The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-02-11 Reply Admin

Alright, now even I am thinking TDWTF is going downhill. This is clearly just a placeholder, that never got implemented. Forgetting to implement something before using the code in production is crap, but it's no WTF.

2010-02-11 Reply Admin

Annoyedymous:
Alright, now even I am thinking TDWTF is going downhill. This is clearly just a placeholder, that never got implemented. Forgetting to implement something before using the code in production is crap, but it's no WTF.

Yes, whole article in fact.

2010-02-11 Reply Admin

mernen:
Actually, the "really random" method is called "real_getRandomName".

Clearly this function is not the real random name function, though. "Mary" is an integer name. (In Fortran.)

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

It's random alright, but drawn from a very specific distribution.

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

Someone too lazy to login and at work:
In theory, anywhere you want. Erich Remarque's middle name was Maria.

There's also an Austrian actor called Klaus Maria Brandauer. (An aeon ago, he played the villain Largo in Never Say Never Again.)

Confusingly, 'Mario' is a male name in German, but 'Marion' is female.

"Surely you can't be serious." "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

Annoyedymous:
This is clearly just a placeholder, that never got implemented.

I disagree. I can't imagine any situation where you'd actually need a random name. I think rather than being a placeholder that never got implemented, it was a debugging function to be used in place of, say, a call to a (not yet existing) database during development. It should have been removed, but wasn't.

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

EvanED:
NSCoder:
It should return "Slartybartfast". Now that's a random name.
How big of a geek am I for immediately recognizing that the correct spelling of that is Slartibartfast?

As big as I am, at least. Thanks for taking that one for the team.

PS -- I don't usually play the captcha game -- but "ingenium" is going to be worked into my next conversation with my CIO. "What's wrong with the server?" "It's low on ingenium"

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

Quite Contrary, the name returned by the function is as random as it can be. The original coder probably chose it at random. :))

Mithfindel · 2010-02-12 Reply Admin

"I have no idea who put this in"

This is why "svn blame" has been invented.

2010-02-12 Reply Admin

bool DoesSheHaveALittleLamb(const string &name) { if (name == "Mary") return true; return false; }

2010-02-13 Reply Admin

sino:
RogerWilco:
anon:
anon:
thosrtanner:
Yalpe Nismou:
So Mary is a boy's name where ?

It's not an uncommon boy's name in Eire (Republic of Ireland)

No it isnt.

Or i should clarify that it hasnt been used as a boys name for 40 years and even then it was only ever used as a middle name.
Someone else also said that using Maria as a middle name is quite common in some countries but didn't seem to know why: It has to do with Roman-Catholicism, it's even called the "religious initial" in some parts of the USA. Why this happens in this religion is unknown to me.
Really?

[image]

Yes, she does look a bit like a man.

2010-02-14 Reply Admin

I feel compelled to complete this code:

   public static function getRandomName($gender)
   {
     if ($gender == “male”)
         return (“Mary” + ”♂”);
     if ($gender == “female”)
         return (“Mary” + ”♀”);
     return (“Mary” + ”?”);
   }

2010-02-14 Reply Admin

Dana:
Don't forget "Dana"

There is no Dana, only ZUUL!!!

2010-02-14 Reply Admin

public static function getRandomName($gender) { t$ = (strtolower(substr($gender, 1)) == "m") ? "t" : ""; return "Mar.$t.y"; }

2010-02-15 Reply Admin

SCB:
Steve the Cynic:
TarquinWJ:
TRWTF is that just under half of the places where it is called use "true" as the param, just under half use "false" as the param, and the remainder use FILE_NOT_FOUND. There, that should dust it off nicely.
gender == true presumably would apply to the entire population, even those who are confused about what the gender actually is. We all *have* a gender, right?
(Well, pedantically speaking, no, we don't. Gender is a concept in grammar, so "Gender Studies" is a narrow subfield of linguistics.)

As the saying goes: Words have gender, people have sex.

Well, not every one does, especially on this forum...

2010-02-15 Reply Admin

Steve the Cynic:
C'mon guys, is nobody (aside from me, that is) going to mention Marion Morrison in the quest for confused names?
And never mind the problems my father had owing to the USian tendency to assume that Robin is a girl's name...

Batman's son is called Robin and BTW Maria is a more or less common middle name for men

2010-02-18 Reply Admin

Mason Wheeler:
Smitty:
Anon:
> Hit geek with sword

You fight like a dairy farmer.

How appropriate! You fight like a cow!

Damn somebody beat me to it

2010-02-18 Reply Admin

The method could at least return "Chris" so as to be correct for either gender.

2010-02-18 Reply Admin

Reminds me of some animated series:

"3, 3, 3, ..."

"Are these really random?"

"That's the problem. You never know".

2010-02-19 Reply Admin

Helper Method:
Reminds me of some animated series:
"3, 3, 3, ..."

"Are these really random?"

"That's the problem. You never know".

That was a Dilbert cartoon and it was pasted into the first page of the comments. If you're not going to bother reading the comments then don't bother contributing to them.

2010-02-24 Reply Admin

That name was randomly generated. Just where does the function name say that it will be randomly generated every time?

Desolator · 2010-03-03 Reply Admin

I think the function name should be getDefaultName instead of getRandomName

Quite Contrary

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