The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Doesn't that result in violence?

Zylon · 2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Steve:
Martin is lucky that he wasn't relegated to "forth-rate status", because then he might have to use the Forth language.

That's cute the way you felt like you had to explain what Forth is.

herby · 2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Then there is a truism that follows: Anyone who calls themselves a "rockstar" (programmer, etc.) probably isn't. Anything else is generally a WTF moment!

da Doctah · 2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Scrummy:
Agile strongly discourages "rockstar programmers." Everyone on the team should be well-versed in all areas of the codebase(s). This provides for emergent design, which is a far superior outcome to the kind of not-invented-here code we see in today's WTF.

But being rockstars explains why they thought their database needed more cowbell.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Gurth:
The BEL character was originally used to cause an audible beep or buzz on terminals
No, it was originally used to ring the physical bell on a teletype. That is, a low-tech version of this.

Or more specifically, one of these.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Rootbeer:
The Real What TF is that they misused BEL as a delimiter when there's already an ASCII Unit Separator non-printable control character (0x1F) that fits the purpose exactly, right?

Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.

ASCII is the perfect example of a standard that was designed with lots of features that are just unnecessary today (though I suppose they were used back then). The other example is HTTP (PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, PATCH?).

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Jay:
Gurth:
The BEL character was originally used to cause an audible beep or buzz on terminals
No, it was originally used to ring the physical bell on a teletype. That is, a low-tech version of this.

Or more specifically, one of these.

Pff. Young'uns. In my day it was one of these.

(Yes, it's a joke. I'm not that old.)

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

pjt33:
qbolec:
\xFF as separator, which is quite unlikely to happen anywhere in UTF-8 strings or numbers (and most of coulmns are of either of these types), but in case it happens we escape it by doubling (\xFF becomes \xFF\xFF)
I'm guessing that you don't use negative integers much.

nice one;)

Unfortunately once you get into PHP world you start to believe that "-123" is a negative number. Then you start to believe that JSON is a compact serialization format.

I must admit that using \xFF as a separator and serializing -123 as "-123" in the same piece of software is a symptom of schizophrenia, at least. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention :)

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

herby:
Then there is a truism that follows: Anyone who calls themselves a "rockstar" (programmer, etc.) probably isn't.

Absent specific anecdata to back it up, I refuse to believe that anyone calls themself a "rockstar". The word is only ever used as a derogatory reference to other people whose behavior fits the Rock Star antipattern. Also, possibly by particularly clueless managers who haven't grasped that it's an antipattern.

(Actual performing artists are a possible exception, though I suspect they too prefer using more specific words about themselves).

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Captcha:ideo:
Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.

How would you use Emacs in an UTF-8 terminal, then?

Also, at a more principled level, UTF-8 has no business deciding that any codepoints Unicode defines are unworthy of being encoded. Its mandate is to be able to express any imaginable sequence of codepoints, and it takes that reasonably seriously.

Also also, it's very easy to think up scenarios where it could open a pretty serious security problem if UTF-8 decoders began producing spaces from unwanted byte combinations, or even removing them silently. Imagine someone thinking themselves secure because they have verified that the UTF-8 input doesn't contain ".." anywhere and then later convert the checked string to UTF-16, silently removing the spurious bytes in ".\x01./.\0x01./.\x01./etc/passwd"?

HIBT?

Matt Westwood · 2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Any program which is passed from one s/w designer to another which the latter can't get to work is always the fault of the former. If they're pressing the wrong buttons, it's because you haven't told them what the buttons do. If it hasn't been configured correctly, it's because you haven't provided the configuration instructions. And if the fucker won't work because of bugs, then it is the top priority for the shithead who wrote it to fix the cunt.

I took over a program from someone at short notice a few months ago and it took me a week to get up to speed, because (a) the configuration had been changed at the last minute and the fuckwit hadn't checked in all the changes, (b) the underlying architecture had been amended and the installation instructions hadn't been updated (they were incomplete and misleading in the first place) and (c) the actual code I was supposed to be working on didn't even compile caused the IDE to crash when checked out of CVS. The reason it took so long to fix it was because the perpetrator of this shabby shower of shit was too busy to talk to me (he was schmoozing with managers) and frantic emails to him were responded to with "Well I'm sure if you were just to apply yourself with a little more zeal you'd soon be able to fix what, knowing you, are probably trivial issues."

All's well that ended well, when I finally managed to get his boss to persuade him to spend a couple of hours with me to look over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. And indeed, the stupid cunt finally got the fucking message that he had seriously fucked up. More to the point, his boss also got the message that he had fucked up. Even more to the point, it was noted that not only had he fucked up but he had also been complacent about such fucking up. His push to be promoted to senior consultant has met up against considerable resistance. And I'm convinced he wears a wig.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

What is even worse is that there are legitimate ASCII control codes for delimiting text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter#ASCII_delimited_text

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Even if we change seed to seen, this hurt my head: "...for code that he hadn't seed nor couldn't build..."

da Doctah · 2012-07-02 Reply Admin

I'm coming up blank trying to remember the context, but there was some environment in my past where BEL characters had a special (non-audio) significance. Not field delimiters, exactly, but something like record terminators, or "wait for input here" indicators.

Something about as mnemonic as SUB (aka Ctrl-Z) for terminating input in a DOS prompt window.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Scrummy:
no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Agile strongly discourages "rockstar programmers." Everyone on the team should be well-versed in all areas of the codebase(s). This provides for emergent design, which is a far superior outcome to the kind of not-invented-here code we see in today's WTF.
If you are using todays WTF as a benchmark for your crummy software development method, you fail at marketing.

I believe you fail at reading comprehension. What I was saying is that Agile would have AVOIDED today's WTF. Guaranteed.

Oh, so the Not-Invented-Here code would have been written by the TEAM instead of the "rockstar" programmers?"

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

I have never actually met a 'junior' consultant. All consultants are senior, at least according to those that hired them.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

PseudoBovine:
Jay:
Gurth:
The BEL character was originally used to cause an audible beep or buzz on terminals
No, it was originally used to ring the physical bell on a teletype. That is, a low-tech version of this.

Or more specifically, one of these.

Pff. Young'uns. In my day it was one of these.

(Yes, it's a joke. I'm not that old.)

[image]

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Jay:
Gurth:
The BEL character was originally used to cause an audible beep or buzz on terminals
No, it was originally used to ring the physical bell on a teletype. That is, a low-tech version of this.

Or more specifically, one of these.

Now I feel ancient remembering using them and loading paper tape. No doubt some will say whats paper tape.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
PleegWat:
I wouldn't expect a chr() character in C#, but I'd expect "\a" or "\009" works?
Not unless 009 suddenly became the octal notation for seven.

James Bond 009: You only live thrice.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Captcha:ideo:
Rootbeer:
The Real What TF is that they misused BEL as a delimiter when there's already an ASCII Unit Separator non-printable control character (0x1F) that fits the purpose exactly, right?
Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.

Not sure if you're trolling or just never bothered to look outside your Windows, but some other are still in current use, including EOT 4 (end of terminal text input), FF 12 (page break in text files), XON 17/XOFF 19 (pause/continue output) and of course ESC 27 for terminal control sequences or, to put it in fashionable terms, for serializing operations such as text color etc.

I even use BEL to get notified about some important events since it works even if my audio is turned off or muted.

ASCII is the perfect example of a standard that was designed with lots of features that are just unnecessary today (though I suppose they were used back then). The other example is HTTP (PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, PATCH?).

And the other other example is just about any standard of a certain age. C library functions, x64 machine instructions, SMTP protocol, ..., you name it.

2012-07-02 Reply Admin

Meant x86 of course.

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Captcha:ideo:
ASCII is the perfect example of a standard that was designed with lots of features that are just unnecessary today (though I suppose they were used back then). The other example is HTTP (PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, PATCH?).

Read up on RESTful and then creep back into your hole fool!

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

[image] If this is reinventing the wheel I'm all for it! This thing's awesome!!!

Steve The Cynic · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Captcha:ideo:
Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.

I care about them enough to know that space isn't a "lower" ASCII character. (Hint: they begin at '\x00' and end at '\x1F', and space is '\x20'...)

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Roby McAndrew:
...Does TDWTF have editors?

We got both editor kinds of editor ! We got Vi AND emacs !

Yeah, you got Phobos and Deimos...

Anonymouse · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

LarryDavid:
oheso:
I typically refuse to be responsible for code I haven't seed, too.
Everybody knows you should always seed

I usually have to seed after chatting to that hot chick in accounting.

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Scrummy:
no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Agile strongly discourages "rockstar programmers." Everyone on the team should be well-versed in all areas of the codebase(s). This provides for emergent design, which is a far superior outcome to the kind of not-invented-here code we see in today's WTF.
If you are using todays WTF as a benchmark for your crummy software development method, you fail at marketing.

I believe you fail at reading comprehension. What I was saying is that Agile would have AVOIDED today's WTF. Guaranteed.

I still can't figure out what this guy is trying to sell...

Captcha saluto: We who are about to die saluto you

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

qbolec:
We also use our own scheme of serialization of table rows for cacheing which is uses \xFF as separator, which is quite unlikely to happen anywhere in UTF-8 strings or numbers (and most of coulmns are of either of these types), but in case it happens we escape it by doubling (\xFF becomes \xFF\xFF).

Back in the late '90s I worked on an embedded system that used \xFF as a record separator in inter-process messages.

This worked great except for one thing: when they added a PC POS (yes, Point of Sale) to the equation, they needed to pass around a MAC address. There was no escaping, and their VB6 code was sufficiently stupid that they couldn't just make an exception for that parameter type to always be 6 bytes or always at the end of the record or whatever.

So for a while, whenever they got in new Ethernet cards to build a new POS at the factory, they would have to check each one and make sure that it didn't have \xFF in the MAC address.

QJo · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Captcha:ideo:
Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.
I care about them enough to know that space isn't a "lower" ASCII character. (Hint: they begin at '\x00' and end at '\x1F', and space is '\x20'...)

If you were to make a mistake and replace \x20 with a space I doubt anyone would make too much of a fuss.

QJo · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Roby McAndrew:
...Does TDWTF have editors?

We got both editor kinds of editor ! We got Vi AND emacs !

Presumably this is supposed to read: "We gaaht aaahl kaahnds of editah! We gaaht Vi aiyund emacs!"

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Zylon:
Steve:
Martin is lucky that he wasn't relegated to "forth-rate status", because then he might have to use the Forth language.
That's cute the way you felt like you had to explain what Forth is.

I only have any idea what Forth is because I remember useless information for decades at a time.;-)

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

In C++ you can do \x07

There is no huge WTF about using a non-printable character as a delimiter, is it a far better one than having to deal with comma as a delimiter and then having to work out where this is used in quoted text.

Having different serialization functions in different places that were all different is probably historic. Someone needed one, the existing one didn't fit and it was too risky to change it so they just wrote a new one.

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
Scrummy:
Agile strongly discourages "rockstar programmers." Everyone on the team should be well-versed in all areas of the codebase(s). This provides for emergent design, which is a far superior outcome to the kind of not-invented-here code we see in today's WTF.
But being rockstars explains why they thought their database needed more cowbell.

Real Rockstar programmers use one of these [image] so their hands are free to program.

The cowbelt in action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxnFDaZ4WXE

Scrummy · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Friedrice the Great:
Scrummy:
no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Agile strongly discourages "rockstar programmers." Everyone on the team should be well-versed in all areas of the codebase(s). This provides for emergent design, which is a far superior outcome to the kind of not-invented-here code we see in today's WTF.
If you are using todays WTF as a benchmark for your crummy software development method, you fail at marketing.

I believe you fail at reading comprehension. What I was saying is that Agile would have AVOIDED today's WTF. Guaranteed.

Oh, so the Not-Invented-Here code would have been written by the TEAM instead of the "rockstar" programmers?"

Or it would not have been written at all, which is my assertion. That's the beauty of a team of empowered peers -- it fosters an environment where the better ideas bubble to the top, and the lesser ideas are quickly exposed. Anyone who claims that Agile teams don't work this way obviously has never seen a true Agile team at work.

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

For most companies who decide to adopt "agile" this "team" attitude is just put there by thick neurotypicals to keep the intellectual aspies out.

DCRoss · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

@Deprecated:
BTW, what is "WCF"? I'd like to think it's pronounced "Whatza F???"

Officially it's pronounced "Indigo", with silent 'W', 'C', and 'F', but I think it's more appropriate to call it 'WhaCkofF'. The trick is to properly enunciate the upper case 'C' in the middle.

Zylon · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Captcha:ideo:
Nobody cares about lower ASCII characters anymore (excluding tab, space,newline, etc). UTF-8 should just declare them all invalid and have software convert them into spaces or just remove them silently.
I care about them enough to know that space isn't a "lower" ASCII character. (Hint: they begin at '\x00' and end at '\x1F', and space is '\x20'...)

Um, no. The 0-31 range is control characters. "Low ASCII" is a retronym referring to the 0-127 range, with 128-255 being the non-standardized "high ASCII" range.

Scrummy · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Cbuttius:
For most companies who decide to adopt "agile" this "team" attitude is just put there by thick neurotypicals to keep the intellectual aspies out.

We like to call companies like those "AINO's."

The Bytemaster · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

STX. Pardon me, but I would linke to ENQ more about your BEL article. I ACK your work, but cannot ESC the throught that you used a lot of BS in it. Right from STX something was a bit fishy about it. Can you tell me if you SUB items in your articles? A simple ACK or NAK would be fine. Thank you.

ETX EOT

no laughing matter · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Scrummy:
Anyone who claims that Agile teams don't work this way obviously has never seen a true scotsman at work.

FTFY!

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Anyone who claims that Agile teams don't work this way obviously has never seen a true scotsman at work.
FTFY!

Yes!

But Scrummy's original comment is correct in one respect: I have never seen a "true agile team" at work. In fact, if you look at all the things that Agile advocates claim for it, I think I can reasonably conjecture that NOBODY has ever seen a "true agile team" at work.

Nexzus · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Ah yes, CHR$07 on the Apple II gs in third grade.

print CHR$07
GOTO 10

beep beep beep beep... ad infinitum.

I thought I was a genius.

shadowman · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Am Disappoint:
See a moderateley WTF story Come to the site to look for snide meta-comments in the source of the story None there
Very Disappoint.

CAPTCHA: damnum - It's that damnum that's breaking the record

Those are Remy's thing, this was an Alex Story.

Scrummy · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Svensson:
no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Anyone who claims that Agile teams don't work this way obviously has never seen a true scotsman at work.
FTFY!
Yes!
But Scrummy's original comment is correct in one respect: I have never seen a "true agile team" at work. In fact, if you look at all the things that Agile advocates claim for it, I think I can reasonably conjecture that NOBODY has ever seen a "true agile team" at work.

All it takes is one team to make your conjecture completely unreasonable then.

My team is a highly-functioning Scrum team. We have very engaged stakeholders, write tests first religiously, and our automation is second to none. Scrum helps those who help themselves, to paraphrase an old adage. It is really a brilliant framework, but it requires diligent buy-in by everyone involved, from executives in the company to developers on the team.

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Roby McAndrew:
We got both editor kinds of editor ! We got Vi AND emacs !

This ain't no Hank Williams code!

Nagesh · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Scrummy:
Svensson:
no laughing matter:
Scrummy:
Anyone who claims that Agile teams don't work this way obviously has never seen a true scotsman at work.
FTFY!
Yes!
But Scrummy's original comment is correct in one respect: I have never seen a "true agile team" at work. In fact, if you look at all the things that Agile advocates claim for it, I think I can reasonably conjecture that NOBODY has ever seen a "true agile team" at work.

All it takes is one team to make your conjecture completely unreasonable then.

My team is a highly-functioning Scrum team. We have very engaged stakeholders, write tests first religiously, and our automation is second to none. Scrum helps those who help themselves, to paraphrase an old adage. It is really a brilliant framework, but it requires diligent buy-in by everyone involved, from executives in the company to developers on the team.

Obvious you're working in cmm level 5 and above company.

What part of India do you come in?

Ragnax · 2012-07-03 Reply Admin

DCRoss:
but I think it's more appropriate to call it 'WhaCkofF'. The trick is to properly enunciate the upper case 'C' in the middle.

Pronounced in the right way, that sounds like a whip being cracked, ... or a face being backhanded. Whichever you prefer, really. Both are equally appropriate in the context of WCF ...

2012-07-03 Reply Admin

Wow... this many comments and not a peep about using CSV?

2012-07-04 Reply Admin

Just testing... ''

2012-07-04 Reply Admin

Aargle Zymurgy:
Wow... this many comments and not a peep about using CSV?

I did earlier you just weren't reading properly.

comma really is a very poor choice of delimiter.

There are altneratives that are humanly readable and typeable but rarely used in data, e.g. ` (very infrequently required) and | (usually infrequent).

Tab is commonly used which is ok except that Microsoft Word seems to be the only text editor that allows you to find-replace using it (you put in ^t for it), which often leads me to copy-pasting text into blank Word documents just to "process" it into tab-separated before copying it back (to Excel or wherever).

For Whom the BEL Tolls

Leave a comment on “For Whom the BEL Tolls”