The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2007-04-26 Reply Admin

At Buenos Aires, Argentina, Federal Office Dept., they have the same system for passports request. Maybe the same software? :-/

2007-04-26 Reply Admin

CRITICAL_SECTION cs;
EnterCriticalSection(&cs);
/* existing code here */
LeaveCriticalSection(&cs);

That's brilliant! I can just put EnterCriticalSection as the first line and LeaveCriticalSection as the last line of main() and never have concurrency problems anywhere in my program again!

2007-04-27 Reply Admin

James:
As for whether or not RAII is a good idea -- if it's not in Stroustrup's book, it's a trick. This does *not* mean you can't use it, or that using it is a WTF, but it does merit at least a few words of comment.

Actually it is in appendix E of the special addition, and Stroustrup cites the technique as a reason that C++ doesn't need the finally keyword: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#finally

2007-04-28 Reply Admin

Despite the questionable use of the Critical Section variable, there is a bigger problem.

(I'm speaking Windows-Speak here - *nix people will recognize the words, it will sound gobbledygook as the non-Windows world uses different definitions).

A critical section only protects you from a collision with another thread in the same process.

We don't know enough about the architecture of the system, but it is probably multi-process.

A Mutex will work for multiple processes on a single system, while something more complex is required if the display is a network resource.

Ideally, a server would receive messages from various clients and queue them for the display device. This does not appear to be happening, given the current failure mode.

Race and Government

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