• DD (unregistered) in reply to RevMike

    According to Jim Cunningham, the opposite of Love is Fear.

    Fear |-------------------------| Love

     

  • (cs) in reply to Mikademus

    truth-be-told... it looks like a unit test crutch.... left behind by mistake.  However, it is private... maybe it's overloading a parent, which children naturally do.

  • Ogre (unregistered) in reply to Paul Tomblin
    Anonymous:
    Omnifarious:

    I sort of think people get way too uptight about stuff like that. I don't really understand why a program can't say "Arrrggghh!" as long as it doesn't confuse anybody.



    How do you feel about the message "Holy Bat, Fuckman, how did we get here?", which I accidentally left in code that got to a production server?


    How about this?  I had an error message in some cross-platform code, that was used in both a client and server application.  The server was proprietary, not released to anyone else, and only ran on Linux.  In a specific error case, which I only really expected the server to ever hit (there I go, making assumptions), it had real error messages describing exactly what had gone wrong.  But I never bothered writing the Windows code to get that information.

    Well, we had someone from Microsoft testing out the client.  And they managed to hit it.  The error they saw due to my laziness?  "Failed to blah blah, reason: Windows sucks."

    Needless to say, it started reporting numeric error codes on Windows the very next day.

  • Fast B (unregistered) in reply to cconroy
    cconroy:
    <font size="2">He misspelled "Aaaaaarrrgghhhh".</font>

    Perhaps he was dictating.

  • Roger Wolff (unregistered)

    Ehmm. There is an error in the code for the leap years: 1900 is NOT a leap year.

  • Anonymous coward (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The real WTF in that second one is the misspelling of "license".


    It's called ENGLISH for a reason. "Licence" is correct. The real WTF in the second one is the mis-spelling of "centre".
  • Pedant (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous coward

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    The real WTF in that second one is the misspelling of "license".


    It's called ENGLISH for a reason. "Licence" is correct. The real WTF in the second one is the mis-spelling of "centre".

    I think that you will find that the WTF is that you don’t know anything about HTML, if you did then you would know that it uses American spellings.

    I would say that the developer was British ergo the spelling of “Licence” was correct for this side of the pond, and the spelling of “center” is also correct as well in the context of the code.  

     <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

    http://www.cafepress.com/thedailywtf/520878

     <o:p></o:p>

    Go buy one of these and drink from it with pride you earned it …[;)]

     

  • (cs) in reply to RevMike
    RevMike:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    Imagine my surprise when I tried to check out a module, and the reply I got from the CVSNT service was "I hate you."



    The success message for CVS is the matching "I love you"....


    But the opposite of love is indifference.


    The opposite of passion is indifference. Hate and Love both imply a certain intimacy and interest in the other's actions and thoughts.

    Your homework for today will be to construct the shape that contains the set of coordinates to describe human being's state with respect to love/hate, and how much of it.
  • (cs) in reply to Pedant
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    The real WTF in that second one is the misspelling of "license".


    It's called ENGLISH for a reason. "Licence" is correct. The real WTF in the second one is the mis-spelling of "centre".

    I think that you will find that the WTF is that you don’t know anything about HTML, if you did then you would know that it uses American spellings.

    I would say that the developer was British ergo the spelling of “Licence” was correct for this side of the pond, and the spelling of “center” is also correct as well in the context of the code.



    I tend to write 'color' in code, and 'colour' in comments.

    I just like 'colour' better. 'color' is just a small step removed from the barbaric 'kolor'.
  • Fabian (unregistered) in reply to dhromed
    dhromed:

    I tend to write 'color' in code, and 'colour' in comments.

    I just like 'colour' better. 'color' is just a small step removed from the barbaric 'kolor'.


    It is also only a small step away from 'colon'.
  • (cs) in reply to Nimrand

    Speaking of unprofessional error messages, a few months ago I was trying to teach a coworker how to use CVS.  We use a CVSNT service as our repository.  She was having lots of very strange networking problems on her computer, however.  Appearantly those networking problems were preventing the connection to the repository from working as well.  Imagine my surprise when I tried to check out a module, and the reply I got from the CVSNT service was "I hate you."



    CVS is open source. If you don't like it, go into the code and change it.

    My favorite is from Screen...I had it crash on me, and the outputted error massage was: "The Dungeon Collapses. You die."
    Short, sweet, and to the point.

  • (cs) in reply to Fabian
    Anonymous:
    dhromed:

    I tend to write 'color' in code, and 'colour' in comments.

    I just like 'colour' better. 'color' is just a small step removed from the barbaric 'kolor'.


    It is also only a small step away from 'colon'.


    EXACTLY
  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:


    Support : I'm telling you, nothing changed!!! The only difference between the old version and the new version is that the old version was in COBOL, and the new one is in C!!!



    Looks like this support person knows the golden rules of porting:

    1. Porting between languages never ever introduces bugs.
    2. The first rule is always right, and to question this is death by boomstick.

  • Loren (unregistered) in reply to no name
    Anonymous:
    Speaking of unprofessional error messages, a few months ago I was trying to teach a coworker how to use CVS. We use a CVSNT service as our repository. She was having lots of very strange networking problems on her computer, however. Appearantly those networking problems were preventing the connection to the repository from working as well. Imagine my surprise when I tried to check out a module, and the reply I got from the CVSNT service was "I hate you."

    And did you imeadiatly run to your boss and demand more professional software?

    Or, did you chuckul for a second or two (possibly calling over your coworkers to chuckle too), and then get on with your work?


    I think it comes down to what the users are like.

    A fellow programmer would get a laugh out of something like this.  Some users, though...
  • Tom K (unregistered)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    The customer service at Jason Harmon's had been telling clients that the bad data coming seen in their system was a configuraiton problem, not a code problem. A client finally complained enough to get the problem pushed back to development where Jason learned that this just might be a coding problem after all ... 

    private bool IsValid() 
{
  return true;
}


    This is outcome-based verification.  Negative results may destroy the self esteem of the user.
  • Alun Jones (unregistered) in reply to -L

    Anonymous:

    From production these are of course removed, since they are unprofessional.

    I'm intrigued - what search-string do you use to find all the unprofessional comments during the pre-release build?

    I'm thinking it's likely something like "Aa*r*g*h*".

    I'm not sure that differentiating between errors by the number of as, rs, gs and hs is any more friendly and helpful than using error codes.

  • (cs) in reply to Loren
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Speaking of unprofessional error messages, a few months ago I was trying to teach a coworker how to use CVS. We use a CVSNT service as our repository. She was having lots of very strange networking problems on her computer, however. Appearantly those networking problems were preventing the connection to the repository from working as well. Imagine my surprise when I tried to check out a module, and the reply I got from the CVSNT service was "I hate you."

    And did you imeadiatly run to your boss and demand more professional software?

    Or, did you chuckul for a second or two (possibly calling over your coworkers to chuckle too), and then get on with your work?


    I would wonder what other stunts might be in the code.

    I think it comes down to what the users are like.

    A fellow programmer would get a laugh out of something like this.  Some users, though...


    Yes, they could lose clients over things like this.  There are certain expectations of professionality.  Examples have already been given of demo blow-ups with inappropriate error messages.

    The story of a mailing letter that opened with "Dear Rich Bastard:" due to some test data or code not being reset may be apocryphal, but others are not: <http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp>.

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

  • (cs) in reply to Alun Jones
    Anonymous:

    I'm intrigued - what search-string do you use to find all the unprofessional comments during the pre-release build?

    I'm thinking it's likely something like "Aa*r*g*h*".

    I'm not sure that differentiating between errors by the number of as, rs, gs and hs is any more friendly and helpful than using error codes.



    So it matches any line that contains 'A'.
  • NickSpags (unregistered)

    and immediately after reading through this WTF i notice this comment in my companies software

    // db connection
      var conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection");

    // load info
       sSql = "select... ";
      var rsOne = conn.Execute(sSql);
    // i hate writing Response. every time
      with (Response) {

    ...

    }

     

  • vDave (unregistered) in reply to mlathe
    mlathe:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Shayne Studdard chuckled at the original authors comment while porting the old ASP code into the ASP.NET ... 

    var aLeapYears = 
      new Array(1900,1904,1908,1912,1916,1920,1924,1928,1932,1936, 
        1940,1944,1948,1952,1956,1960,1964,1968,1972,1976,
        1980,1984,1988,1992,1996,2000,2004,2008,2012,2016,
        2020,2024,2028,2032,2036,2040,2044,2048,2052,2056, 
        2060) //please god let this be far enough??

    the real WTF is that 1900 is not even a leap year. dork!

    http://www.dpbsmith.com/leapyearfaq.txt



    Sadly, this was the first thing i thought of when I saw that as well.

      -dave-

  • Bugbear (unregistered) in reply to Avalanche

    Umm, I'm afraid not.

    Licence is a noun, License is a verb.  The two are not interchangeable.[:)]

  • Matt Wilson (unregistered) in reply to Paul Tomblin
    Anonymous:
    Omnifarious:

    I sort of think people get way too uptight about stuff like that. I don't really understand why a program can't say "Arrrggghh!" as long as it doesn't confuse anybody.



    How do you feel about the message "Holy Bat, Fuckman, how did we get here?", which I accidentally left in code that got to a production server?


    Heh. A couple friends of mine used to work together as in-house developers. We'll call them Mr. Pink and Mr. White.
    One day Mr. White answers the phone, on the other line is a customer. He'd been using some billing software the the company had written for this particular client, but found something slightly odd when making a transaction. Unsure how he stumbled accross it, but there before him was a nearly blank page, with three simple words: "YOU'RE A HOMO". Apparently while writing this particular page, Mr. Pink had forgotten to remove a few bits of, er, debug code. In this case, after every transaction went through, he'd left die("YOU'RE A HOMO");

    Was quite funny. Funnier still that he wasn't fired for this :)
  • ISO Snob (unregistered) in reply to Disgruntled DBA
    Disgruntled DBA:
    How many times does an error message have to be used, before it gains professional status?  Or is it governed by a certification test?
    I only use ISO accreditated error messages.
    However Arrrrgggg! (and its misspelling)  are part of ISO 094423.
  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Chris : So you're telling me that you sent out an update, but you didn't change anything. If that's the case, what's the point of the update?
    ( ... More back and forth, Support getting more and more exasperated ...)
    Support : I'm telling you, nothing changed!!! The only difference between the old version and the new version is that the old version was in COBOL, and the new one is in C!!!



    I got into an argument with my telephone company once that was almost this funny.  There was a disputed item on my phone bill, an expensive call to Uganda or some such remote place (I'm in Canada).  After much argument, the phone company rep finally admitted that, well, unlike most bills, the data on this particular one had been entered by hand.  But that couldn't possibly be the source of any errors!

  • (cs) in reply to John

    Anonymous:
    cconroy:
    <FONT size=2>He misspelled "Aaaaaarrrgghhhh".</FONT>
    He must have died while carving it.

    Perhaps he was dictating.

  • (cs) in reply to Pope

    The "Aaaargh!" error is better than one program I had to debug that simply said "Something Wrong".

    I had the (un)enviable task at one point of fixing an ASP.NET form that was supposed to retrieve some data and show it in an editable form.  However, it would always be blank with a little message in the corner saying "something else happened".  Turns out that the original developer had one try/catch block around the entire data load process, so any exception resulted in this message appearing.  And the reason it was showing up 6 months later was because somebody changed the DB schema under the mistaken impression that 1) nobody used that field anyway, 2) nobody would care and 3) unit tests are for sissies.

    olddog:
    maybe it's overloading a parent, which children naturally do.

    So you've met my kids, then?  [:)]

  • Les (unregistered) in reply to neuro

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    ummm... it has been a long time since I've coded PHP, so I am probably exposing my gross ignorance, but how does the original code ever produce anything but '09998'?

    please note that it produces 01000 through 09997 in the meantime.
    i would think that the [snip] removed non-wtf-relevant code which was processing the numbers

    Has nobody noted that the loop variable is always a 4 digit number?  A 5 character string left padded with zero's can be done with a single statement that prefixes the the loop variable with a single '0' character.

    This proposal obviously isn't a generic solution; it's completely dependent on the range being a 4 digit number.  Changing the range for the loop variable would clearly invalidate the code I proposed.  The original developer would argue that he did it to protect against future maintenance, but we all know better, and where's the fun/WTF in that?

    Ciao,

    -- Les

  • Tony the Tiger (unregistered)

    I just found this exact method in our Java app at work today:

    private bool IsValid() { return true; }

    I was too afraid to investigate it.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    oh, that "i didn't change anything" story reminds me of a similar story i read: someone called tech support, complaining that a program had stopped working. when the tech asked if he made any changes to his hardware, he said he "hadn't changed anything"...

    he had just got a COMPLETELY NEW COMPUTER, with completely different hardware, AND a different version of Windows, but he "hadn't changed anything"...idiot.

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