• iMalc (unregistered)

    Perhaps the report writers just didn't want all their effort making a fantastic report to go to waste, having people simply look at nothing but the dot. Us coders can be too proud sometimes.

  • someone (unregistered)

    Because */images/mood/ green.JPG yellow.JPG red.JPG

    Is SO complex and difficult? That explanation of why implementing it is such a bunch of nonsense.

  • (cs)

    There's about ten tons of stupid in this thread.

    All the stuff about problems with displaying the moods was a LIE, you PHB-grade morons.

  • (cs) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    Oh really? So how do you explain the fact that the comments currently only have white images on a white background?
    Thank you, Creed.
  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Block Progress:
    C. F. Martin:
    Where I work, we would spend three or four days discussing why green should be the "good" mood. Legal would be brought in. We'd need to justify it to communications. Many would have interesting points on various shades of green. Naturally, the process would be repeated for yellow and red.
    Don't forget to be culturally sensitive! Some people may be offended by yellow. Green could be a political statement. Better run it by HR. Although "run" is not really the operative term there.

    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    I'm pretty sure the triangle is green on my controller.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts

  • (cs) in reply to Khazwossname
    Khazwossname:
    my name is missing:
    I think this site needs to add negro images to every comment.

    Racist.

    FTFY

    Re: UNCF

  • (cs) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    Put me in the column of folks who don't get it.

    I'm not a databaser so I'm probably way out of my depth here and will take my insults off the air, thanks, but it strikes me that in the previous system there was some metric used to determine the "goodness" of the report -- that apparently already worked. So how difficult would it be to transfer/port that calculation to the new system and flag the report with whatever icon, background color, bell, or whistle that the user wanted.

    What am I missing? I assume it's something obvious, so be gentle.

    From the TODO comment I extrapolate that:

    Some database re engineering needed done to integrate with the new release. When it came time to access the mood procedure, the developer decided to simply add a TODO for at the time, probably because the re engineering that had been done so far didn't include the mood functionality.

    Because the TODO says to do the schema refactoring before the schema grows too large to do it easily, that means if the developer would have just done the refactoring right there it wouldn't have been too bad to implement.

    Time goes by and the schema gets updated/modified/new tables/new rows, all without consideration for the mood feature.

    So the real reason the mood feature didn't get added in is because they completely forgot about it during the new release development, and to add it in now would require going back through and redeveloping the release.

    Then when the customer inquires about why one of their features are gone, rather than just saying, "Oh... we forgot about that," they make up some big long stupid story.

  • (cs) in reply to tuna
    tuna:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!
    [image]

    i'm colorblind, fyi.

    It reads, "Obama in '08".

    HTH

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to BlueKnot
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?
    Haptic feedback. Soft and fluffy for green, cool and hard for yellow, sharp and spikey for red.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Walleye:
    Quango:
    I don't get this one..

    "..an extreme challenge to manage the thousands of icon files.."

    There are only three: red, yellow, green. Why create them dynamically? Just reference static ones?

    Or did IBQ just not want to do the work?

    But it's a WEB site. That means that you might have thousands of users at a time, so you need thousands of icon files. Maybe millions.

    Not if you have a good backup solution. Every time someone downloads the file you can just restore from backups. It saves the graphic artists people from redrawing all day.

    LOL...seriously, you ever notice on Star Trek that whenever they open a file or a program if they get attacked or something they are in jeprody of loosing it. Apparently when the computers of the future open a file they will not leave a copy on disk.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to the amazing null
    the amazing null:
    it seems all of that BS could be shortened to: 1.generate report 2.determine colored dot to use 3.add dot

    you know, assuming that they could just reuse already generated dots in one of three colors that were already on the drive.

    this kind of reminds me of those star trek voyager episodes when the evil group of aliens [read: people with model parts and foamcore glued to their eyes, foreheads or chests] 'download' something from the ship and suddenly, the ship does not work because, evidently, this team designed the copy/paste integration software for the ship.

    YES!!!!.... That's exactly what I am saying!!!

  • green-rage (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    naaaah..

    You also missed some critical steps:

    1. Process the report from the database
    2. Render the icon in memory
    3. Save the image to the server's hard drive
    4. Print out image
    5. Put image on wooden table
    6. Photograph image
    7. Scan image back into server
    8. Render that image within the web page
    9. Do all of this on the web site without conflicting with other alerts or users within the file system web site
    10. ???
    11. PROFIT!!
  • ohgodpleaseletthissubjectwork (unregistered) in reply to a

    I guess the more entrenched people were older ... and used to the "not in the mood" excuses. Doesn't take long for a grown man to learn these and apply them at work, y'know!

    Wooo! I've got the entire alphabet in random order as a captcha!

  • Moitah (unregistered) in reply to DaveAronson
    DaveAronson:
    TODO: make a comment on this WTF before it becomes a royal pain to read existing comments

    Nice one ;-)

  • psb (unregistered) in reply to Moitah

    At least this page hasn't been redirect to Google ... or worse ... yet.

    WTF is a suscipere?

  • rosko (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    The database addition would have allowed them to store a mood and only have 3 images that could be referred to by mood, for instance "Mood_Green.jpg" rather than by the name of one of thousands of reports.
    Tarwn:
    Surely "Mood_Green.gif" or "Mood_Green.png". It's only a dot!
    Except to make each result unique, they would need to add in a unique identifier for the report run. Brazzy identified the issue earlier:
    brazzy:
    You already have each of the 3 states in 2 places (icons and a happy/ok/bad enum). In a sufficiently enterprisey system, they would also have to be integrated into a dozen other layers (database schema, DAOs, DTOs, business objects, CORBA stubs, etc. pp.).
    Thus, a green, red or yellow dot image would need to be copied from template to the target image for the report, say, report_status_1956756985643.png, thus incurring the overhead of managing thousands of icon files and risking file system corruption (probably FAT/VFAT on a Windows NT 3.51 server)

    I mean, it's obvious that was the only solution left, wasn't it?

    (Unless you count adding a single "getReportStatus()" function to the various layers)

  • BOB (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    alt text?

    OK!
  • more randomer than you (unregistered)

    No-one seems to have picked up on the fact that this was a GUI update, hence it is not completely out of the question that database changes were in fact "out of scope" which could indeed make it impractical to implement the 'mood'

    Perhaps the comment was left in the stored proc as a reminder so that when db changes did become in scope they could get around to doing it properly.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Chris:
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?
    Haptic feedback. Soft and fluffy for green, cool and hard for yellow, sharp and spikey for red.
    Your user, Lyle, is dead. Now what?

  • Casey (unregistered)

    I bet it would have been simple if they asked for TEXT to change color instead of a graphic image.

  • Paper Form Fan (unregistered) in reply to mxsscott
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    But if a blind person reads the report, he sees neither shape nor color...

  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.
    Shapist! Why is being fat good, and skinny bad? (And how about wearing a skirt? Not many think it's ok when I wear a skirt to work.)
  • Vermis (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    I give him an empty picture frame to use as a monitor, and make everybody promise not to tell!

  • Simon (unregistered)

    Maybe I am missing something obvious? But why didn't they just code the icons into text and store in the DB?

    For example: http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data

  • minini (unregistered) in reply to a

    generating images? wtf? so they are just too dumb to have three images on their webserver and write into their reports which one is being used?

  • dkf (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!
    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.
    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?
    They're not colourblind.
    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?
    He's also dead, and so doesn't need a status report.
  • Rabiator (unregistered) in reply to Dale E
    Dale E:
    I've seen many applications where if you can't add a column to the database, just attach the data to the primary key:

    Report_ID

    1.Red 2.Red 3.Green 4.Red 5.Yellow

    Make sure you put it AFTER the ID, to confound anyone who wants to sort on mood. But why would anyone want to do that?

    A great new WTF ;-)

    Now the primary key will change when the mood of the report changes. Every routine/application that wants to retrieve the report by ID needs to be updated to handle this.

    Anyone who suggests such a "solution" should better have a damn good reason why an additional column in the database table is not possible.

  • Readthis (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    There's about ten tons of stupid in this thread.

    All the stuff about problems with displaying the moods was a LIE, you PHB-grade morons.

    People, read this comment above :)

    Here is what happened:

    manager says: "We want the dot". dev thinks: "oh crap, the dot... forgot about that one" dev says: "unfortunately the dot is a lot of work because of the image processing (manager hears: white noise) scaling load balancing file system corrupt bad millions millions...(manager thinks: woosh), wouldn't you agree?" manager says: "Ah yes of course, that makes sense, good work" manager thinks: "face saved - score!"

    Later on manager takes a look at the devs notes and realizes that he has been had. manager thinks: "wtf!?"

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Eternal Density
    Eternal Density:
    Anon:
    Chris:
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?
    Haptic feedback. Soft and fluffy for green, cool and hard for yellow, sharp and spikey for red.
    Your user, Lyle, is dead. Now what?

    Ouija board!

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    Win! I Lol'ed.

  • Brady Kelly (proudly in Jo'burg) (unregistered) in reply to John Hensley
    John Hensley:
    TRWTF is the phrase "custom web browser."

    Why? I've written a custom web browser.

  • Drew (unregistered)

    TRWTF is the custom web browser

  • ALK-NBT Rearrangment (unregistered) in reply to Brady Kelly (proudly in Jo'burg)

    I have written systems like this (balanced scorecard/dashboard/etc...) and sometimes it's easy (e.g. fixed red/green/blue that you can set in a DB field) and sometimes it's more difficult(e.g. allowing the user to define variables representing data from various feeds, easily manipulate it, and define feed-specific criteria for dynamically determining if red/green/blue). Depending on how the business/software groups work together, I could see push back on getting this "in the door" if it was never formally agreed on and if project scope has a tendency to explode.

    Just my $0.02 worth...

    ALTL

  • verto (unregistered) in reply to DaveAronson
    DaveAronson:
    TODO: make a comment on this WTF before it becomes a royal pain to read existing comments

    To late by the time you posted this it was an Epic Fail.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    IF they're too stupid to tell shapes apart, they're probably not working there. Say what you will about middle management, they can all at least dress themselves.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Ibn al-Hazardous
    Ibn al-Hazardous:
    Franz Kafka:
    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.
    Shapist! Why is being fat good, and skinny bad? (And how about wearing a skirt? Not many think it's ok when I wear a skirt to work.)

    I know: Green cross, yellow star, pink triangle (inverted). That way, we can start some serious shit when the lawyers get involved.

  • xtremezone (unregistered)

    My understanding is that the developers didn't want to implement the feature. I think the schema was the least of their worries... Implementing the frontend would have been much more troublesome then the backend, IMO. I'm not even really sure how you're supposed to know what "mood" a report is in... Maybe this is because of my hatred for paper though.

    Jake Vinson:
    The reports were supposed to call out when there was something that required attention. For instance, if someone set up a virus on the computers to bleed out money (like in Superman III), it wouldn't be noticed by the report so this is a terrible example.
    Nice. ;D
  • ping floyd (unregistered) in reply to DaveAronson
    DaveAronson:
    TODO: make a comment on this WTF before it becomes a royal pain to read existing comments
    Rats! Too late!
  • (cs) in reply to Eternal Density
    Eternal Density:
    Anon:
    Chris:
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?
    Haptic feedback. Soft and fluffy for green, cool and hard for yellow, sharp and spikey for red.
    Your user, Lyle, is dead. Now what?

    Well, that would explain why he cannot see or hear...

  • spelling nazi (unregistered) in reply to xtremezone
    xtremezone:
    My understanding is that the developers didn't want to implement the feature. I think the schema was the least of their worries.

    Except for the code comment posted at the end where they say "let's do this before the schema [backend] gets too hard to change".

    Which, from what I can tell, was the funny part. Not that anybody got it. OK, three people got it.

    Out of the rest:

    • 49% Don't know what a schema is and made wooshing sounds with their comments
    • 51% Are trying to force memes that even 4chan wouldn't touch.

    I'd do a pie chart but I'm afraid someone would photograph it on a wooden table in an attempt at humor.

    </cbg>
  • JIm Jones (unregistered)

    OMFG dude, I love Windows 95. I still use Windows 95 to this day. Best OS ever released!

    RD www.FireMe.to/udi

  • (cs)

    ...so there are only three icons: #1: :-) [green] #2: :-| [yellow] #3: :-( [red]

    So what's with all the dynamic image generation?!?!? Why can't they just put three image icons on the server and reference the right one?

  • /Arthur (unregistered)

    This normal practise at IBQ The next version will not be a update but a upgrade; read $$$

    This version will have moving avatars on every report.

  • Flagger (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Chris:
    BlueKnot:
    Anon:
    mxsscott:
    Anon:
    Franz Kafka:
    Anon:
    Don't forget the colorblind!

    Green circle, Yellw Triangle, Red X.

    Ah...But you forgot about the shape blind! Now what?

    They're not colourblind.

    Not so! I assert that Ray Charles was both color and shape blind. Ha! Now what would you do?

    ALT attribute for the screen reader? Maybe even a TITLE attribute for good measure? How about an audio indicator: Green = crickets, yellow = heart monitor beeps, red = air horn blasts
    Your user is both blind and deaf. Now what?
    Haptic feedback. Soft and fluffy for green, cool and hard for yellow, sharp and spikey for red.
    how do you teach him about that?

  • Bubbles (unregistered) in reply to cf18

    Lol, I was thinking the color coded words as well, why mess with images at all?

  • return of the spelling nazi (unregistered) in reply to Jeff Grigg
    Jeff Grigg:
    ...so there are only three icons: #1: :-) [green] #2: :-| [yellow] #3: :-( [red]

    So what's with all the dynamic image generation?!?!? Why can't they just put three image icons on the server and reference the right one?

    Everyone wondering what's so hard about loading an image, please read below.

    The stuff about loading images was a red herring that worked on the management. In reality, the database had progressed to a point where it would have taken more work to add a place to store the 'mood' than they were willing to do. The WTF in this case was that one of the coders realized this early on, and left a TODO for himself noting that they should add this to the database before it becomes unwieldy.

    There is an extra bit of irony in the fact that many of you were raked in by the "dynamic image" like the company's management was.

    I will admit that I had to re-read the last half of the story to get it. Now get the hell off my lawn.

  • return of the spelling nazi (unregistered) in reply to return of the spelling nazi
    return of the spelling nazi:
    Now get the hell off my lawn.

    Forgot to add: the real WTF may very well be that these guys are either unwilling or incapable of implementing a feature that the customer asked for. But we can take two morals from this:

    1. Things that seem easy to an outsider are not always easy in fact. And everything seems easy to your boss.

    2. They sufficiently bs'ed their way out of doing their job. Proving once again that if you have the right combination of smarts and laziness, the world is your oyster.

  • (cs)

    I kinda like the idea of bombing management with technobabble if you don't want to implement a feature. Makes things so easy...

    Adding a 'print report' button? Are you nuts? We'd need to serialize the whole XML stream into design patterns for that. If we managed to extract the algoritm at all, we'd still have to establish a stable feedback loop to feed the entity code into before our data service overloads. And you don't even want to think about what happened if the interface hub calibration were misconfigured...

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