• (cs) in reply to Mike Dimmick

    K.I.T.T. was gay. gay as in homosexual. no, really. a gay car. :) http://www.bunchofnerds.com/2006/10/television/hasselhoff-reveals-that-kitt-was-homosexual/

  • alexp (unregistered) in reply to Juifeng

    Wish we could see a screenshot of this thing!!

  • Lzz (unregistered) in reply to alexp

    There is a screen shot on Martijn's page..

    http://blog.upscene.com/martijn/index.php?entry=entry061129-203710 

  • (cs)

    I came across something like this in an app just a couple of years ago.

    An array of 20 flashing square "LED"'s, each of which was intended to indicate the status of one of the threads in what was a critical system service. I was given the codebase for this project and told that it was "80% complete" and the PHB in charge was sure it was "just a few weeks work" to get it finished. My cody-sense had already started tingling when I heard it was a VB project and when I discovered that part of the 20% still to be done was the documentation I just knew I had a treat in store....

    Anyways, back to the flashing-lights part of thing I discovered that, of course, rather than monitoring a service, the GUI app was responsible for starting, monitoring and stopping the programs "functionality". And that the "coders" behind the system hadnt actually quite managed to get their heads around threading in VB (or that if you need to use threading then VB6 should really not be your language of choice [this was in 2003-4 btw]). And that because they couldnt multi-thread in VB they had written a seperate program to actually do the main work and the "flashing-light GUI" actually made 20 seperate directories, put a copy of the program and its support file into each directory and used shellExecute to launch it. And a significant amount of work had been devoted into allowing the flashing-lights GUI to be configured to make copies of the program onto other machines and launch and monitor those copies. Via ShellExecute. Because, you know, it was a distributed application...

  • Donald Klopper (unregistered) in reply to GrandmasterB

    Hahahahaha - yeah CodeGear is in for a beeeeg surprise ...

    No, it's OK, really.

    DON'T educate yourself.

    ALWAYS assume it's a stupid tool's fault.

    OH Yes, and the VCL will never work. It's stupid and flawed.

    -----  N O T !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    BTW great story !!! I wonder how long it'll take before someone gets hold of some of MY bad code somewhere and BLOG it. Ouch.

     

     

     

     

  • (cs)

    One of the first things the outgoing developers mentioned was that the Ultra-Dedicated Programmer designed the system to be multithreaded. For whatever reason, he was never able to figure out the source of some rather obscure multithreading errors through the system, so he devised a "work-around."  A Thread Manager was created to allow only one of the application's threads to run at a time. When a thread completed its task, it would then have to notify the Thread Manager so that the next thread in the queue could be reanimated.

    ...A cute GUI application. Really, it kind of looked like Winamp and had all sorts of greenish and reddish decorations over a black background. Every part of it was animated, with wave graphs, "LED" lights, bar charts, and all sorts of other things to indicate what the application was doing. At least, that's what everyone assumed they were for; the graphics provided no indication as to what they were measuring and none of the developers cared to look.


    The UDP was ofcourse crazy and stupid to build in this kind of nonsense in a mission-critical application.

    But what's at least just as big a WTF is that the client accepted this kind of thing - especially in an application that is critical to their business.

     

  • Goo (unregistered) in reply to Ghost Ware Wizard
    Ghost Ware Wizard:

    ARGH

    the "Ultra Dedicated Programmer" working on "His" engine was the in-house idiot/expert right? Especially since these people, self-proclaimed gurus at vapor ware, basically *look* good "His" engine worked right?  Translation: Only the "Ultra Dedicated Programmer" was the one to use it, or could use it properly.  Wtf #1 is the obvious "make it so others can't maintain it for job security" and wtf #2 is he left telling others to tweek it without actually *using* it....

     <Idiots are everywhere.  They keep following me around/>

     

    Yeh.  And I remember that one episode where there was an evil, white-colored KITT.  That was awesome!  The only problem was that the under carriage wasn't made of that same super-protective stuff that KITT had.  Man, I thought that was gonna be the last episode!

     
    They never could get "KITT.clone()" to work right; even after "tweaking" it.

     

  • ByteJuggler (unregistered) in reply to utu
    utu:

    Sean:
    Some may foolishly question why it would be a GUI instead of a service.  Well, you can't put a useless red status bar in a service now, can you?

    If you write it as a service, you can make it launch a nice GUI (since services can interact with desktop - any desktop) for each and every user that happens to log on the machine no matter if they want it or not - plus make it nearly impossible to get rid of. And you can have a uniquely useless red flashy status bar in that GUI if you so wish :)

     

    Yeah... not only that, but Borland actually gives you an example in the form of the SocketServer source... 

  • Paul Winkler (unregistered) in reply to Bitter Like Quinine

     We had one manager who could just never walk past the main control room without 'tweaking' something. So we made up a control screen with meters, sliders and indicators that could be attached to a (real life) knob...

     Heh. In the audio engineering world, there' s a company that sells some nice-looking but totally useless rack-mounted gadgets for just that purpose.   Sadly the Algorhythmic Prosecutor and the Digilog Dynamicator were both discontinued, but my favorite is still available,  the Palindrometer:

     http://www.funklogic.com/palindrometer.htm

     

    captcha: TPS

    I, I don't care if they, if they lay me off either, because I, I told 
    Bill that if he moves my desk one more time, then, then I'm quitting. 
    I'm going to quit. And I told Dom too because they've moved my desk 
    four times. I used to be by the window, where I could see the squirrels 
    and they were merry. But then they switched from the Swingline to the 
    Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline. They have my staples for the Boston 
    and I kept the staples from the Swingline stapler ...
    And if, if they take my stapler, I will, I will set this building on 
    fire.

     

  • (cs) in reply to Paul Winkler
    Anonymous:

    captcha: TPS

    I, I don't care if they, if they lay me off either, because I, I told 
    Bill that if he moves my desk one more time, then, then I'm quitting. 
    I'm going to quit. And I told Dom too because they've moved my desk 
    four times. I used to be by the window, where I could see the squirrels 
    and they were merry. But then they switched from the Swingline to the 
    Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline. They have my staples for the Boston 
    and I kept the staples from the Swingline stapler ...
    And if, if they take my stapler, I will, I will set this building on 
    fire.

     Excellent!

  • Alan C (unregistered) in reply to Corporate Cog

    You are the first person I have ever heard say they don't like working with Delphi, other than the Delphi 8 and 2005 abortions: I suggest you find another day job because it's the Rolls Royce of IDEs and you won't find a more productive one.

  • Bill P. (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    I thought the usual rule of thumb is that a company pays the employee in benefits approximately 30% more. The taxes part works in the benefit of the contractor, as long as he/she is incorporated. 

  • Joon (unregistered) in reply to ElSicilianoMaldito

    Ahem....

     Try writing a .NET web service in Delpi 2005, and then debugging it while it is in use from an ASP.NET application.

     Then explain the random lockups, freezes, blue screens of death, plagues of rats etc. that occur when trying to perform this (should be, at least) relatively standard task. EEK!!!!

     I left Delphi behind 18 months ago for C#, and I must say that Visual Studio .NET easily beats any Delphi IDE (and I have used 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2005) for stability and ease of use.

    Regards,

    Joon

  • Homer (unregistered)

    On a daily basis, I continue to be astounded by the "brilliance" displayed in our industry.  No wonder IT gets such a bad rap with dumbasses like the "Ultra.." whatever he thought he was running around....

  • Corporate Cog (unregistered) in reply to Alan C
    Anonymous:

    You are the first person I have ever heard say they don't like working with Delphi, other than the Delphi 8 and 2005 abortions: I suggest you find another day job because it's the Rolls Royce of IDEs and you won't find a more productive one.

    Apparently you're in the minority.  Some on this forum seem to indicate that the birth of "CodeGear" is a good indicator.  Hello?  Borland dumped Delphi.  That's not a good indicator.

    It's also interesting that people seem to think I'm an idiot for thinking that it's a bad thing when things don't work as they should.  My experience was an exemplar of my history of usage with Delphi 5-9.  BDS 2006 is much, much better, but if you're going to develop in .Net there is absolutely no reason to favor BDS over Visual Studio.

    If you're stuck with Win32, fine; continue using Delphi.
     

  • Henrick (unregistered) in reply to Corporate Cog
    Anonymous:

    Some on this forum seem to indicate that the birth of "CodeGear" is a good indicator.  Hello?  Borland dumped Delphi.  That's not a good indicator.

     Did they? You mean, like Ericsson "dumped" their mobile phone products into Sony Ericsson?
     

     

    Anonymous:

    If you're stuck with Win32, fine; continue using Delphi.

    Stuck? I can see how that would be a problem if you are coding in VC++ and have to write all WinAPI calls by linking in header files. The beuty of Delphi is however that you already have the VCL that wraps all that up in components. Using .NET is much less of an advantage compared to if you were coding in VB or VC++. Most Delphi developers I talk to don't move to .NET because they don't want to be "stuck" on Win32, but to the contrary because their clients stick them to .NET and they are forced to move whether they like it or not. As a consequence they get to produce apps that are a lot slower and consume a lot more memory, and probably contain a lot more bugs because the framework is closed source and the help system is much slower than navigating the library code would have been for a real programmer.

  • lemming (unregistered) in reply to MrData
    MrData:

    This further supports my theory that All People, not just Germans, love David Hasselhoff (and KITT).

     None like David Hasselhoff but David Hasselhoff.

  • david (unregistered)

    Read Primo Levi's 'The Periodic Table' - he used to work as a paint chemist. Met years later someone who was doing his old job and pulling his hair out trying to source a replacement for an esssential ingredient to one of their products. They didn't actually know what it did, but didn't dare experiment. Turns out Primo had added purely to get rid of large pile of cans of surplus chemical as it was cheaper than disposing of it.

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