The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Consultants have been busy. It's hard work looking like you're working then, when crunch time comes, taking a map of the world, turning it upside down, squinting and drawing a bunch of boxes to match.

boog · 2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
boog:
Matt Westwood:
If you have an application written in FORTRAN that functions smooth as you like, easy to use, etc. etc. whose only downsides are: a) The hardware it runs on is obsolete and no longer supported, and there is no appropriate replacement, and b) despite needing minimal ongoing maintenance, you can't find any staff either willing or able to perform this task, then reluctantly you find you *have* to upgrade.
Obviously. At that point, it's no longer a decision to rewrite/upgrade, but an imperative.
But oh so sad. There's a beautifully written program whose only crime is to be written in a language which is no longer "fashionable", for fucking pissing vb asp microsoft sake.

Absolutely. I never said it was right.

2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
boog:
Matt Westwood:
If you have an application written in FORTRAN that functions smooth as you like, easy to use, etc. etc. whose only downsides are: a) The hardware it runs on is obsolete and no longer supported, and there is no appropriate replacement, and b) despite needing minimal ongoing maintenance, you can't find any staff either willing or able to perform this task, then reluctantly you find you *have* to upgrade.
Obviously. At that point, it's no longer a decision to rewrite/upgrade, but an imperative.

But oh so sad. There's a beautifully written program whose only crime is to be written in a language which is no longer "fashionable", for fucking pissing vb asp microsoft sake.

Don't know that fashionable plays into it. If the code hasn't upgraded to more current versions of FORTRAN (and I know next to nothing about it, but do see that there's an OOP version and Fortran 2003), and won't run on modern hardware, that's an adapt or die problem.

Matt Westwood · 2011-11-17 Reply Admin

esteban:
Matt Westwood:
boog:
Matt Westwood:
If you have an application written in FORTRAN that functions smooth as you like, easy to use, etc. etc. whose only downsides are: a) The hardware it runs on is obsolete and no longer supported, and there is no appropriate replacement, and b) despite needing minimal ongoing maintenance, you can't find any staff either willing or able to perform this task, then reluctantly you find you *have* to upgrade.
Obviously. At that point, it's no longer a decision to rewrite/upgrade, but an imperative.

But oh so sad. There's a beautifully written program whose only crime is to be written in a language which is no longer "fashionable", for fucking pissing vb asp microsoft sake.

Don't know that fashionable plays into it. If the code hasn't upgraded to more current versions of FORTRAN (and I know next to nothing about it, but do see that there's an OOP version and Fortran 2003), and won't run on modern hardware, that's an adapt or die problem.

QFT. Arsewipe company wasn't prepared to admit the possibility that FORTRAN 95 or 2003 were worth a piss.

2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Daid:
Because in my experience, Java developers have a tendency to generate a lot of glue on glue code. IntegerFactoryImplementationFactoryGeneratorImplementationInterface.

I blame Sun, for setting bad examples in their own APIs.

PiisAWheeL · 2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Allan Schatsky:
This raises so many pressing questions, like what's with the tiny, logical section at the bottom, and when will this be made available in desktop size?

That little logical section at the bottom is where the program actually does what the client wants. The rest is called "job security" for a very large number of programmers.

Scarlet Manuka · 2011-11-17 Reply Admin

Captain James T. Kirk:
boog:
It all depends on which starship the stakeholders find to be more Enterprise-E.
FTFY

FFTFY. (Finished fixing...)

DaveK · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

foo:
Uncle Al:
Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.
And this is of course retarded because the letters chosen for ctrl-keystrokes should only by coincidence have any relation to the underlying command names in the local language, yes?
Like they do in the nonlocal(?) language? Ctrl-X = cut, Ctrl-V = paste, Ctrl-Z = undo. WTF?

Ctrl-X = eXcise Ctrl-V = adhesiVe Ctrl-Z = reviZe

;-)

DaveK · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Was pissing around the other day on a remote server on which I was debugging a large app supplied by a large company. Needed to view a its log file. Only file view tools were Notepad and WordPad. Couldn't view the file while the app was running. WTF!?!? Installed Notepad++ and everything honky dorky.
So WTF haven't MicroShit sorted out their fucking file viewers in the last 25 fucking years?

At least on W2k, and IIRC XP too, Notepad has no trouble opening in-use files. However it's so lousy as an editor that I prefer to use the cmd.exe COPY command (which also works on in-use files) to copy it to a new name and then use wordpad to read the (partial) copy.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Kuba:
brazzy:
1700 classes aren't that many. I've worked on far larger systems that were mostly OK.
But those three classes that seem to have at least a hundred dependencies each... those scare me.
If you're looking at any sort of a decent application development framework, reuse of existing code will surely make it so that some classes or methods refer to dozens of other basic classes. There's nothing wrong with it. Even a trivial Hello World application done in, say, Qt framework, will pull in on the order of a hundred classes indirectly.

The graph, as shown in the article, does not allow anyone to truly judge the quality of the code. You cannot judge anything because the classes lack the hierarchical context. Usually in a framework there are layers of classes: at the bottom are basic data structures (say QVector, QList, QString), higher up are various simple primitives that may use those (say graphic primitives, MVC model elements, etc), further on you have things that provide more functionality (widgets, OS interfaces, ...). Higher up you'll have application-specific stuff, and that has a hierarchy of its own that may parallel some of the framework's own hierarchy.

With an autogenerated diagram, where generation was done in the most silly way possible (like in the fine article), you don't know what's where in terms of hierarchy. Thus you cannot judge anything. If you get Qt's class hierarchy into a similarly poorly done diagram, it will look no better, even if it's a fairly well designed framework.

You can't judge it directly from the graph/map/multidimensional painting, but you CAN judge it by the fact that it's half finished after two years and replacing a 100 class working system.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

If you need a render farm for your dependency diagram, you are doing it wrong

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Uncle Al:
Matt Westwood:
Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.
And this is of course retarded because the letters chosen for ctrl-keystrokes should only by coincidence have any relation to the underlying command names in the local language, yes? (Though I'll admit surprise that "select all" isn't ctrl-T in a Spanish system...) For your next trick, are you going to explain how retarded it is for an application to make you type words from right to left when localized for Hebrew or Arabic?

I don't know why you would think Matt Westwood wrote that, he lives in UK and I don't see why he would have met a Spanish version of Windows ever. I think it's retarded because it's just a key scheme Microsoft decided to follow, without promoting it to some kind of native system which every application has to use. So, if you use Spanish Windows with American Office, you will have to think, before selecting all, if you're doing it within the OS or within Word.

Furthermore, every other software developer totally ignores it and uses the US scheme. Even Microsoft uses the classic US scheme it the vast majority of their tools, even when in Spanish.

Besides, in a Spanish version of Visual Studio, a plug-in developer needs to think, before assigning a keystroke to a functionality of his plugin, if somewhere, in some language, that keystroke isn't already used for one of the classic keystrokes like Open or Select All. Do you think any of them care about this? No, of course!

So in the end, you use the same keystrokes as US OSes, except in two or three Microsoft applications, which is a big pain in the butt. And I really don't care if the key corresponds to the first letter of a word: those keystrokes are for power users (I never saw a occasional PC user use keystrokes like this), we learned them 15 years ago, we don't need them to be changed.

It's like French or German keyboards: really, WTF?? That's not how you localize stuff, that's just plain stupid.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

DaveK:
Matt Westwood:
Was pissing around the other day on a remote server on which I was debugging a large app supplied by a large company. Needed to view a its log file. Only file view tools were Notepad and WordPad. Couldn't view the file while the app was running. WTF!?!? Installed Notepad++ and everything honky dorky.
So WTF haven't MicroShit sorted out their fucking file viewers in the last 25 fucking years?

At least on W2k, and IIRC XP too, Notepad has no trouble opening in-use files. However it's so lousy as an editor that I prefer to use the cmd.exe COPY command (which also works on in-use files) to copy it to a new name and then use wordpad to read the (partial) copy.

Notepad++ can open files that are in use, updates it when it has focus if you want... Plus, it can open huges files in an instant... It's an amazing tool really.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

KevinHamburger:
Holy crap, there's a class for each symbol on the ASCII table there.

Forget ASCII. Try Unicode.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Mmmpf:
Notepad++ can open files that are in use, updates it when it has focus if you want... Plus, it can open huges files in an instant... It's an amazing tool really.

Sorry I don't believe you. Product with two pluses in name can't be good.

DaveK · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Monkeycode:
Mmmpf:
Notepad++ can open files that are in use, updates it when it has focus if you want... Plus, it can open huges files in an instant... It's an amazing tool really.

Sorry I don't believe you. Product with two pluses in name can't be good.

They're not good - they're doubleplusgood!

DaveK · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Mmmpf:
DaveK:
Matt Westwood:
Was pissing around the other day on a remote server on which I was debugging a large app supplied by a large company. Needed to view a its log file. Only file view tools were Notepad and WordPad. Couldn't view the file while the app was running. WTF!?!? Installed Notepad++ and everything honky dorky.
So WTF haven't MicroShit sorted out their fucking file viewers in the last 25 fucking years?

At least on W2k, and IIRC XP too, Notepad has no trouble opening in-use files. However it's so lousy as an editor that I prefer to use the cmd.exe COPY command (which also works on in-use files) to copy it to a new name and then use wordpad to read the (partial) copy.

Notepad++ can open files that are in use, updates it when it has focus if you want... Plus, it can open huges files in an instant... It's an amazing tool really.

Yes, I think that was Matt's point. I was just pointing out an alternative for situations where it's not available.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Given the choice I prefer the former to the latter, because then at least you have a nice meaty refactoring job on your hands which will keep you nice and happily busy for a week or two's lovely overtime, just right at this time of year.

You obvious are not being computer profesional. Nuthing but profesional trol.

http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17e_computer.htm

Don't be a H8R.

I undertake project in java, if you need help with homework, contact me.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Anyone wanting to join me for lunch?

[image]

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

esteban:
Matt Westwood:
boog:
Matt Westwood:
If you have an application written in FORTRAN that functions smooth as you like, easy to use, etc. etc. whose only downsides are: a) The hardware it runs on is obsolete and no longer supported, and there is no appropriate replacement, and b) despite needing minimal ongoing maintenance, you can't find any staff either willing or able to perform this task, then reluctantly you find you *have* to upgrade.
Obviously. At that point, it's no longer a decision to rewrite/upgrade, but an imperative.

But oh so sad. There's a beautifully written program whose only crime is to be written in a language which is no longer "fashionable", for fucking pissing vb asp microsoft sake.

Don't know that fashionable plays into it. If the code hasn't upgraded to more current versions of FORTRAN (and I know next to nothing about it, but do see that there's an OOP version and Fortran 2003), and won't run on modern hardware, that's an adapt or die problem.

People make these decisions more complicated than they have to be. Upgrading is not a decision of technology, it is a decision of economics. If the net present value of the upgrade project exceeds the net present value of doing nothing, then it makes sense to do the upgrade (and net present value accounts for the risk).

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
esteban:
Matt Westwood:
boog:
Matt Westwood:
If you have an application written in FORTRAN that functions smooth as you like, easy to use, etc. etc. whose only downsides are: a) The hardware it runs on is obsolete and no longer supported, and there is no appropriate replacement, and b) despite needing minimal ongoing maintenance, you can't find any staff either willing or able to perform this task, then reluctantly you find you *have* to upgrade.
Obviously. At that point, it's no longer a decision to rewrite/upgrade, but an imperative.

But oh so sad. There's a beautifully written program whose only crime is to be written in a language which is no longer "fashionable", for fucking pissing vb asp microsoft sake.

Don't know that fashionable plays into it. If the code hasn't upgraded to more current versions of FORTRAN (and I know next to nothing about it, but do see that there's an OOP version and Fortran 2003), and won't run on modern hardware, that's an adapt or die problem.

People make these decisions more complicated than they have to be. Upgrading is not a decision of technology, it is a decision of economics. If the net present value of the upgrade project exceeds the net present value of doing nothing, then it makes sense to do the upgrade (and net present value accounts for the risk).

This is being why bus being painted mor oftan than apeartmant not being painted for decedes.

[image]

frits · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

India looks kinda like Newark, NJ.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

frits:
India looks kinda like Newark, NJ.

Sadly, Indian woman also resembling newark woman :(

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Oh look! It's the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Enterprises have unique and complex problems, which require unique and complex software systems to solve. TRWTF is Bob thinking things are simpler than they really are.

PiisAWheeL · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Anyone wanting to join me for lunch?
[image]

Absolutely! That goat look delicious.

2011-11-18 Reply Admin

PiisAWheeL:
Nagesh:
Anyone wanting to join me for lunch?
Absolutely! That goat look delicious.

Oh, the goat? I just assumed we were eating the shirtless kid. Bunch of savages over there.

SQLDave · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

It's a Magic Eye! If I blur my focus just right, I see a unicorn humping an Irish girl.

PiisAWheeL · 2011-11-18 Reply Admin

Hortical:
PiisAWheeL:
Nagesh:
Anyone wanting to join me for lunch?
Absolutely! That goat look delicious.
Oh, the goat? I just assumed we were eating the shirtless kid. Bunch of savages over there.

Is it me or does everyone in that pic look pissed. Even the goat looks angry... Makes me think of India as an angry place to live.

2011-11-20 Reply Admin

Stop mocking about the picture of my brain!!

Do I run around and say "Your brain looks like cauliflower"?

Humans suck!!!

2011-11-20 Reply Admin

How interesting to read this well expressed opinion. This shows how big business and government, hamstrings itself with unnecessary complicated systems which grow of of control.

Lets face it the real cause of this is overinflated ego's in IT departments.

However, on the basis that one should not give advice or wisdom to a horse's arse leave them well alone to their folly and concentrate on the smaller enterprises who have the capability to see the potential of simple sensible solutions.

I give you one example: recently the Government financed a huge multi million project to digitize NHS paper records. At the same time about ten years ago I think,another major organization were using an old MSDOS based system to do much the same with Probate records which are not dissimilar. An IT friend wrote a few lines of PHP code which solved the Probate problem. Was it used ? Of course not!!!

WTF

2011-11-20 Reply Admin

They haven't updated that because they won't make money from it...

2011-11-20 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Mmmpf:
no laughing matter:
The rest of us have switched from Notepad to professional IDEs about 10 or 15 years ago. (If someone has programmed Java with an IDE more than 17 years ago, please stand up!)

I don't remember what I used before Visual Studio or Eclipse to write my code under Windows (probably UltraEdit), but I'm quite sure it wasn't Notepad. Actually now that I have absolutely no reason to use it, I started to like it, in a nostalgic way: it's there to remind me why I hated Windows so much (while still using it) back in the days: it does the smallest subset of things it is supposed to do, but in the worse possible way.

Doesn't know how to cancel. Well yes it does, but just one time. Next time you cancel, it cancels the cancellation. Deeeep!

Doesn't lock files when modifying it. You can open it, and it can get deleted. You still have it. It won't tell you anything if you save a deleted file: if you modified it, it will recreate it. If you didn't, it will just do nothing, keeping you in the warm illusion that your file still exists.

Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.

Doesn't know how to select a word by double-clicking it. Well yes it does, but the set of characters it considers as word separators is completely different for that of any other existing tool.

Also, it has absolutely no functionality, but it has this entry in a menu to insert the current date and time. So it's a completely useless program, unless you want to rapidly insert the current date and time in a text file. In this case, it's the bomb.

Before eclipse we used TextPad. Now, when not using eclipse or whatever tool is appropriate for whatever other stuff I happen to be doing, I use Notepad++. I recommend it.

Was pissing around the other day on a remote server on which I was debugging a large app supplied by a large company. Needed to view a its log file. Only file view tools were Notepad and WordPad. Couldn't view the file while the app was running. WTF!?!? Installed Notepad++ and everything honky dorky.

So WTF haven't MicroShit sorted out their fucking file viewers in the last 25 fucking years?

Because they won't make money from updating that kind of stuff... Economics 101... :|

Nagesh · 2011-11-21 Reply Admin

Are they not meke money from windows selling?

2011-11-23 Reply Admin

Mmmpf:
Uncle Al:
Matt Westwood:
Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.
And this is of course retarded because the letters chosen for ctrl-keystrokes should only by coincidence have any relation to the underlying command names in the local language, yes? (Though I'll admit surprise that "select all" isn't ctrl-T in a Spanish system...) For your next trick, are you going to explain how retarded it is for an application to make you type words from right to left when localized for Hebrew or Arabic?

I don't know why you would think Matt Westwood wrote that, he lives in UK and I don't see why he would have met a Spanish version of Windows ever. I think it's retarded because it's just a key scheme Microsoft decided to follow, without promoting it to some kind of native system which every application has to use. So, if you use Spanish Windows with American Office, you will have to think, before selecting all, if you're doing it within the OS or within Word.

Furthermore, every other software developer totally ignores it and uses the US scheme. Even Microsoft uses the classic US scheme it the vast majority of their tools, even when in Spanish.

Besides, in a Spanish version of Visual Studio, a plug-in developer needs to think, before assigning a keystroke to a functionality of his plugin, if somewhere, in some language, that keystroke isn't already used for one of the classic keystrokes like Open or Select All. Do you think any of them care about this? No, of course!

So in the end, you use the same keystrokes as US OSes, except in two or three Microsoft applications, which is a big pain in the butt. And I really don't care if the key corresponds to the first letter of a word: those keystrokes are for power users (I never saw a occasional PC user use keystrokes like this), we learned them 15 years ago, we don't need them to be changed.

It's like French or German keyboards: really, WTF?? That's not how you localize stuff, that's just plain stupid.

I partially agree. It's true that having different key shortcuts than the standard is a pain in the ass, specially if the they're different even to the rest of the same system.

But you're just plain wrong about "those keystrokes are for power users [...] we learned them 15 years ago, we don't need them to be changed". Occasional users occasionally know about keystrokes too, and it's much, much easier to teach them if they have any way to remember them. If you're Spanish, your computer is in Spanish, and your keyboard is in Spanish, I think shortcuts should obviously correspond to spanish words (Ctrl+C,V,Z are historic exceptions). The only problem is power-users that have already learned the English shortcuts (and the rest of non-localized applications).

The obvious solution is to have system-wide shortcut customization. Change the locale to Spanish, and you have Spanish shortcuts. Change it to English and they're English. Or you can have "Ctrl+Alt+W+2+Ñ" as "Undo" if you want. I'm pretty sure every linux distro (and probably Mac OS) can do this already.

CAPTCHA: jumentum. Jumentum is conserved between Portals.

2011-11-24 Reply Admin

Not requiring a file per class is an enormous help there.

The following is legal (incomplete) java code, in a single file

public class MyContainer { public static class MyClass1 { } public static class MyClass2 { }

....

public static class MyClassN { } }

May not be nice (depends on the point of view, and on what the classes does), but there is nothing that prevent you from having one hundred java class for each file. It also offer you a nice way to implements sub-modules without having pseudo sub-packages.

2011-11-29 Reply Admin

foo:
Uncle Al:
Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.
And this is of course retarded because the letters chosen for ctrl-keystrokes should only by coincidence have any relation to the underlying command names in the local language, yes?
Like they do in the nonlocal(?) language? Ctrl-X = cut, Ctrl-V = paste, Ctrl-Z = undo. WTF?

Pfft . never heard of silent consonants ?

Pastev, undoz, cutx ... get your spelling right seriously

2011-11-29 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Mmmpf:
no laughing matter:
The rest of us have switched from Notepad to professional IDEs about 10 or 15 years ago. (If someone has programmed Java with an IDE more than 17 years ago, please stand up!)

I don't remember what I used before Visual Studio or Eclipse to write my code under Windows (probably UltraEdit), but I'm quite sure it wasn't Notepad. Actually now that I have absolutely no reason to use it, I started to like it, in a nostalgic way: it's there to remind me why I hated Windows so much (while still using it) back in the days: it does the smallest subset of things it is supposed to do, but in the worse possible way.

Doesn't know how to cancel. Well yes it does, but just one time. Next time you cancel, it cancels the cancellation. Deeeep!

Doesn't lock files when modifying it. You can open it, and it can get deleted. You still have it. It won't tell you anything if you save a deleted file: if you modified it, it will recreate it. If you didn't, it will just do nothing, keeping you in the warm illusion that your file still exists.

Uses Ctrl+keystrokes. But if you're in a foreign language OS, it's all wrong. In Spanish for instance, Ctrl-G saves, Ctrl-A opens, Ctrl-B finds, Ctrl-R replaces, Ctrl-E selects all. Try to work with this. To its defense, some other Microsoft apps (Explorer, Office) use this retarded way of thinking localization.

Doesn't know how to select a word by double-clicking it. Well yes it does, but the set of characters it considers as word separators is completely different for that of any other existing tool.

Also, it has absolutely no functionality, but it has this entry in a menu to insert the current date and time. So it's a completely useless program, unless you want to rapidly insert the current date and time in a text file. In this case, it's the bomb.

Before eclipse we used TextPad. Now, when not using eclipse or whatever tool is appropriate for whatever other stuff I happen to be doing, I use Notepad++. I recommend it.

Was pissing around the other day on a remote server on which I was debugging a large app supplied by a large company. Needed to view a its log file. Only file view tools were Notepad and WordPad. Couldn't view the file while the app was running. WTF!?!? Installed Notepad++ and everything honky dorky.

So WTF haven't MicroShit sorted out their fucking file viewers in the last 25 fucking years?

Notepad++ FTW /. I don't use IDE's and I know I should give it a try .. but notepad++ is one damn good reason to keep a windows environment somewhere.

Enterprise Dependency: The Next Generation

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