not a reason to do it.

Excel and Access are fine to enable an end-user to do some basic stuff at home, it was never suitable for anything serious and yet people who believed like you used it for corporate solutions and now we're in a mess of eleventy beelion different versions of the same spreadsheet, information that cannot possibly be accessed by other applications or even users and overall major fails in data quality, data maintenance and value derived from data collection.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

There is no such language as C/C++, nor is it possible to learn C++ or C in 21 days.

However those were the days when if you were a developer you would take any challenge put before you and work it out.

The real WTF though is that you were left to do everything on your own with nobody reviewing your work, preferably before you start on something, not at the end when the whole thing is written and working.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

Of course there is. A finished program is any program that is no longer your problem.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

DaveK:
Only slightly exaggerating. When I first got web access in mid-'94, the WWW was growing at a rate of around 30 sites a day.

Ah, the youth of today.

I first got full Internet access in 1992 (Demon Internet in the UK). It was "fun" accessing the Internet from DOS - KA9Q was the thing to use (with a 9600 baud modem - the speed!) - and we had a version of Lynx to access websites. I remember thinking websites were a bit useless (well, there were about 10 of them, and just plain text). Usenet, email and FTP was what it was all about, and just general fiddling, and amazement at communicating around the world.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

Cbuttius:
There is no such language as C/C++, nor is it possible to learn C++ or C in 21 days.
However those were the days when if you were a developer you would take any challenge put before you and work it out.

The real WTF though is that you were left to do everything on your own with nobody reviewing your work, preferably before you start on something, not at the end when the whole thing is written and working.

of course you can learn C or C++ (or whatever) language in a few hours. The language is just the syntax, symbols and their meanings.

What takes (up to) forever to learn is the culture, i.e. the standard libraries, how the runtime works, how best to design and optimize your code and data structures in that language for different constraints, etc.

Someone mentioned ProjectEuler earlier. I'd recommend this to anyone trying to learn another programming language. Their forums encourage people to share solutions, so you can usually find efficient, equivalent implementations in other languages.

If you're really hardcore, you finish PE problems in the interrupt time available during page turn events as you read TAOCP. Or, if you're lazy, just create an AI to solve them for you.

frits · 2011-12-16 Reply Admin

Severity One:
...but every now a client needed something...
Only every now? Not every again as well?

Sounds about right to me. Most clients are needy and persistent...

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

L.:
geoffrey:
L.:
Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

I have no idea how stating my legitimate opinion could be construed as a troll. If you really think there was "never any good reason" to use Access, then you're flat-out wrong.

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrow paradigm of what is "good," does not mean it has not provided tremendous value to businesses. At a time when one's only options for creating a windows application were C++, where access to the Win API was so arcane that it required a thousand lines of code to handle just a simple form action, and Visual Basic, which was finicky at best in its early years. Neither came with built-in data access, either. Along came Access, which was a Godsend. One could rapidly create user interfaces for displaying and managing data, as well as a pretty powerful reporting engine.

Yes, it was useless the moment you added a second user, but that was never its intent (though you could externally connect to a SQL Server database, and it worked surprisingly well). Access was meant to be a RAD single-user database, to automate someone's data retrieval and boost his productivity.

Right ... At a time when one had so many other options like having an actually centralized database server, a real application and stuff, Access was the best choice for those who understood only windows and thought fail was acceptable.

So cool.

The very idea of not having a centralized datastore deserves heavy corporal punishment.

The very idea of using access when one should be using a database .. just the same.

It's like Excel, it's an evil that must be destroyed.

Besides, you're thinking microsoft space, like most people who are only half-technical ... as if the capability to create real solutions could come from people who managed to stick the words "windows" and "server" together after laughing hysterically for several weeks.

Yes, you can do a lot in Excel or Access, but it's not a reason to do it.

Excel and Access are fine to enable an end-user to do some basic stuff at home, it was never suitable for anything serious and yet people who believed like you used it for corporate solutions and now we're in a mess of eleventy beelion different versions of the same spreadsheet, information that cannot possibly be accessed by other applications or even users and overall major fails in data quality, data maintenance and value derived from data collection.

When faced with a programming team who quotes thousands of hours of labor to automate a simple task, one naturally turns to a tool that can get it rapidly done. Enter Access and Excel.

To call them "evil" is indicative of the disdain you hold for providing value. While you stand there stamping your feet that it must be done "right," millions of users are doubling their productivity, if not better, but using "evil" tools.

Sorry, but you are on poor footing here. Technology should be subject to the the business, not vice versa.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
L.:
geoffrey:
L.:
Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

I have no idea how stating my legitimate opinion could be construed as a troll. If you really think there was "never any good reason" to use Access, then you're flat-out wrong.

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrow paradigm of what is "good," does not mean it has not provided tremendous value to businesses. At a time when one's only options for creating a windows application were C++, where access to the Win API was so arcane that it required a thousand lines of code to handle just a simple form action, and Visual Basic, which was finicky at best in its early years. Neither came with built-in data access, either. Along came Access, which was a Godsend. One could rapidly create user interfaces for displaying and managing data, as well as a pretty powerful reporting engine.

Yes, it was useless the moment you added a second user, but that was never its intent (though you could externally connect to a SQL Server database, and it worked surprisingly well). Access was meant to be a RAD single-user database, to automate someone's data retrieval and boost his productivity.

Right ... At a time when one had so many other options like having an actually centralized database server, a real application and stuff, Access was the best choice for those who understood only windows and thought fail was acceptable.

So cool.

The very idea of not having a centralized datastore deserves heavy corporal punishment.

The very idea of using access when one should be using a database .. just the same.

It's like Excel, it's an evil that must be destroyed.

Besides, you're thinking microsoft space, like most people who are only half-technical ... as if the capability to create real solutions could come from people who managed to stick the words "windows" and "server" together after laughing hysterically for several weeks.

Yes, you can do a lot in Excel or Access, but it's not a reason to do it.

Excel and Access are fine to enable an end-user to do some basic stuff at home, it was never suitable for anything serious and yet people who believed like you used it for corporate solutions and now we're in a mess of eleventy beelion different versions of the same spreadsheet, information that cannot possibly be accessed by other applications or even users and overall major fails in data quality, data maintenance and value derived from data collection.

When faced with a programming team who quotes thousands of hours of labor to automate a simple task, one naturally turns to a tool that can get it rapidly done. Enter Access and Excel.

To call them "evil" is indicative of the disdain you hold for providing value. While you stand there stamping your feet that it must be done "right," millions of users are doubling their productivity, if not better, but using "evil" tools.

Sorry, but you are on poor footing here. Technology should be subject to the the business, not vice versa.

I don't reply to t... oh shit!

Matt Westwood · 2011-12-16 Reply Admin

geoffrey:
L.:
geoffrey:
L.:
Doozerboy:
geoffrey:
ubersoldat:
I've got a confession to make: I ______ MS Access ______
I was going to write "I wrote MS Access applications" but then I couldn't. I just can define how dirty I felt, it was like losing my virginity because of being raped.

And then I met PHP... Generation X sucks!!!

There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat

No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.

The mind boggles....

And there i was, seeing geof's trolling thinking noone would take the bait.

You sir are made of fail.

I was going to say "There never was any good reason to use access,ever", and then I took an arrow in the knee.

I have no idea how stating my legitimate opinion could be construed as a troll. If you really think there was "never any good reason" to use Access, then you're flat-out wrong.

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrow paradigm of what is "good," does not mean it has not provided tremendous value to businesses. At a time when one's only options for creating a windows application were C++, where access to the Win API was so arcane that it required a thousand lines of code to handle just a simple form action, and Visual Basic, which was finicky at best in its early years. Neither came with built-in data access, either. Along came Access, which was a Godsend. One could rapidly create user interfaces for displaying and managing data, as well as a pretty powerful reporting engine.

Yes, it was useless the moment you added a second user, but that was never its intent (though you could externally connect to a SQL Server database, and it worked surprisingly well). Access was meant to be a RAD single-user database, to automate someone's data retrieval and boost his productivity.

Right ... At a time when one had so many other options like having an actually centralized database server, a real application and stuff, Access was the best choice for those who understood only windows and thought fail was acceptable.

So cool.

The very idea of not having a centralized datastore deserves heavy corporal punishment.

The very idea of using access when one should be using a database .. just the same.

It's like Excel, it's an evil that must be destroyed.

Besides, you're thinking microsoft space, like most people who are only half-technical ... as if the capability to create real solutions could come from people who managed to stick the words "windows" and "server" together after laughing hysterically for several weeks.

Yes, you can do a lot in Excel or Access, but it's not a reason to do it.

Excel and Access are fine to enable an end-user to do some basic stuff at home, it was never suitable for anything serious and yet people who believed like you used it for corporate solutions and now we're in a mess of eleventy beelion different versions of the same spreadsheet, information that cannot possibly be accessed by other applications or even users and overall major fails in data quality, data maintenance and value derived from data collection.

When faced with a programming team who quotes thousands of hours of labor to automate a simple task, one naturally turns to a tool that can get it rapidly done. Enter Access and Excel.

To call them "evil" is indicative of the disdain you hold for providing value. While you stand there stamping your feet that it must be done "right," millions of users are doubling their productivity, if not better, but using "evil" tools.

Sorry, but you are on poor footing here. Technology should be subject to the the business, not vice versa.

Hats off to you once more for challenging our religious convictions and forcing us to think.

2011-12-16 Reply Admin

"When faced with a programming team who quotes thousands of hours of labor to automate a simple task, one naturally turns to a tool that can get it rapidly done. Enter Access and Excel.

To call them "evil" is indicative of the disdain you hold for providing value. While you stand there stamping your feet that it must be done "right," millions of users are doubling their productivity, if not better, but using "evil" tools.

Sorry, but you are on poor footing here. Technology should be subject to the the business, not vice versa."

They ARE evil, since they put the business logic on the CLIENT SIDE, this is not where it should be as crates endless problems when people are using different "versions" of this type of half assed fix.

2011-12-17 Reply Admin

"At a time when one had so many other options like having an actually centralized database server, a real application and stuff, Access was the best choice for those who understood only windows and thought fail was acceptable."

You're assuming that these options WERE available. Some business cases evaluated upon the basis of current skill levels, delivery capability and cost may have arrived at the conclusion that Access was the best choice available.

"Yes, you can do a lot in Excel or Access, but it's not a reason to do it" - I would leave that decision to those forming and approving the business case. I would give strong reasons for not using them, but until I know the context for which they are being considered, immediately discounting them without reason is presumptuous.

"people who believed like you used it for corporate solutions" - in many organisations, it provided a solution for the problem definition at that time. Now the situation has changed and the organisation has matured, more time/money/skill may be available to redevelop the current (unscalable) solution into something more robust. People who believe small problems requiring an enterprise-strength solution from the outset are guilty of enormous wastage through over-engineering and extending the ROI period.

Horses for courses and all that.

(how the hell do you fix quoting in this CMS?)

2011-12-17 Reply Admin

IS there any rule that says business logic shouldn't exist on the client side?

I can see the issue when different people are trying to access the same data and it makes sense to centralise the logic over to a server from a client, but in situations where there is a Singleton user, adding a client-server layer seems unnecessary over-engineering to me.

2011-12-17 Reply Admin

bob:
"When faced with a programming team who quotes thousands of hours of labor to automate a simple task, one naturally turns to a tool that can get it rapidly done. Enter Access and Excel.
To call them "evil" is indicative of the disdain you hold for providing value. While you stand there stamping your feet that it must be done "right," millions of users are doubling their productivity, if not better, but using "evil" tools.

Sorry, but you are on poor footing here. Technology should be subject to the the business, not vice versa."

They ARE evil, since they put the business logic on the CLIENT SIDE, this is not where it should be as crates endless problems when people are using different "versions" of this type of half assed fix.

In life, the doers don't worry about all the ways something won't work. That's loser talk, and doers are winners. Instead they just get the job done. So go ahead and keep standing on the sidelines, telling everyone how you could have done it better, while the world passes you by.

2011-12-17 Reply Admin

bob:
They ARE evil, since they put the business logic on the CLIENT SIDE, this is not where it should be as crates endless problems when people are using different "versions" of this type of half assed fix.

Well, since you mention the business logic, and we are on the dailywtf.com, what better thing to do than to re-read that wonderful article the very owner of this very site wrote 4 years ago aprox.:

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Mythical-Business-Layer.aspx

Alex Papadimoulis:
virtually every line of code in a software application is business logic:

The Customers database table, with its Customer_Number (CHAR-13), Approved_Date (DATETIME), and SalesRep_Name (VARCHAR-35) columns: business logic. If it wasn’t, it’d just be Table032 with Column01, Column02, and Column03.

The subroutine that extends a ten-percent discount to first time customers: definitely business logic. And hopefully, not soft-coded.

And the code that highlights past-due invoices in red: that’s business logic, too. Internet Explorer certainly doesn’t look for the strings “unpaid” and “30+ days” and go, hey, that sure would look good with a #990000 background!

So how then is possible to encapsulate all of this business logic in a single layer of code? With terrible architecture and bad code of course!

Damn!, this guy is good.

2011-12-17 Reply Admin

fritters:
Earlchaos:
Daniel:
Who wants to bet that this solution was vulnerable to "watermelon | rm -rf / "

Is that a friend of little bobby tables? ;)

Little Wally Tables, they called him.

No, it's Bobby's cousin Billy Watermelon.

2011-12-18 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
operagost:
The next year, I burned-out that very same C64 by trying use its sound chip for placing phone calls.
I'm going to guess that the purpose was to send touch tones. I'm also guessing that you attached the audio output directly to the telephone network. I'll conclude by suggesting that at some point, an incoming call put 90VAC on the line...
That reminds me of the day a colleague put a card into the wrong slot of a custom-backplane chassis. (Around 1992) The card was a 0-5V digital output, using an Intel 8255 PIO chip. The backplane slot he used was for some sort of analog input, and had a +24V supply rail on the pin connected to one of the poor 8255's outputs.
The result was a snapping sound and a thin curl of smoke emerging from the top of the rack.

Oh, and a wedge-shaped fragment blown out of the plastic chip package (40-pin wide DIP).

The 8255 didn't work too well after that, needless to say.

Dude, of course it didn't work anymore! You let the smoke out. Everybody knows the smoke is what makes it work, Duh!

;-)

Confessions: FSDB

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