The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Some damn Yank:
Tony:
what is American English but a poor, bastardised copy of actual English?
Um, "globally dominant English"? Thanks to Noah Webster,we win!

FTFY. Since that jerk wrote down the standards AT THAT TIME, our language was not able to evolve into what you now employ.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Michael ZZZZZZZZZZ:
What about my last name, huh?

Blame your parents.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Anon:
Jeff:
So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this?

First, you have to stop whining like a pussy and grow a pair.

Too slow. 9 months to grow plus some 17 years to mature, each.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Zolcos:
I didn't get it at first. "The Zed-Liminator?" Ah. American English.

Even considering the equally valid "zed" pronunciation of Z, I don't see how you could come to "Zed-Liminator" from seeing "Zliminator". Do you pronounce Zebra as "Zed-ebra" too?

If you're pronouncing Zebra as Zee-ebra, ur doing it wrong, Zee-olcos.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Big Fat Jerk:
Space man:
I call BS. Everyone knows if you can't store a null, just store a zero length string. If that doesn't work, store a single space.
P.S. InB4 "Comment is blank" "null comments not allowed" "ZZZZZ" etc.

I have no understanding of the article at all until this is explained.

Why was empty string not an option? Even if the field is NOT NULL it can still be zero-length string.

Until someone explains that, I'm left to assume Derek is a retard.

Please ATTEMPT some sensitivity. I had a son who was retarded, and let me assure you: it is no laughing matter.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

trtrwtf:
Jeff:
I think you've all figured it out. Primary key was last name. In case of duplicates, an on insert trigger just appended a space and tried again.
OK now that we've dealt with today's WTF, here's another. I'm on a team of developers that work all day thinking about code. Some manager thought it would be ideal to put us right next to a gang of a-holes who apparently have no work to do, because all they ever do is discuss sports and the lottery and politics and TV. Very loudly. Which makes it impossible for developers to concentrate on code.

Now, the most obnoxious one of them has decided to grace us with his singing skills. I'm to the point where I want to grab my electric stapler by the power cord, start swinging it David and Goliath style, and silence them all with gentle taps to the side of the head.

Want to. Not going to. Also want to keep my job.

So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this? Remember -- he who complains is the troublemaker, not he who engages in offensive behavior all day long.

I'm in the same hell here - I'm on the other side of a cubicle wall from the tech support team, and whenever they're not on a call, they're sitting around talking very loudly about nothing at all. It's awful.

It gets worse, though: the woman sitting next to me does trainings for employees, so she spends an hour at a time speaking very clearly and very loudly about this or that or the other... and I can't even complain because it's her job.

Got the same thing at the main office. Developer trying to develop (or, if I got nothing to do, read up and learn a new framework or such that'll come in handy). A couple of desks behind me are two support people. Both very nice, friendly and gentle folks. But if I need to concentrate on my code, them talking on the phone for hooooouuuuurs (especially one of the two, who's got such a sharp voice it really cuts through your head) makes it impossible to get anything done, and will leave me with a headache and a completely drained brain at the end of the day. Can't complain either, cause they're just doing their job. The real WTF there's putting support people right near developers.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Worf:
Think of the ...:
I'm sure glad children's privacy is protected (but why not mine?) but the one thing I don't get is how a web site operator is supposed to measure the age of the person at the keyboard. And what if mom steps away to put a load in the washer and her kid starts fiddling with the mouse? Doesn't this require a camera -- and face recognition software -- active on every computer -- just to protect your privacy, of course...

Or the website could just not require the data which benefits all of us.

A lot of websites require more information than they really need, so they either skirt around with with an under-13 age check, or, more preferably, don't ask for that information to begin with since they don't need it.

Go tell that to Marketing. They usually loooooove asking way too damn much.

Worst example I know, is one of my country's biggest newspapers. Their website allows visitors to post comments (god knows why you'd do that). When registering, you're presented with 6 pages to fill in, asking all kinds of questions like age, sex, address, phone number, profession, amount of children, amount of handicapped children, what your annual income is, if you're planning to buy a house anytime soon, if you're planning to buy a car anytime soon, who your ISP is, who your phone company is, who your electricity company is, and so on and so on. They're not all required, but they hide that fact pretty damn well (there's a teenyweeny "skip" link at the top right, which half blends into the background). And then they have the guts to add a new rule: "To protect privacy, we now don't allow users to use a pseudonym, but have to post under their true name"

There's no way in hell they require all that info just to let you post comments. It's either Marketing who'll spam the living daylights out of you with that info (which they do, and the obligatory "unsubscribe" link doesn't even work! You'll have to change your email address to a non-existing one if you want to get rid of their "interesting offers"), or it's so politicians can Big Brother you. Probably both.

frits · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised copy of actual English?

General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

The Poop... of DOOM!:
Worf:
Think of the ...:
I'm sure glad children's privacy is protected (but why not mine?) but the one thing I don't get is how a web site operator is supposed to measure the age of the person at the keyboard. And what if mom steps away to put a load in the washer and her kid starts fiddling with the mouse? Doesn't this require a camera -- and face recognition software -- active on every computer -- just to protect your privacy, of course...

Or the website could just not require the data which benefits all of us.

A lot of websites require more information than they really need, so they either skirt around with with an under-13 age check, or, more preferably, don't ask for that information to begin with since they don't need it.
Go tell that to Marketing. They usually loooooove asking way too damn much.

Worst example I know, is one of my country's biggest newspapers. Their website allows visitors to post comments (god knows why you'd do that). When registering, you're presented with 6 pages to fill in, asking all kinds of questions like age, sex, address, phone number, profession, amount of children, amount of handicapped children, what your annual income is, if you're planning to buy a house anytime soon, if you're planning to buy a car anytime soon, who your ISP is, who your phone company is, who your electricity company is, and so on and so on. They're not all required, but they hide that fact pretty damn well (there's a teenyweeny "skip" link at the top right, which half blends into the background). And then they have the guts to add a new rule: "To protect privacy, we now don't allow users to use a pseudonym, but have to post under their true name"

There's no way in hell they require all that info just to let you post comments. It's either Marketing who'll spam the living daylights out of you with that info (which they do, and the obligatory "unsubscribe" link doesn't even work! You'll have to change your email address to a non-existing one if you want to get rid of their "interesting offers"), or it's so politicians can Big Brother you. Probably both.

A friend of mine has a technique which has so far proved foolproof.

Every time he does business online, he sets up a new email address, keeping a record of which address corresponds to which company. If he subsequently gets spam on that email address, he sends a terse message to that company to the effect that he will no longer do business with them because they dishonestly sold his email address to a spammer. Then he closes down the email address and tells everyone that this company is a no-good spam-merchant.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Zebra used to be zeebra at around the same time Kenya was called keenya and next door there was a country called Tanganyika. Both were coloured red on a map

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Abso:
Jeff:
OK now that we've dealt with today's WTF, here's another. I'm on a team of developers that work all day thinking about code. Some manager thought it would be ideal to put us right next to a gang of a-holes who apparently have no work to do, because all they ever do is discuss sports and the lottery and politics and TV. Very loudly. Which makes it impossible for developers to concentrate on code.
Now, the most obnoxious one of them has decided to grace us with his singing skills. I'm to the point where I want to grab my electric stapler by the power cord, start swinging it David and Goliath style, and silence them all with gentle taps to the side of the head.

Want to. Not going to. Also want to keep my job.

So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this? Remember -- he who complains is the troublemaker, not he who engages in offensive behavior all day long.
Noise-isolating earbuds + mp3 player. If I don't want to listen to music, the earbuds make decent earplugs.

Of course, this requires that you have a boss who doesn't mind if you listen to music, can tolerate being startled occasionally when someone you didn't hear come in tries to get your attention, and can talk over the other people or go somewhere else when you need to talk to the people you work with.

or when the boss complains about the earphones, take them out and then say "eh? sorry, you'll have to shout, I can't hear you over those guys"

dkf · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

frits:
General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".

But which 18th century English dialect/pronunciation scheme are you closer to? There were (and still are) many.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

dkf:
frits:
General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".
But which 18th century English dialect/pronunciation scheme are you closer to? There were (and still are) many.

West country (Somerset and Devon, and so on).

American English is considerably simpler in some aspects, and there are many linguistic changes which are more recent. Examples being:

Using "alternate" to mean "alternative" (in the sense of: "the other option"), while in the UK "alternate" is a verb meaning "to take turns" as in "black and white alternate on a chess-board".
Confusing "persuade" and "convince". In the UK the former means "get someone to do something" and the latter means "get someone to believe something". In the USA they are often used the other way round, and the distinction between the two is being lost.
Many, many euphemisms for personal body parts and bodily functions which have themselves become taboo words and replaced by ever more coy and embarrassing baby-words (e.g. "booty" and "poop").
A considerable number of simplifications for complex consonantal clusters, e.g. "bud" and "buddy" for "brother", now meaning "friend".
And not forgetting how "stomach" has evolved from being the bag inside the body in which food is initially digested, to meaning the entire abdominal cavity, having evolved from the step 3 above "tummy" as the child's word for "stomach" to replace "belly" considered rather more indecent at some stage. Then "tummy" used to mean the entire abdomen, via nursery-speech, to be finally expanded back into "stomach". In its limit, this leads to absurdities like a recent-ish news story about a barbarism reported from some primitive foreign nation in which a baby was "ripped from its mother's stomach". What! You mean she'd eaten it?

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

frits:
Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised copy of actual English?
General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".

No, but you do misprounce words like "twenty", which has evolved into "twenny". And so on.

frits · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

dkf:
frits:
General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".
But which 18th century English dialect/pronunciation scheme are you closer to? There were (and still are) many.

I don't know, you guys all sound the same to me ;).

I read somewhere that General American was influenced by West Country dialects. Further, many sources simply state that American English retains common features from the "time of Shakespeare" such as trash, faucet, diaper, using "loan" instead of "lend", etc.

Addendum (2011-09-21 10:16): Where I'm from, it seems that the Quakers from the North Midlands gave rise to my particular dialect.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Beta:
Zolcos:
Derek is the WTF here, not Steve.

I respectfully disagree; Steve is a blockhead, but Derek's manager is the WTF. Derek implemented a horrible cowboy solution, but his manager put him in a position where he had to do it (or something more likely to get him fired). This should have been passed up until it reached someone with the authority to add it to Steve's requirements, but Derek's manager didn't have the spine for that, so he kicked it back down with an order to make the problem go away. He should be issued a mop and bucket and reassigned to new duties.

Want to actually get compliance? Get a team to analyze what needs to be changed in accordance to the new law, and put those "features" in highest priority for the next release (e.g. above the plans for the new ERE). Have the dev team writing/maintaining the code proceed to the changes themselves.

I totally agree that the manager is the WTF. There's just nothing like trying to avoid dealing with a pile of problems like shipping them to some new team with no authority (well almost, since members of this new time have the power to ship changes to production setups and bypass the testing phase).

frits · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

QJo:
frits:
Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised copy of actual English?
General American English is more similar to English from the 18th century. In other words, we're closer to the original English. Notice how we don't mispronounce words ending in "r".

No, but you do misprounce words like "twenty", which has evolved into "twenny". And so on.

Yeah, I'm from the Philly area where that's completely acceptable. Where I live now (Northern NJ) you get some strange looks if you drop the "t".

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Andrew:
Space man:
I call BS. Everyone knows if you can't store a null, just store a zero length string. If that doesn't work, store a single space.
P.S. InB4 "Comment is blank" "null comments not allowed" "ZZZZZ" etc.

"...also considered the fact that the database would sort the ANSI NULLs to the top of the results". Which would probably be true for empty strings, "" being less than "a" after all...

In MySQL at least, you could sort them with "ORDER BY last_name IS NULL, last_name". That way the real last names will come before the NULLs and be sorted alphabetically. You could check string length or compare against an empty string as well in the ORDER BY, but my gut feeling tells me that might be slower. Especially since string length wouldn't be read from an index. I would have to benchmark to be sure though.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

I used to read TDWTF with my morning coffee. Now I have to wait until afternoon tea. :(

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Mark:
There really is a simple solution:

Fire Steve. He is refusing to make changes that are required by law.

There is no step 2.

????

PROFIT!!!

dtobias · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

The "Marketing Types" at places where I've worked have tended to be the sort who insist on making all sorts of data fields mandatory that aren't strictly necessary to the operation of the site/program. They especially want to get everybody's email address and phone number even if that's not needed to fulfil a snail-mail order, the better to spam/telemarket them.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

MrBester:
Zebra used to be zeebra at around the same time Kenya was called keenya and next door there was a country called Tanganyika. Both were coloured red on a map

Commander Keenya in: Zee bros ate my babysitter.

Captcha: Praesent: The way Americans write "present" in the praesent.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Zolcos:
I didn't get it at first. "The Zed-Liminator?" Ah. American English.

Even considering the equally valid "zed" pronunciation of Z, I don't see how you could come to "Zed-Liminator" from seeing "Zliminator". Do you pronounce Zebra as "Zed-ebra" too?

(Pedantry follows...)

The Z in Zebra doesn't come before a consonant. It's obvious that that the Z in Zliminator is a play on the letter name.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

QJo:
(...) 3. Many, many euphemisms for personal body parts and bodily functions which have themselves become taboo words and replaced by ever more coy and embarrassing baby-words (e.g. "booty" and "poop"). (...)

Good thing the public body parts got spared of that!

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

The Poop... of DOOM!:
QJo:
(...) 3. Many, many euphemisms for personal body parts and bodily functions which have themselves become taboo words and replaced by ever more coy and embarrassing baby-words (e.g. "booty" and "poop"). (...)
Good thing the public body parts got spared of that!

Apologies, "personal" used ironically meaning "parts that are considered rude and embarrassing" as opposed to the more prosaic meaning "appertaining to the person".

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

QJo:
The Poop... of DOOM!:
QJo:
(...) 3. Many, many euphemisms for personal body parts and bodily functions which have themselves become taboo words and replaced by ever more coy and embarrassing baby-words (e.g. "booty" and "poop"). (...)
Good thing the public body parts got spared of that!

Apologies, "personal" used ironically meaning "parts that are considered rude and embarrassing" as opposed to the more prosaic meaning "appertaining to the person".

Oh, didn't get it. Non-native English speakers call those "private parts", "family jewels" or "those that should not be named"

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Webcam. Youtube. Tagged with their names. 'Accidental' email with a link to said youtube.

Jeff:
I think you've all figured it out. Primary key was last name. In case of duplicates, an on insert trigger just appended a space and tried again.
OK now that we've dealt with today's WTF, here's another. I'm on a team of developers that work all day thinking about code. Some manager thought it would be ideal to put us right next to a gang of a-holes who apparently have no work to do, because all they ever do is discuss sports and the lottery and politics and TV. Very loudly. Which makes it impossible for developers to concentrate on code.

Now, the most obnoxious one of them has decided to grace us with his singing skills. I'm to the point where I want to grab my electric stapler by the power cord, start swinging it David and Goliath style, and silence them all with gentle taps to the side of the head.

Want to. Not going to. Also want to keep my job.

So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this? Remember -- he who complains is the troublemaker, not he who engages in offensive behavior all day long.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised (sic) copy of actual English?

No, I think we can all agree that English (all variations) is fucked up. That's what happens when you take two massively different languages and produce a new one by randomly taking bits and pieces from each, and then spicing it up by borrowing the odd word from even more languages. English is a bit like that thing that Jeff Goldblum turns into in the movie The Fly, an unholy amalgam of two things that should never have been crossed in the first place.

Matt Westwood · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Orclev:
Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised (sic) copy of actual English?
No, I think we can all agree that English (all variations) is fucked up. That's what happens when you take two massively different languages and produce a new one by randomly taking bits and pieces from each, and then spicing it up by borrowing the odd word from even more languages. English is a bit like that thing that Jeff Goldblum turns into in the movie The Fly, an unholy amalgam of two things that should never have been crossed in the first place.

Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as people can make themselves understood. The fact that the language is becoming undescribably ugly is just a fucking shame.

hoodaticus · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Erik:
Why was empty string not an option? Even if the field is NOT NULL it can still be zero-length string.

They're running Oracle, which has the great "feature" of magically converting empty strings to NULLs. True story!

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

On that note, is it okay to rip on Java in the Anti-Oracle forum now?

hoodaticus · 2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Orclev:
Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised (sic) copy of actual English?
No, I think we can all agree that English (all variations) is fucked up. That's what happens when you take two massively different languages and produce a new one by randomly taking bits and pieces from each, and then spicing it up by borrowing the odd word from even more languages. English is a bit like that thing that Jeff Goldblum turns into in the movie The Fly, an unholy amalgam of two things that should never have been crossed in the first place.

Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as people can make themselves understood. The fact that the language is becoming undescribably ugly is just a fucking shame.

To each his own. Most people in the world prefer English music over all other foreign music, for instance.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

We need their name.

Nigel Tufnel

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

An MP3 player and headphones?

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Steve was right. Surname is mandatory.

They should send mail to COPPA to suck their balls because of such stupid regulations.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this? Remember -- he who complains is the troublemaker, not he who engages in offensive behavior all day long.

Use the power of smell, Luke! B.O. and farts, and plenty of them. It's par for the course, since everybody knows programmers smell bad anyway. Add in some smelly lunch and strategically placed gym bags, escalate everything gently and you'll have them begging to move within a fortnight!

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Steve was being a contrarian asshole. Derek though, implemented an incredibly shitty solution. Imagine finding Derek's code after Derek has happily left. What the fuck, zliminator? Sliminator? Zedliminator? What? Replaces null with ZZZZZZZ? Why? What the...

Derek: I updated the documentation, so no problem. It's your own fault for not constantly re-reading the 50 page documentation lol.

Maybe Derek should have sent an email around, instead of gleefully watching shit break, due to his irresponsible "just following orders" attitude.

The manager should fire both their incompetent asses.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Erik:
Why was empty string not an option? Even if the field is NOT NULL it can still be zero-length string.
They're running Oracle, which has the great "feature" of magically converting empty strings to NULLs. True story!

Except that Oracle sorts Nulls to the bottom.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Blank spaces show up first in the order, he needed them to be last. Probably should have used a blank space and done the sort outside of the database.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

MortenK:
Steve was being a contrarian asshole. Derek though, implemented an incredibly shitty solution. Imagine finding Derek's code after Derek has happily left. What the fuck, zliminator? Sliminator? Zedliminator? What? Replaces null with ZZZZZZZ? Why? What the...
Derek: I updated the documentation, so no problem. It's your own fault for not constantly re-reading the 50 page documentation lol.

Maybe Derek should have sent an email around, instead of gleefully watching shit break, due to his irresponsible "just following orders" attitude.

The manager should fire both their incompetent asses.

"Lack of communication is the path to the dark side, lack of communication leads to errors, errors leads to Incompetence and incompetence leads to suffering"

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Anon:
Jeff:
So, how have you effectively dealt with moronic situations like this?

First, you have to stop whining like a pussy and grow a pair.

Headphones + music.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

A friend of mine has a technique which has so far proved foolproof.
Every time he does business online, he sets up a new email address, keeping a record of which address corresponds to which company. If he subsequently gets spam on that email address, he sends a terse message to that company to the effect that he will no longer do business with them because they dishonestly sold his email address to a spammer. Then he closes down the email address and tells everyone that this company is a no-good spam-merchant.

I do that too. Your friend will love this Thunderbird addon which automatically chooses the right "FROM" address when writing to people: https://www.absorb.it/virtual-id/

That's the extension's development site, the dev removed the addon from the Mozilla addons site because Thunderbird will now have a new version every 6 weeks! That is a real WTF.

Captcha: quibus. Biggus quibus.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

PRMan:
An MP3 player and headphones?

Bingo. Works for me.

Protip: if you're going to be using this method several hours per day, several days per week, you can afford to get a nice pair of headphones rather than the crappy earbuds that came with the MP3 player.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

Orclev:
Tony:
I think we can all agree (sic) that the English pronunciation is correct. After all, what is American English but a poor, bastardised (sic) copy of actual English?
No, I think we can all agree that English (all variations) is fucked up. That's what happens when you take two massively different languages and produce a new one by randomly taking bits and pieces from each, and then spicing it up by borrowing the odd word from even more languages. English is a bit like that thing that Jeff Goldblum turns into in the movie The Fly, an unholy amalgam of two things that should never have been crossed in the first place.

Has you ever saw portugues, it is even worse that english in this aspect.

oheso · 2011-09-23 Reply Admin

Luiz Felipe:
Has you ever saw portugues, it is even worse that english in this aspect.

I often find, to my amusement, that I can read Portuguese. Definitely would not understand if addressed in Portuguese, though. Have never studied it.

toshir0 · 2011-09-23 Reply Admin

QJo:
Jeff:
[...] OK now that we've dealt with today's WTF, here's another.[...]

Has anybody tried the technique: "Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be possible to keep the noise down a fraction? We need it to be a little quieter in order to be able to do our jobs."

One of the following may happen:

They appreciate the heads-up, realise that their current behaviour is unacceptable, and become significantly quieter and more professional.

They are offended, and become aggressively, confrontationally and even more obnoxiously noisy, in which case you are more than justified in raising the issue with higher management.

No effect, in which case you repeat until either somebody complains to management about you disturbing their analysis of whether Manchester City are better than Chelsea or just lucky, and either i) you get moved away to somewhere else where you don't annoy anybody else with your constant whingeing demands for peace and quiet, or ii) action is taken in your favour to reduce the noise from this team.

Everybody ridicules you bunch of pussies for acting like a bunch of old schoolmarms, in which case you actively start seeking alternative employment.

You get dismissed for lack of ability to be a team player, in which case you take whatever legal action you want to for unfair dismissal.

In my experience, the overwhelming probability is that option 1) happens, with the probability of 3) coming a distant second. I have heard of the occurrences of 2) happening, and they generally have the same outcome as 3) ii). 4) and 5) have a vanishing probability of happening, but I mention them in case you wish to take all the possibilities into account before embarking on the course of action suggested.

So sane analysis. I was considering writing something* like this when I saw your post. I definitely would not have expressed it so clearly in english. Thank you !

first time I see three consecutive "ing"-finishing words in a valid sentence... can we do even better ? Hmmm.... let's see.

I was considering writing something missing siblings** can understand.

** I hate this "s" .... help me english grammar nazis out there !

2011-09-23 Reply Admin

Why didn't you just use an empty string or a space char instead of zzzz.. ?

2011-09-23 Reply Admin

A zero-length string would be nice, unless the database is Oracle - where "zero-length string" and "NULL" are synonymous! Either the person who came up with this gem never took a class in set theory or flunked it. (Yeah, I know - it was probably Larry Ellison, and his net worth about 10 godzillion times more than mine, which just goes to prove that being a rich asshole is better than being right - or so I hear <sigh>)

2011-09-26 Reply Admin

Ah, the usual "screw the data integrity, just make it work" brigade are out in force - again.

Having suffered the delights of zero length strings in SQL server, oracle does a fine job of maintaining reason. A null is an unknown value, that's why it's null. A zero length string is precisely known. Does anyone have a surname which is a zero length string? Does anyone have a surname which consists solely of white spaces?

Why store a big fat lie in the db?

The db constraint is quite correct. If the surname is not available in the db, how would a letter be sent to Timmy's parents? They wouldn't know him from all the other Timmy's.

The answer is to do some business analysis, and keep the data, but only allow it to appear to end users who need to see it. As usual, the db is wrong, and the developers are right - sigh....

tgape · 2011-09-26 Reply Admin

J. Random PMP:
What I don't understand is why Derek or his boss didn't get the Sales and/or Marketing teams involved. It would have been simple for Derek to explain that Steve is keeping them from being able to sell their flagship product.

That'd require the communication skills Derek apparently lacked when he was talking to Steve in the first place. In the quoted bit of dialog, Derek never pointed out that their product's only customer base would refuse to buy the product unless it had some way to handle this need, so Steve's refusal to either comply or suggest an alternate solution would kill the product.

On the other hand, Derek lacked the communication skills to realize that a better solution would be compliant with both Steve and COPPA: If the kid's surname was withheld, use a surname of 'Withheld <n>', where <n> is a number that's unique to that kid's given name. This way, you know which homework goes with which kid. (Note: yeah, that leaves out all sorts of implementation details.)

[Edit: yes, I know that's also problem solving. But with sufficient communication skills, it's trivial to determine that the NULL choice is wrong, so something else is needed. Something that actually communicates more about the kids. Yeah, an ID number can also help, but this gives at least twice the chance the kid can be correctly differentiated from another kid with the same first name. (Probably more than twice if <n> is significantly simpler than the ID.)]

Arancaytar · 2011-10-23 Reply Admin

I didn't even realize, but this sort of fix has so much potential.

If the database is designed by idiots who refuse to budge, the deployment team can simply sneak in code that replaces it with a proper design in production.

(And if the reverse is true, the deployment team can replace a proper database design with a stupid one.)

Get to da COPPA!

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