• Your Name * (unregistered) in reply to Mathew
    Mathew:
    The compelling reason is the link being external. This is absolutly basic ui stuff. You never want to open an external link in the same window, so it does in no way matter, whether your browser could do that. By default opening it in a new tab, you save the user one extra click. Arguing otherwise is ridiculous.

    It's time for you to get a mouse with a middle button - no more extra clicks. It shouldn't be up to website to decide how I want my links to open.

  • geoffrey (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    geoffrey:
    YF:
    Yeah, this is a real WTF.

    And likewise... WHY the FUCK people code things like that? It's made to blow up sooner or later, with major rework, lots of frustration and endless hate.

    Everytime I see aberrations like this I think of 'Hostel' movie, Chinese torture techniques... that sort of pleasant thing.

    Captcha: praesent... a greek one, it is!

    You can't know what kind of constraints the programmer has, so it is unfair to judge. Who knows, it could have been a requirement defined by his manager. I know I have put similar constraints on my team before, for no other reason than to see how creative they can be in solving a problem.

    As a management style, no doubt yours works in the academic sphere, where the projects being generated are not being paid for by an impatient customer, and difficult problems are generated artificially as training exercises. However, in the real world of commercial realities, I'm afraid your approach may result in your business losing any competitive edge it may ever have had.

    You could not be more wrong. I am a seasoned professional with over a decade of work in top-tier enterprises.

  • Mathew (unregistered) in reply to Your Name *
    Your Name *:
    Mathew:
    The compelling reason is the link being external. This is absolutly basic ui stuff. You never want to open an external link in the same window, so it does in no way matter, whether your browser could do that. By default opening it in a new tab, you save the user one extra click. Arguing otherwise is ridiculous.

    It's time for you to get a mouse with a middle button - no more extra clicks. It shouldn't be up to website to decide how I want my links to open.

    A Mouse with 3 with a middle button is a wtf in itself.

    This is a clear thing: By opening an external site in a new tab, in average you'll save time for your visitor (which btw you should value instead of raping!).

    Please stop denying reality and do some basic math and common sense thinking.

  • Mathew (unregistered) in reply to Mathew

    except when you mean a wheel as a middle button. pressing that will still be slower than normal click. it's really easy.

  • (cs)

    What a cool idea! I'm putting a doomsday clock in all my applications.

  • Lerch98 (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey

    Geoffery must work for a company that doesn't need to make a profit and get real work done, since he has the time to play games and in the last decade hasn't had a deadline. QJo is right, you must work in academia or some place where they got all the time in the world. Maybe the G'Man would like to come work here for a day and he will soon realize that we have enough problems and challenges and realize the fool that he is. Get to work, or we'll farm your job out to Negeesh. He'll Get-r-done.

    captcha secundum I'll second dumb.

  • RC (unregistered)

    Why's everyone so excited about the concept of a doomsday clock? I put those together all the time. In such situations I do, however, also put together a script as well for continuous snmp/nagios monitoring, so everyone that needs to, will know a problem is approaching.

    Plus, WTH isn't that SQL in a crontab somewhere, set to run every night or so? If your app doesn't clean-up, you gotta automate it somehow.

  • 2 minutes to midnight (unregistered) in reply to RC
    RC:
    Why's everyone so excited about the concept of a doomsday clock? I put those together all the time. In such situations I do, however, also put together a script as well for continuous snmp/nagios monitoring, so everyone that needs to, will know a problem is approaching.

    Probably because most people consider the necessity of a doomsday clock an unacceptable solution to a problem? I mean, there's a conceptual difference between unsupported edge cases and guaranteed to fail eventually through normal use.

    RC:
    Plus, WTH isn't that SQL in a crontab somewhere, set to run every night or so? If your app doesn't clean-up, you gotta automate it somehow.
  • JJ (unregistered)

    Wow. geoffrey is seriously reeling in the bites in this article.

    PROTIP: He's a troll, and you're feeding him.

  • Ken B. (unregistered)
    Daryl checked the doomsday clock. Apparently there had been a little up-tick in business. They were already at 27,000 orders, and it looked like they'd hit 30,000 by next quarter.
    The solution is simple...

    Daryl: "Bob, can you take a look at this for a few minutes?" Bob: "No problem."

    ... 2 months pass ...

    Client: "Daryl, we're out of numbers again!" Daryl: "Sorry, Bob touched it last."

  • Hater (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Oh fuck off, course it's fucking well not! (blows kisses)

    You're so gay. Anyway I always said that Mark Westwood blows.

  • Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune (unregistered)

    OMG this happened to me! I am Daryl!

    The client's old e-commerce system went down because it was "designed" to handle up to 99999 orders... as it turns out, about 5 years of business.

  • Dr Doom (unregistered) in reply to Spivonious

    me too. I occasionally put easter eggs in my apps like winforms tetris or a minesweeper clone built with jquery, but that's the old me from now on. doomsday clocks in applications are by far the best thing I've ever heard of in my 11+ years as a developer.

    you'll know it's my app if you type "SHTF" and a doomsday clock pops up.

  • Catprog (unregistered) in reply to Alex
    Alex:
    Okay, please explain a newbie why the hell couldn't he just change the sql to: DELETE FROM tbl14a_fx004B WHERE id >= 50000

    You know, untill they fix the application (Yeah, right)

    because >30,000 is scratch space that the program uses for it's own purpose and not for orders.

  • Don L (unregistered)

    To all you "experts" who suggest to fix the problem by modifying the clearnup script to e.g.

    DELETE FROM tbl14a_fx004B WHERE id >= 50000

    or

    DELETE FROM tbl14a_fx004B WHERE id >= 40000;

    Do you know what you're talking about? Cuz you surely belong in a place I call "somewhere-to-put-wannabe-developers-who-are-also-smartasses-and-think-they-know-everything-but-who-really-puts-our-services-in-jeopardy".

    Who knows if the code contains any of these magic numbers? Such as 

    SELECT * FROM tbl14a_fx004B WHERE id<30000 and ID>199
    or

    UPDATE tbl14a_fx004B SET blabla WHERE id<30000 and ID>199

    How about other code than the main application? Other scripts? Compiled applications? Maintenance jobs?

    No, I don't think the original developer did a great job in making this app, but your suggestions are outright stupid and would probably break more than it would fix.

    This problem doesn't have a quick fix. Nope. And if you try anyway you risk breaking everything. Perhaps except creating new tables and moving existing rows as suggested by a guy (provided that the code would support this).

    Aside of that, surely, I LOVE the doomsday clock thingie :-)

  • anonymous_bystander (unregistered) in reply to geoffrey
    geoffrey:
    You could not be more wrong. I am a seasoned professional with over a decade of work in top-tier enterprises.
    You're William Shatner ?
  • Arioch (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Opening links in a new tab, as a default behavior, is abad choice.

    Every browser has a simple and easy way to force a link to open in a new tab. No browser has a simple and easy way to force a link to open in the current tab.

    Opera has.

  • Chase (unregistered)

    Fixing this would be very annoying.

    By fixing I of course mean 'keeping it hobbling along without greatly modifying the system'.

    All of these are very likely PITAs.

    -- Level 1 Maintain- Increase order number count wherever the application lives, this leaves less scratch space, so update the FIX script.

    -- Level 2 Maintain- Make a new table to be the scratch space. All other can just be order numbers. Hopefully will last until your no longer around.

    -- Level 3 Maintain- Damn, run out of employee area or product codes.

    Best solution would be to give each of them their own tables, but should that prove impossible.

    Shuffle things around and give those more room to grow.

  • Knows Daryl (unregistered)

    So let me start this off by saying I'm NOT Daryl, but I know him very well and worked with him on this hell-hole of a nightmare. A couple answers to some common comments I've seen thus far:

    • The original developer wasn't an idiot, or at least, the original application owner wasn't. This is a customized 3rd party system, and the out of the box "features" have the stupid, rigid customer/product/order/swap structure. There's certainly fault, but it's on the vendor's part more so than anything.

    • It's in fact an oracle backend

    • Daryl is still here (so am I), and there's still no support. In fact, Daryl isn't even at the physical site that is having this problem. Good times. And of course, there's no known plan to add any support in the future.

    • They're supposed to be upgrading the system in 2015...we'll just have to hope they don't get too many more orders :)

  • jeremiahfelt (unregistered) in reply to Jazz

    You are absolutely correct. /author

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