The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2007-12-06 Reply Admin

I had a similar problem while working with the IT staff of a very, very large company. You see their ads in every phone book in the country. They were sending us XML files in which some of their values were including large numbers of space characters between words. I sent the XML back to them and explained the error. He said the error was on our side because when he views it in IE, there are no extra spaces. IE collapses whitespace.

2007-12-28 Reply Admin

Hey,

looks like a lot of people enjoy making fun of less intelligent people. Why? Do you really think you're so much smarter? Do you think you're so intelligent that it is ok to call someone retarded, or moron, or idiot?

We all have bad days and can do something really stupid.

90% of all people believe that 90% of all people are idiots - and they might be right.

2013-01-28 Reply Admin

Rick's system was supposed to talk to his vendor's system using XML files, but their files were coming back with invalid XML data. Rick complained to a technical contact ("Terry") that the XML they returned was invalid. Terry argued that they were processing the file wrong.
The issue that Rick discovered was that one of the attribute values in the XML file used single quotes instead of double quotes.

Patrick:
I had a similar problem while working with the IT staff of a very, very large company. You see their ads in every phone book in the country. They were sending us XML files in which some of their values were including large numbers of space characters between words. I sent the XML back to them and explained the error. He said the error was on our side because when he views it in IE, there are no extra spaces. IE collapses whitespace.

Rick: please let me know when you will be available to meet and discuss replacing the bit sequence '00100010' with '00100111' in the XML files, budgetary requirements to replace the two instances of '0' with '1' in each occurrence of the sequence, cost of acquiring additional '1' bits, and the proper method of disposing of the garbage '0' bits. Hard drives will need to be purchased and filled with '1's, which will be read in sequence as needed and replaced with discarded '0's. Once depleted, the hard drives will need to be wiped according to DOD 5220.22-M and then physically shredded or reduced to slag with thermite to ensure that no leakage of sensitive data will occur. However, we feel that this is entirely unnecessary since both IE and XMLSpy correctly parse the file, and the problem you encounter when opening it up in Notepad is found somewhere between your PC monitor and your chair.

Patrick: we apologize for the undue strain in processing files with extra space characters. Our programmer had some extra '1's and '0's that he needed to dispose of, and management balked at the method outlined above, claiming they didn't have budget for that, so he encrypted them and then re-formed the bits into '00100000' sequences which he inserted into your XML. As multiple space characters are allowed by the XML spec, we have technically held up our end of the contract; the problem is on your end. Since you prefer the way that IE renders the code, we suggest opening the files in IE and copy-pasting them back into a text editor such as Notepad, then manually go through and remove the '-' characters from the beginnings of lines.

tl;dr: Your next contract will include an extra "1D-10T fee".

Notepad Translation Error

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