The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Mark Bowytz:
srsly:
Could you update the story to at least not include the word SheMale?

Reasonable request. Changed to Octember.

It was not a reasonable request. It was a bitter, toxic, selfish, destructive request.

The examples from the guidelines doc are month names, day names, and gender names. The counterexamples "Helluary? Wtfday? SheMale?" perfectly match the type and order of the silly examples. The counterexamples "Helluary? Wtfday? Octember?" sound like the author wasn't paying attention to his own prose even as he was writing it. It had been changed by the time I first read it, and I actually was going to suggest changing "Octember" to "Shemale" for smoother reading.

I am a straight and somewhat prudish adult man, and the presence of a flamboyant gay or a brutal dyke can make me uncomfortable. But -- but -- if the heat failed and we were freezing to death, and I had to choose between cuddling naked with a shemale, or with a person who thinks that his personal discomfort at certain words entitles him to ceaselessly chip away at beautiful and effective language -- I would rather share body heat with the shemale.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

CigarDoug:
operagost:
srsly:
Besides, in these days we're coming to understand that gender is often not as simple as "baby blue boy" or "princess pink girl", and joking that gender is as inflexible as the days of the week is pretty stuck in the mud.
Yeah... you see, biology is a science, so no, you don't get to decide you're a girl because you like pink.
Sex is binary. When your dead body is lying on a slab in the morgue, the medical examiner will determine your sex from your physical characteristics.
Everything else is behavior.

You have the right idea, but you're drawing the line wrong. On the plus side, you do seem to broadly agree that gender is a social construction (i.e., "behavior" -- admittedly, I am putting some words in your mouth with respect to nature versus nurture)

But sex, as it is known to science and medicine, is not binary -- at least not in terms of "male" and "female". Functional hermaphroditism, asexual birth, chromosomal disease (being born with YY, say) -- all of these are counter-examples to simple tests. So either there is some other binary test medicine has not discovered, or sex is a combination of characteristics.

P.C. comes in because it would be nice if we could treat these people with respect. If they choose project masculinity, great. If they choose femininity, awesome. If they choose something else, perfect. The idea extends to "regular" people. If a sexual male decides to project femininity, that is his business. If he asks you nicely to call him a her, that is between you and her. It does not seem like a particularly costly task, to me.

But going around projecting roles onto people -- people you know nothing about, except for some vague and useless classification -- is the opposite of respect.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Let me tell you of government story in India. There is a big corporation run totally by Government. one day they invite bid to build a pylon towers. 15 contractors bid for the job. 3 are called into private mtg room. They are told there is no tower that is actually going to be built. We will pass tenders and we can split the fortune (tax payer money) among some officers of the corporation and the contractors. 3 months later there is another invite for a bid to demolish the tower.

No doubt this is one of those stories where making a point is more important than whether it happened.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chris Angelico:
Developer:
One could write a generic unit test using reflection to grab a setter method, check the name-matching member variable and also the getter method. One could also extend this generic unit test to be fed by a list of object classes to go through and check test all automatically. Without Writing Stupid Unit Test Coverage Code Over And Over Again.
Or.. some stupid could waste hours writing stupid unit tests

Better solution: Use a language that doesn't require you to write getters and setters. Python lets you happily "reach in" and manipulate members with direct assignment, and if you ever need to change things around (that's the whole point of getX() and setX(), after all - you can change them to not simply be direct getter and setter), you can create a @property that lets you write, effectively, the getter and setter. Of course, that's WAY too smart for bureaucracy.

Javascript lets you create objects with both public and private properties, so you can do either one.

Dragnslcr · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin:
TRWTF are getters/setters. If outside class need to access internal variable of another class, just make it public. If you don't want field to be modified outside, just mark it as readonly. Most sane languages have methods for that. Getters/Setters were worst design choice made when creating Java.
As big pain it causes me, C# being M$ product, it fixed most of Java's issues. .NET runtime (be it Mono or .NET from M$) is just faster and C# uses saner language constructs than Java does.

For me, it's a matter of semantics. A method performs some significant action, while a property simply gets or sets a value. "foo.x = 5" provides that small bit of extra information over "foo.setX(5)" - the only thing you're doing is setting a property of the object.

I admit that this is really just a personal preference, but that's one possible reason for using getters/setters.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Duke of New York:
Nagesh:
Let me tell you of government story in India. There is a big corporation run totally by Government. one day they invite bid to build a pylon towers. 15 contractors bid for the job. 3 are called into private mtg room. They are told there is no tower that is actually going to be built. We will pass tenders and we can split the fortune (tax payer money) among some officers of the corporation and the contractors. 3 months later there is another invite for a bid to demolish the tower.
No doubt this is one of those stories where making a point is more important than whether it happened.

Of course it happened. [image]

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Duke of New York:
No doubt this is one of those stories where making a point is more important than whether it happened.

I thought that just about everything you ever read here on TDWTF is like that.

Otherwise I never would have posted about what happened when the heat failed and we were freezing to death.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Developer:
One could write a generic unit test using reflection to grab a setter method, check the name-matching member variable and also the getter method. One could also extend this generic unit test to be fed by a list of object classes to go through and check test all automatically. Without Writing Stupid Unit Test Coverage Code Over And Over Again.
Or.. some stupid could waste hours writing stupid unit tests

And you end up with unit tests that don't test what they are actually supposed to be testing.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chris Angelico:
Better solution: Use a language that doesn't require you to write getters and setters. Python lets you happily "reach in" and manipulate members with direct assignment, and if you ever need to change things around (that's the whole point of getX() and setX(), after all - you can change them to not simply be direct getter and setter), you can create a @property that lets you write, effectively, the getter and setter. Of course, that's WAY too smart for bureaucracy.

And how do you test this? I think some people are just incapable of understanding the reasons for unit tests: To detect the cases where you mess up. It's obvious that you can write correct code, but unit tests are for the cases where you don't. For example, is the underlying variable capable of holding the value INT_MAX? How do you test that without testing it?

DrPepper · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

gnasher729:
About the unit testing: It's absolutely fine to have lots of quite trivial unit tests. For example, if you just use a setter to store a 1 and the getter to verify that it is one, that wouldn't catch if the setter sets the wrong variable and by coincidence the variable is already set to the expected value. You can have lots of test for trivial cases, which will then find really stupid bugs that would otherwise go undetected until the software is in the hands of a customer.

Hopefully, these tests are auto-generated; otherwise you're paying hundreds of dollars an hour for a software engineer to write these tests when they could be writing production code.

no laughing matter · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

The Great Lobachevsky:
Please show some sensitivity.
I had a son who suffered from octember, and let me assure you it was no laughing matter.

Wait a moment! Are you implying that i have 8 penisses?

Isn't that quite a strong indication you are the true person behind the Zunesis posts?

The Great Lobachevsky:
(Had to do it...could not resist... please forgive me)

More evidence that you are Zunesis!

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

gnasher729:
And how do you test this? I think some people are just incapable of understanding the reasons for unit tests: To detect the cases where you mess up. It's obvious that you can write correct code, but unit tests are for the cases where you don't. For example, is the underlying variable capable of holding the value INT_MAX? How do you test that without testing it?

It's simple, of course. You use a language that doesn't care about silly things like types or sizes. You know, like Python.


>>> class Foo(object):
...     pass
...
>>> obj = Foo()
>>> obj.x = "bar"
>>> obj.x
'bar'
>>> obj.x = 1
>>> obj.x
1
>>> obj.x = 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
>>> obj.x
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890L

See? It doesn't care about the type of the members, whether or not you assign ludicrous values to them, or even whether or not you add arbitrary members to instances of classes that don't have those members. It's the Perfect Language!

chubertdev · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
See? It doesn't care about the type of the members, whether or not you assign ludicrous values to them, or even whether or not you add arbitrary members to instances of classes that don't have those members. It's the Perfect Language!

He was talking about one aspect of the language. If he wanted to talk about a perfect language, he'd use Haskell.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Was the problem here boyz?

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
There are people self-identify as multi-phallused and who may have surgery to give themselves multiple penises.

They call that an "addadictomy", right?

Captcha: facilisis - another name for Octember

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

srsly:
Right. And biologists know that physical gender is set as a function of how much testosterone a fetus receives in the early stages of pregnancy.

Actually, gender is set in stone as soon as the egg is fertilized, and it depends entirely on whether the fertilizing sperm cell has an X or Y chromosome. Hormone concentrations in utero after that have been shown to have some effect on sexual orientation, but have absolutely no effect on physical gender.

It doesn't matter which set(s) of equipment you choose to have surgically removed or added later. You are what you are. Anything else is just pretending.

Also, telling other people what words they can and can't use on their own website lest they make you uncomfortable is narcissistic, divisive, and incredibly self-centered. Nobody has a moral obligation to avoid offending you.

Nagesh · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chris Angelico:
Developer:
One could write a generic unit test using reflection to grab a setter method, check the name-matching member variable and also the getter method. One could also extend this generic unit test to be fed by a list of object classes to go through and check test all automatically. Without Writing Stupid Unit Test Coverage Code Over And Over Again.
Or.. some stupid could waste hours writing stupid unit tests

Better solution: Use a language that doesn't require you to write getters and setters. Python lets you happily "reach in" and manipulate members with direct assignment, and if you ever need to change things around (that's the whole point of getX() and setX(), after all - you can change them to not simply be direct getter and setter), you can create a @property that lets you write, effectively, the getter and setter. Of course, that's WAY too smart for bureaucracy.

There will no manipulating of members, while I am on this forum.

Nagesh · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Duke of New York:
Nagesh:
Let me tell you of government story in India. There is a big corporation run totally by Government. one day they invite bid to build a pylon towers. 15 contractors bid for the job. 3 are called into private mtg room. They are told there is no tower that is actually going to be built. We will pass tenders and we can split the fortune (tax payer money) among some officers of the corporation and the contractors. 3 months later there is another invite for a bid to demolish the tower.
No doubt this is one of those stories where making a point is more important than whether it happened.

Making point is only secondary. Primary thing is story did take place.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Read, wtf? Read, wtf? Read, wtf? Think: Who the hell could this really happen too? Scroll up. Scroll up. Read, Oh, Snoofle. Think: Of course. Scroll down. Scroll down. Read, wtf? Read, wtf? Read, wtf?

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
It's simple, of course. You use a language that doesn't care about silly things like types or sizes. You know, like Python.

Some people just have to preach, don't you? So when you start working with a team that has already written 100,000 lines of C# or Objective-C or Java code, do you use unit tests, do you change all the code over to Python, or do you sulk?

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Every day is WTFDay!

herby · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

On unit tests...

They can be useful, but CAN lead you astray. In one case, a contract builder decided to just copy the address prom from the master example (instead of the properly serialized one from a particular vendor) of a network card into all the units he built. They worked just peachy in "unit test" and did well. The problem arose when you used two such cards on the same network, and all hell broke loose to fail miserably.

Kinda like counterfit bills having the same serial number. Not too smart!

Don't ask me how I know about this problem.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

O yes there is many reasons to test them

What if the setter is expected to enforce a limit on which values you can set, for example only 0-4 to prevent invalid values to find it's way into some legacy code.

NOT testing that 5 causes an error is a major mistake.

Tests should not only check for valid uses, but also make sure that invalid uses throw exception or in some other way prevent misuse.

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Developer:
One could write a generic unit test using reflection to grab a setter method, check the name-matching member variable and also the getter method. One could also extend this generic unit test to be fed by a list of object classes to go through and check test all automatically. Without Writing Stupid Unit Test Coverage Code Over And Over Again.
Or.. some stupid could waste hours writing stupid unit tests

I've actually done that. Works quite well, actually. In Java, it's not too hard to find and load every application class in the system. And then, using Java Bean conventions, find all the getter-setter pairs, check their types, and go into different code for each type to check the proper values.

This might seem kind of useless and crazy -- except for the fact that the GxdDxmmxdUsxlxssPxxcxOfShxt(TM) CASE tool we were forced to use had a bad habit of "randomly" replacing method bodies with nothing or "return null" or likewise. It can be a real nightmare to debug a system where getter and setter methods are "killed" randomly by your CASE tool. So the ONE AND ONLY ONE gettter-setter test quickly isolated the REALLY STUPID cases where the CASE tool killed a getter or setter method. :-/

(Yes, the single master getter-setter test "knew" about the small number of getter-setter pairs that had really creative functionality -- and handled them appropriately. It's not hard. Really.)

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
Mark Bowytz:
srsly:
Could you update the story to at least not include the word SheMale?

Reasonable request. Changed to Octember.

Sorry, have to send out the PC Police again.

"Octember" is a word that exists mostly in pornography; namely the hentai variety featuring men or other creatures with eight male members. There are people self-identify as multi-phallused and who may have surgery to give themselves multiple penises. Referring to them by what porn refers to them as would be like referring to an Australian male colleague as... well... you don't need me to expand on that.

As an Australian male, I refer to all my colleagues, friends, family, strangers... everyone really, as (CAPTCHA) caecus

2014-03-20 Reply Admin

henke37:
With the correct setup, it might be possible to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet. Might.
And about the getters, you are clearly doing it wrong if your code does nothing but setting and getting a property. Just expose the real property already. Good languages allow you to access getters and setters as if they were properties in case you change your mind later.

If a requirement changes such that the setter needs to do bounds checking/validation of some sort, you will not need to touch any other classes to make that change. Exposing it as a property will require you to make a change to every class accessing it.

lucidfox · 2014-03-20 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
Mark Bowytz:
srsly:
Could you update the story to at least not include the word SheMale?

Reasonable request. Changed to Octember.

Sorry, have to send out the PC Police again.

"Octember" is a word that exists mostly in pornography; namely the hentai variety featuring men or other creatures with eight male members. There are people self-identify as multi-phallused and who may have surgery to give themselves multiple penises. Referring to them by what porn refers to them as would be like referring to an Australian male colleague as... well... you don't need me to expand on that.

You think you're being all clever and sarcastic, but you're not. You're just a dick.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
Mark Bowytz:
srsly:
Could you update the story to at least not include the word SheMale?

Reasonable request. Changed to Octember.

Sorry, have to send out the PC Police again.

"Octember" is a word that exists mostly in pornography; namely the hentai variety featuring men or other creatures with eight male members. There are people self-identify as multi-phallused and who may have surgery to give themselves multiple penises. Referring to them by what porn refers to them as would be like referring to an Australian male colleague as... well... you don't need me to expand on that.

You're thinking of octmember, not Octember.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

[quote user="ShachMaT"][quote user="merb"]

public String []dayNames = { "Sunday", ..., "Saturday" };

The real WTF is starting with Sunday?[/quote]

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/ Ask no more.

From the website: "Sunday is regarded as the first day of the week ..." which isn't a fact carved in stone as most of Europe counts differently. It refers to the bible and I find it amusing that God started to rest and then worked. (Not a bad idea, really!)

Watson · 2014-03-21 Reply Admin

To get from the front entrance of the building to the Windows Desktop, you must perform the following: ... All of this to get to a desktop where nothing secure is stored, or even accessible!

Making them look exactly like the desktops from which secure material is accessible, thus depriving potential attackers of a covert channel that they could otherwise use to identify machines it would be worth concentrating their attacks on.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

Jake:
henke37:
With the correct setup, it might be possible to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet. Might.
And about the getters, you are clearly doing it wrong if your code does nothing but setting and getting a property. Just expose the real property already. Good languages allow you to access getters and setters as if they were properties in case you change your mind later.
If a requirement changes such that the setter needs to do bounds checking/validation of some sort, you will not need to touch any other classes to make that change. Exposing it as a property will require you to make a change to every class accessing it.

Which is exactly what he was talking about. For example C#

public int X;

Usage: someObject.X = 5;

now your requirement change comes into play so you turn the public variable into a property:

int x; int X { get {return x;} set { if(value <6) { x = value; } } }

Usage: someObject.X = 5;

Because C# does not rely on a stupid getSomething() setSomething()the syntax for using a property and using a public variable stay identical. Even though it's nothing but syntactical sugar this makes alle the difference in the world, because it allows you to change the behavior of your porperties without a syntactical breaking change that will force you to change every piece of code that references that variable.

Of course the above example is still a behavioral breaking change that has to be communicated to all the consumers of your API. They still won't be happy, but at least they won't murder you because if you know what you're doing chances are there was a good reason why you made the behavioral change.

Captcha ingenium: What I take every day before plotting world domination.

powerlord · 2014-03-21 Reply Admin

dgschrei:
Jake:
henke37:
With the correct setup, it might be possible to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet. Might.
And about the getters, you are clearly doing it wrong if your code does nothing but setting and getting a property. Just expose the real property already. Good languages allow you to access getters and setters as if they were properties in case you change your mind later.
If a requirement changes such that the setter needs to do bounds checking/validation of some sort, you will not need to touch any other classes to make that change. Exposing it as a property will require you to make a change to every class accessing it.

Which is exactly what he was talking about. For example C#

public int X;

Usage: someObject.X = 5;

now your requirement change comes into play so you turn the public variable into a property:

int x; int X { get {return x;} set { if(value <6) { x = value; } } }

Usage: someObject.X = 5;

Because C# does not rely on a stupid getSomething() setSomething()the syntax for using a property and using a public variable stay identical. Even though it's nothing but syntactical sugar this makes alle the difference in the world, because it allows you to change the behavior of your porperties without a syntactical breaking change that will force you to change every piece of code that references that variable.

Of course the above example is still a behavioral breaking change that has to be communicated to all the consumers of your API. They still won't be happy, but at least they won't murder you because if you know what you're doing chances are there was a good reason why you made the behavioral change.

Captcha ingenium: What I take every day before plotting world domination.

And by "breaking behavioral change" you mean that everything that references that variable (now property) has to be recompiled because the CIL for properties is different than the CIL for variables. Which is why MS recommends using properties from the start (and why Sun/Oracle recommends using setters/getters in Java).

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

From: security-complaince@██████.gov

I'll bet the Security Complaince Department gets a lot of 'em after this missive...

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

Chaarmann:
I learned by painful experience that storing constants in a single common place ("island of data") is better than having them defined in each of many different classes in many programs. If you exchange data and one class has defined {Sunday, monday,...}, another {monday, tuesday, ..} then when transmitting the corresponding integer values (0,1 etc.) between services, a Sunday suddenly becomes a Monday. If you submit strings, then there may be no match (lowercase and uppercase in the case above) because two things mean the same or spelling mistakes. E.G "Christmas" and "Xmas", "grey" and "gray", "seperate" and "separate" etc. Also storing these values in the database makes correction of them (or translation in a different language) easy and can be done immediately with a single SQL statement; no need to change any code and deploy it everywhere and having downtime etc. You are just more flexible. Imagine you sell paint and you run out of yellow. Then you just delete the corresponding record from the table of available colors instead of changing hundreds of classes!

An enum in one place in code is at least as convenient as an enumeration of values in a DB table - IMO, more convenient - if you only have one system/app accessing the enums. If you have multiple apps, written in different languages, that need that enumeration, then the DB is one possible convenient place to store that enumeration.

In the example of physical paint colors, these are most probably a property/attribute of paint that can change over time - the name of it can change, there can be varying hues/compositions/etc., and you wouldn't delete the color just because you ran out, you would mark the item in inventory as "out of stock" and/or "back-ordered".

The time to move enums from a DB to code is when the items rarely, if ever, change - like the days of a week (for which many languages already have an enum), months, holidays, etc.

However, if some SQL query needs to depend on the enum (for good reason, not just because it is there), then having it in a DB table is often not a bad idea. But having it in a DB table simply because it can be read into the code is not - in my experience it leads to a lot of unnecessary code, and often the dev who thought this was a good idea didn't think about caching or the cost of one, much less multiple repeated DB reads.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

The part that I don't understand is "Unit tests must cover the full range of values for affected variables/methods". If that is the case, then shouldn't their unit test cover the entire range of an int?

class SomeObject { private int x; public void setX(int x) { this.x = x; } public int getX() { return x; } } @Test // for: member: int x public void memberXtest() { SomeObject o = new SomeObject(); int i; // test the entire range of integers for (i = Integer.MIN_VALUE; i <= Integer.MAX_VALUE; ++ i) { o.setX(i); assertEquals(i, o.getX()); sleep(10); if (i >= Integer.MAX_VALUE) break; // avoid an infinite loop } }

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

Yet a majority of people are clearly male or female based on their...parts. Sure, some are exceptions to this rule, but that can be just as easily attributed to a breakdown of nature in some way vs a license to redefine clearly defined roles.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

srsly:
operagost:
srsly:
Besides, in these days we're coming to understand that gender is often not as simple as "baby blue boy" or "princess pink girl", and joking that gender is as inflexible as the days of the week is pretty stuck in the mud.
Yeah... you see, biology is a science, so no, you don't get to decide you're a girl because you like pink.

Right. And biologists know that physical gender is set as a function of how much testosterone a fetus receives in the early stages of pregnancy. That testosterone can be distributed unevenly - an XY fetus can have unusually little, an XX fetus can have unusually much, the hormone can come early or late, and that's not to mention fetuses with unusual chromosomes, XXY, XXX, etc. Since the process is highly fluid, a minority of people aren't simply male or female.

Forgot the quote...

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

[quote user="Yep, srsly!"][quote user="srsly"]Right. And biologists know that physical gender is set as a function of how much testosterone a fetus receives in the early stages of pregnancy.[/quote]

Actually, gender is set in stone as soon as the egg is fertilized, and it depends entirely on whether the fertilizing sperm cell has an X or Y chromosome. Hormone concentrations in utero after that have been shown to have some effect on sexual orientation, but have absolutely no effect on physical gender.

It doesn't matter which set(s) of equipment you choose to have surgically removed or added later. You are what you are. Anything else is just pretending.[/quote] [/quote]

Or two Y chromosomes. Or no sex chromosomes.

Or sometimes, you get an embryo with XY chromosomes (so it's chromosomally male), but that doesn't respond to androgens and therefore doesn't develop male genitalia and is physically female.

Or sometimes you get people who have a penis, but ovaries instead of testes.

And there are intersex people, whose genitalia are ambiguous (at best) and are often assigned a gender by the obstetrician which might not represent their chromosomes at all.

It's really not a binary situation.

[quote]Also, telling other people what words they can and can't use on their own website lest they make you uncomfortable is narcissistic, divisive, and incredibly self-centered. Nobody has a moral obligation to avoid offending you.[/quote]

Personally, I didn't read it that way. I read it as "hey, some people will be offended by that; you might want to think about changing it".

Obviously, everyone has the right to be deliberately offensive if they so choose, but I've never understood people taking pride in this right. Why wouldn't you want to be considerate of others?

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

wintermute:
Obviously, everyone has the right to be deliberately offensive if they so choose, but I've never understood people taking pride in this right. Why wouldn't you want to be considerate of others?

Consider that some people aren't worth my time or consideration.

2014-03-21 Reply Admin

ShachMaT:
merb:
public String []dayNames = { "Sunday", ..., "Saturday" };
The real WTF is starting with Sunday?
http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/ Ask no more.

P.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday

I'm not sure whether you want to say that Sunday is the 1st day of the week or not.

It would have been easier and unambigious to refer to ISO 8601 which declares Monday as the 1st day of the week.

chubertdev · 2014-03-21 Reply Admin

Sunday is the first day of the week because 'Murica.

AndyCanfield · 2014-03-22 Reply Admin

0/1 constants for Male / Female? OK, maybe 0/1/2 for Unknown / Male / Female. OBSOLETE! Last I heard Facebook was up to some 40 different sex designations.

Every time I fill out a government form, and there is box labelled "Sex: [ ] Male [ ] Female", I wonder if I should enter what I am or what I want.

Faxmachinen · 2014-03-22 Reply Admin

ShachMaT:
http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/

The irony being that the first year in the Bible is 1 AD, whereas the first year in the ISO standard arguably is year zero (1 BC). Thus the first day of the first week in the first year is Monday and Saturday respectively.

2014-03-22 Reply Admin

Faxmachinen:
ShachMaT:
http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/
The irony being that the first year in the Bible is 1 AD

The old testament is bigger than the new testament.

Also it depends on which country you're in. This is year 26 but years of previous eras didn't just disappear from history.[*]

[* Though some malicious actions undertaken during previous eras do just disappear from history, because every year is 1984 in Japan.]

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

Why would you need to lock the spreadsheet just to edit your row? Excel allows shared spreadsheets, and as long as multiple people don't edit the same cell it works pretty well.

At least until one person accidentally deletes the sheet.

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

I admit, being from the frozen tundra of Minnesota, I LOL'd at "Helluary"

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

AndyCanfield:
0/1 constants for Male / Female? OK, maybe 0/1/2 for Unknown / Male / Female. OBSOLETE! Last I heard Facebook was up to some 40 different sex designations.
Every time I fill out a government form, and there is box labelled "Sex: [ ] Male [ ] Female", I wonder if I should enter what I am or what I want.

Actually, that should be Female/Male/Unknown so that the 0 and 1 symbolically represent female and male sexual organs, and so that *ists have something to complain about.

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

DigitalYeti:
I admit, being from the frozen tundra of Minnesota, I LOL'd at "Helluary"

I think it's a bit more accurate for us in Australia, when during February we consistently beat Hell's own temperature records for every day of the month

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

All code shall have unit tests.

Including the unit test code?

2014-03-23 Reply Admin

Cthulu Sanchez:
Chelloveck:
Mark Bowytz:
srsly:
Could you update the story to at least not include the word SheMale?

Reasonable request. Changed to Octember.

Sorry, have to send out the PC Police again.

"Octember" is a word that exists mostly in pornography; namely the hentai variety featuring men or other creatures with eight male members. There are people self-identify as multi-phallused and who may have surgery to give themselves multiple penises. Referring to them by what porn refers to them as would be like referring to an Australian male colleague as... well... you don't need me to expand on that.

You're thinking of octmember, not Octember.

You're right, mate.

Government, Inc.

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