The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

eViLegion:
chubertdev:
savar:
Null's not a value!!!

You must get really upset when people talk about the color black.

If anyone thinks black isn't a colour, then they fail to understand what colour is... namely a label applied to some aspect of the human perception of light.

Secondarily there might be definitions of specific colours that are based on specific bands of wavelengths, but those definitions are calibrated by the human eye. Red might be defined as anything in the ~620–740nm range, but we call it red because it looks red.

Anyone who doesn't think black is a colour deserves to have everything they own painted black, until they learn that it very much is a colour, and a really bad one for wallpaper, windshields, tins-of-food-in-cupboards, etc...

Entertaining link for the day:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

Mo6eB · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

It was God's design to make the Bool two-state and He knew what He was doing.

Some languages let you have nullable pointers and in them you can have a sort-of three-state Bool - by treating a null pointer as an unknown value. But this is merely a natural interaction between nullable pointers and Bool, an act explicitly permitted by the Creator God.

Two states weren't enough for man. Man sought to possess the three-state Bool. In their folly, man created a True/False/File Not Found abomination! And they paid the price.

But science learneth not of caution, irregardless of what science wrought hath.

THIS FALL

WITNESS THE HORROR

OF THE SIX-STATE-BOOL!

<cut to woman screaming>: THE BOOLEANS ARE REFILING! THE BOOLEANS ARE REFILING!

<his face is half-melted, his hair is transforming into wires and his eyes are tacky pixellated CGI>: H-hhelp meeee "" "" "" "" [Note: figure out how to pronounce an empty string creepily]

NO STATE IS SAFE

<cut to the "No" state of Bool sitting in his bunker>: I told them. I tried to warn them. But they wouldn't listen. Why didn't you listen? You could have prevented this. All you had to do was listen. And now, NO ONE can help them.

<suddenly calm music, generic saxon blue-eyed american dream man drives american dream car to american dream home, takes out american dream flowers for american dream wife, opens american dream door to american dream house, enters with the dreamily american gait of a person who has achieved the american dream and calls out in american dream voice>: Honey, I'm home! ... Honey? Why are you alone? Where are the kids?

<american dream wife having succumbed to the Bool disease>: YES YES FALSE UNKN "" "" (null) TRUUUUUUEEEEEE!

10/01/10

BOOL.SIX

eViLegion · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Entertaining link for the day:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

That was totally awesome, thanks!

da Doctah · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

eViLegion:
Anyone who doesn't think black is a colour deserves to have everything they own painted black, until they learn that it very much is a colour, and a really bad one for wallpaper, windshields, tins-of-food-in-cupboards, etc...

ObAmericanVsBritishSpelling: gray is a color; grey is a colour.

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

“NO” is not a viable option

With all due respect I must disagree. Faced with this abomination "NO" is the only viable option.

Only if there were enough characters available to prefix "NO" with an appropriate expletive could any other option be considered viable.

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

VBA: Truly the MS Paint of programming languages.

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
savar:
Null's not a value!!!

You must get really upset when people talk about the color black.

There is no such colour as black or magenta. Or white for that matter. If you disagree, find me a black, magenta or white photon.

chubertdev · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

Lights on:
chubertdev:
savar:
Null's not a value!!!

You must get really upset when people talk about the color black.
There is no such colour as black or magenta. Or white for that matter. If you disagree, find me a black, magenta or white photon.

Since, obviously, colors are single photons, and not a combination of the results of the wavelength of zero or more photons.

eViLegion · 2013-09-30 Reply Admin

Lights on:
chubertdev:
savar:
Null's not a value!!!

You must get really upset when people talk about the color black.
There is no such colour as black or magenta. Or white for that matter. If you disagree, find me a black, magenta or white photon.

Photons have wavelengths. When shit loads of them bombard your retina, impulses are sent down the optic nerve to your visual cortex which does some kind of Magic® to translate that information into colour. Minds contain colour.

Anyway... if I find you a photon, what other particle are you going to bounce off it into your eye, in order to see it with?

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Tim:
here's my favourite - described as a "tri-state Boolean" - but with 5 possible values! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa432714(v=office.12).aspx
I love it! Especially the fact that your link states that msoTriStateMixed is "Not supported" whereas http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff746389.aspx notes that the parameter EmbedFonts of the Presentation.SaveAs() method is of type MsoTriState and that msoTriStateMixed is the default value.

That makes it rather unexceptional, since everything from Microsoft is unsupported.

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

jaggerbush:
I'd love to see the truth table generated from that.

And the falsity table, and the filenotfound table, and the tablenotfound nullity.

2013-09-30 Reply Admin

original post:
“NO” is not a viable option

Uh-huh. Database designed by a gung-ho manager.

"'No' is not an option! 'No' is never an option!"

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

NULL - the string

http://www.cmtes.com

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

eViLegion:
chubertdev:
Entertaining link for the day:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

That was totally awesome, thanks!

Interesting, I'll grant you, but the evolution of concepts for colour can be found in any halfway decent introductory book on linguistics.

It was the comments appended to that page which baffled me.

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

Daniel:
“NO” is not a viable option
With all due respect I must disagree. Faced with this abomination "NO" is the only viable option.
Only if there were enough characters available to prefix "NO" with an appropriate expletive could any other option be considered viable.

No sh*t!

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
jaggerbush:
I'd love to see the truth table generated from that.
And the falsity table, and the filenotfound table, and the tablenotfound nullity.

+1 FTW

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

real-modo:
original post:
“NO” is not a viable option
Uh-huh. Database designed by a gung-ho manager.
"'No' is not an option! 'No' is never an option!"

Dammit, this was the one I intended to give the accolade "+1 FTW", although it has been a pretty good day for amusing and thought-provoking comments.

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
They're shouting "Bool-urns."

Bool-irks!

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

QJo:
It was the comments appended to that page which baffled me.

Yeah... there is something particularly odd about attempting to sell magic spells over an internet powered by science.

lucidfox · 2013-10-01 Reply Admin

TRWTF is generating Word documents, right? A truly standards-compliant program would use ODF!

chubertdev · 2013-10-01 Reply Admin

QJo:
eViLegion:
chubertdev:
Entertaining link for the day:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

That was totally awesome, thanks!

Interesting, I'll grant you, but the evolution of concepts for colour can be found in any halfway decent introductory book on linguistics.

It was the comments appended to that page which baffled me.

The spam, or the real comments?

2013-10-01 Reply Admin

Like "COURAGE - the dog"

2013-10-02 Reply Admin

Wayne (OP):
I would prefer VBA, terrible as it is, to something like this. The only possible thing I can see is that it lets you conditionally show/hide entire paragraphs of text, which I could never figure out how to do in VBA.

You have a few choices, you can set a paragraph style option to be 'Hidden', or {IF} fields.

Word documents have what's called DocVariables, a bit like regular document properties (Author, Title etc) but can only be set via VBA.

So you enter the field like {IF {DOCVARIABLE "IsFrist"} = TRUE, "Moron poster", ""}, depending on the value of IsFrist you get some text or nothing.

Oh yeah, in Word TRUE = 1, while in VBA it's -1. Might be better to test on FALSE.

You open the document (in VBA, using COM or whatever), set all the DocVariables (eg Document.Variables.Add "IsFrist", False), refresh the fields to update the text, and save it.

Not that hard, although dealing with Word Fields can be a bit tedious. Can't be any worse than what you have though.

2013-10-02 Reply Admin

I would be laughing about this - if I hadn't learnt the depths of SQL a few months ago: SQL itself does support three "boolean" values: true, false and unknown. You if you write "a=b" you can actually get three different results creating very subtle bugs. I still don't understand why nobody told me that during studying.

E.g. if you add a check-constraint to a column like "CHECK (Column IN (1,2))", the column can actually contain 1, 2 or NULL!

2013-10-02 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Clearly the WTF there is VB using -1 for True.

Thinking in bytes, this is perfectly reasonable, since -1 is represented by an array of 1-bits. So when breaking the check down to the bit-level, there is no confusion, which bit to check :-)

2013-10-03 Reply Admin

flyboyfred:
If, however, you put "FILE_NOT_FOUND" in that column, instead of gaynerating a Word document, your computer outputs bacon.

This didn't work for me. Do I need a special bacon output device for my computer?

BACON_NOT_FOUND

2013-10-04 Reply Admin

Otto:
I would be laughing about this - if I hadn't learnt the depths of SQL a few months ago: SQL itself does support three "boolean" values: true, false and unknown. You if you write "a=b" you can actually get three different results creating very subtle bugs. I still don't understand why nobody told me that during studying.
E.g. if you add a check-constraint to a column like "CHECK (Column IN (1,2))", the column can actually contain 1, 2 or NULL!

Why isn't the column marked not null?

Fields of Booleans

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