The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

SR:
Reminds me of merging a couple of batch files long, long ago. The new process took 10 - 20 minutes depending on the size of the data sets. Easily time for a quick ciggie. I'd often see the boss in there: "smoking again SR?" she'd ask - "my PC's hard at it" I'd reply.
I'm glad the place closed down before we'd migrated off DOS 6.1 and onto that horroble multitasking Windows.

Svillen? Is that you?

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

aleph:
Hugh Brown:
So this code just returns the length of the file? You don't have to read any bytes of the file to know the file length -- no allocations/reallocations or file-reading necessary.

Bellinghman:
I love the way that pBuffer is declared as an array of pointers, but actually used as an array of BYTE.
pBuffer is a pointer to a pointer - standard C/C++ technique for returning extra stuff (particularly that created with new or malloc) from a function. BYTE ** doesn't necessarily imply that the first pointer points to an array. Usage would be something like
BYTE * fileData;
int length = ReadBinaryFile("file.txt", &fileData);
At which point *fileData is the contents of the file.

Yes, but hardly the point, is it? Are we critiquing the code in the OP, or the understanding of posters who aren't entirely au courant with C/C++?

Not that it matters, because the first reaction of any sane person would be "Rewrite!" And no, this is not a good example of why you'd use C rather than C++ (in case anybody asks). Here are, in rough order, the problems:

(1) Shlemiel the painter algorithm. (2) Use of delete[]. This is almost invariably an awful idea; particularly in a loop. (3) Failure to ask yourself what you're trying to achieve. If you can actually make use of a stringified file that's 2GB long, then, fine. Preallocate *pResult as 2GB. (3a) See (1) and (2) in support of (3). (4) RAII. Some poor fool is going to have to delete pResult. Oops, sorry, was that free() pResult? No, actually, it's delete[] pResult. (4a) If, for some insane reason, you wanted to go this way, use an auto_ptr reference. (5) Do not coerce NULL into a long (vide the returned value if the file cannot be opened). (6) Gouge your eyes out before you even think of using ZeroMemory(). This is a surprisingly common Anti-Pattern amongst people who consider themselves C++ programmers, but haven't yet weaned themselves off the C string library. Mind you, it's not remotely necessary in this case. Use std::string, if you really have to do something like this. (7) I wonder what happens if the file is 2.5GB long? Using the type "long" on purpose, of course ... (8) How Long, O Lord? How Long before the Rapture?

and, of course,

(0) Consider using a more suitable tool. Not the tool whose sorry ass you just fired, obviously.

Apologies for stating the bleeding obvious, nine times over. Ya gotta start counting from 0, because that is the Zen of C.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

ThePants999:
Brompot:
TRWTF is that Rik V, having brought it down to under 20 seconds expended effort to further reduce it to 13 seconds. The payback time for that last adjustment must probably be measured in centuries.
I was going to post precisely this. As a manager, I obviously wouldn't be that happy about a developer that wrote such poor code that it took forty minutes, but I also wouldn't be hugely happier about a developer who, having shaved 2380 seconds off that, spends significant further time taking that up to 2387.

Really? There's such a thing as finishing a task so that it's confirmable as done and free from logic errors - there's more to the task than mere runtime, and while it's nice to go from 20 seconds to 13, that means that a: it scales that much more and b: it will likely need minimal atention for the next year or two. It's worth a couple hours to make sure that b happens because if you're wrong, it'll take more than 2 hours to fix it.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

ThePants999:
Brompot:
TRWTF is that Rik V, having brought it down to under 20 seconds expended effort to further reduce it to 13 seconds. The payback time for that last adjustment must probably be measured in centuries.
I was going to post precisely this. As a manager, I obviously wouldn't be that happy about a developer that wrote such poor code that it took forty minutes, but I also wouldn't be hugely happier about a developer who, having shaved 2380 seconds off that, spends significant further time taking that up to 2387.

You're not thinking in beancounterese...

"I saved 99% on the first optimization, and then another 35% on the second optimization."

Beancounter reports a 134% savings.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
highphilosopher:
My Name?:
F:
f!
class first <snipped some code>

Why did you write this? I really want to know why. Of all the code snippets that get dropped on this site, what stimulus can you blame this response on? ... #$%@#$% ...

It made perfect sense to me. I'm not saying it was hugely funny or clever, but I see exactly what he was doing (it's a glorified "frist" joke, FYI). What exactly don't you understand? And who the hell is Dick? You're not one of those freaks that likes to name his junk are you? You should have called it "lowphilosopher", that would have been so much better than "Dick".

What are you talking about? This is first-class code which surely does not terminate in time.

Rick · 2009-11-09 Reply Admin

F:
what's the non-programmer version of "Dick measuring"? and why is Dick proper?

As someone who was named Richard by my parents, I strongly object to this use of the name Dick. There are plenty of synonyms available.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

tim:
I would have just increased the size of the buffer from 256 bytes to 10MB (or whatever depending on the typical size of the files you're reading)
99% of the speedup with 1% of the effort. no need to unit test as you haven't changed the logic

Wrong! If it hasn't been tested, it doesn't exist.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Rick:
F:
what's the non-programmer version of "Dick measuring"? and why is Dick proper?

As someone who was named Richard by my parents, I strongly object to this use of the name Dick. There are plenty of synonyms available.

http://www.lfgcomic.com/page/3

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Rick:
F:
what's the non-programmer version of "Dick measuring"? and why is Dick proper?

As someone who was named Richard by my parents, I strongly object to this use of the name Dick. There are plenty of synonyms available.

Could be worse - your last name could be Smalls

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

dkf:
But then I also write in C and not C++ for preference.)

Well, the sad thing is that, if the author were using C++ properly, the second parameter would have been a BYTE*& and not a BYTE**, and then the function body would work as written. Oh, well.

DOA:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

Thanks for the link! I remember reading that, but forgot the title, so Google wasn't much help.

One of my pet peeves is how, when GUI OSs moved to multitasking, they would demonstrate how awesome that was by multithreading the copy operation. Watch! You can copy one file while copying another! All the little progress bars move at the same time!

But if you pay attention, they're all moving ever slower, and the predicted finish time shoots way up. If you're quiet, you can hear the hard drives thrashing (i.e. dying) as what would normally be efficient sequential writes become rather random writes. And, unless your OS takes great pains to prevent it (I've never heard of that), you're fragmenting the files at the same time.

The best copy process I've ever used was something called CopyDoubler for the old Mac OS 7.x. What it would do is spin off copies to a background process, and that process would perform the copies sequentially. Just as fast as copying one at a time, without making you wait for each copy to complete before starting another, and all the benefits of sequential execution as described in Joel's article. And I have never seen that technique used since.

Anonymous:
Sounds like you think about it way too much

I get that a lot.

Anonymous:
all that time spent optimising your life is surely counter-productive to the task of actually living it.

Some people bury cars on their ranch. Me, I see everything as puzzles. It's a fun quirk.

Anonymous:
On a related note, can you pass the turing test?

Which one? The AI one or the social-bigotry-as-law one? I'm not sure I'll pass either, honestly.

Your Name:
TRWTF is using Hungarian notation with verbose variable names in a 34 line function.

Hungarian notation is its own WTF. If your function gets big enough that it "needs" special variable name notation, it's big enough to need to be broken up into several smaller functions.

PJ Volk:
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The version I use more often is: "To a man with a new hammer, everything looks like a nail." It's a slightly different twist.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Mike D.:
One of my pet peeves is how, when GUI OSs moved to multitasking, they would demonstrate how awesome that was by multithreading the copy operation. Watch! You can copy one file while copying another! All the little progress bars move at the same time!
But if you pay attention, they're all moving ever slower, and the predicted finish time shoots way up. If you're quiet, you can hear the hard drives thrashing (i.e. dying) as what would normally be efficient sequential writes become rather random writes. And, unless your OS takes great pains to prevent it (I've never heard of that), you're fragmenting the files at the same time.

This is an artifact of the OS' IO layer and FS - a decent block cache will accumulate writes and spit them out in larger blocks, while a reasonable FS impl (like ext2) allocates files several blocks at a time, leading to overall less fragmentation. And yeah, if you have 1 disk, then copying 4 files shoudl take about 4 times as long; would be interesting to see them serialize the jobs.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

PLEASE PLEASE don't post articles like this without posting the code you wrote as a solution. The WTF code is only half the story.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Hubert Humphrey:
PLEASE PLEASE don't post articles like this without posting the code you wrote as a solution. The WTF code is only half the story.

my replacement for this mess is rsync + some cfg files.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Mike D.:
dkf:
But then I also write in C and not C++ for preference.)
Well, the sad thing is that, if the author were using C++ properly, the second parameter would have been a BYTE*& and not a BYTE**, and then the function body would work as written. Oh, well.

Work as written, how? What's calling it? How does a reference-to-pointer make any difference to a pointer-to-pointer?

See my comment above.

Please do not write any more C++ code unless you have absorbed

(a) The STL (b) Scott Meyer (all three books, please) (c) optionally, anything at all by Herb Sutter.

I'm sick and tired of lazy C++ "programmers."

I'm sick and tired of nitwit C programmers who claim that C++ would just "make things more difficult."

Actually, I'm just sick and tired of programmers. It's no bloody wonder that complete cretins like Rik V's predecessor don't just get employed, but can co-exist in the goldfish tank for a comfortable couple of years whilst being fed cheesy wotsits.

I'm on the right site, then.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

galgorah:
I think its safe to assume this one was incompetance. Either 1) he lacked the level of skill that was required by his job or 2) he was lazy to a fault. Either I would classify as incompetant.
as for malevolent genius that would be if he had siphoned off company data, for years, to sell to a competitor or something like that.

a) I think it is clear he was incompetent (I think the line about a genius was a little tongue in cheek) b) Not knowing how to spell (especially when little red lines appear under words you have spelled incorrectly) is a sign of gross incompetence

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Franz Kafka:
Hubert Humphrey:
PLEASE PLEASE don't post articles like this without posting the code you wrote as a solution. The WTF code is only half the story.

my replacement for this mess is rsync + some cfg files.

Go on, then.

Given the rubric, why would you want to pester YerLuvinUncleSysAdmin to install rsync and deal with the cfg files?

You know, and I know, that it's a simple twenty line script in Perl. Or Python. Or PowerShell. Or WonderBra (now available in Enterprise Edition!).

You still convinced about rsync? I can show you some 8 by 10 color glossy pictures that will suggest that PowerShell is a better solution.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Am I the only one thinking this is what Scripting languages were designed for?
I would have thought a situation like this (optimum efficiency is not imperative, just reasonable efficiency) the effort of writing and compiling an application is a bit OTT, when a script can call a few simple OS commands to achieve much the same result. Perhaps it wouldn't be the quickest way to go, but adequate surely (especially compared to the 40 minutes the original app was taking).

(I'll concede that he might be working in a Windoze environment, and things may be different there, although I would have thought that even a batch file could be set up to do a task as simple as checking that the checksum of two files is the same, and moving one if they weren't (even if he needs to then check which is newer). Perhaps I've missed the point....).

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
Mike D.:
dkf:
But then I also write in C and not C++ for preference.)
Well, the sad thing is that, if the author were using C++ properly, the second parameter would have been a BYTE*& and not a BYTE**, and then the function body would work as written. Oh, well.
Work as written, how? What's calling it? How does a reference-to-pointer make any difference to a pointer-to-pointer?
See my comment above.

Please do not write any more C++ code unless you have absorbed

(a) The STL (b) Scott Meyer (all three books, please) (c) optionally, anything at all by Herb Sutter.

I'm sick and tired of lazy C++ "programmers."

I'm sick and tired of nitwit C programmers who claim that C++ would just "make things more difficult."

Actually, I'm just sick and tired of programmers. It's no bloody wonder that complete cretins like Rik V's predecessor don't just get employed, but can co-exist in the goldfish tank for a comfortable couple of years whilst being fed cheesy wotsits.

I'm on the right site, then.

a) given a choice, I'd probably use Boost on a new project. Or python if I can get away with it - most of the C++ patterns are language features in high level languages.

b) he's not the only game in town - MS publishes a number of good SW dev books, even if they can't get OSes right. c) hey, a threads book.

oh, and C++ is frequently a pain in the ass. simple stuff is better if it isn't performance critical in some way.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
Franz Kafka:
Hubert Humphrey:
PLEASE PLEASE don't post articles like this without posting the code you wrote as a solution. The WTF code is only half the story.

my replacement for this mess is rsync + some cfg files.
Go on, then.

Given the rubric, why would you want to pester YerLuvinUncleSysAdmin to install rsync and deal with the cfg files?

You know, and I know, that it's a simple twenty line script in Perl. Or Python. Or PowerShell. Or WonderBra (now available in Enterprise Edition!).

You still convinced about rsync? I can show you some 8 by 10 color glossy pictures that will suggest that PowerShell is a better solution.

I'll bet that admin prefers rsync with its good docs and community support to whatever madness I'd come up with in 2 hours. Besides, powershell sounds sort of windowsy - run windows in production and you deserve what you get.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Ifgomil:
Am I the only one thinking this is what Scripting languages were designed for?

Well, you could well be the only one who hasn't read the other posts.

It's not likely, but you could have been.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

I can't believe he didn't handle shenanigans.

Old Captcha: genitus = p3nis

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

And once again we have insufficient proofreading. It's supposed to be spelled "forty", not "fourty". (By the way, I've once heard somebody claim that "fourty" is the British spelling. It's not. Check your dictionary.)

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Idiocy abounds in this one.

"This was a semi-frequent task, and one that he needed to devote quite a bit of time to each month."

OK, so you had an idiot doing this task. But what the hell were you doing, allowing this situation to continue? This should have been a cronjobbed script that required no human interaction at all. Instead, every month, you allowed your idiot to mess around and waste time while you moped around passively, saying "oh, woe is me, this is no-brainer routine task is taking a lot of time every month. Maybe next month it'll be better."

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

ThePants999:
Brompot:
TRWTF is that Rik V, having brought it down to under 20 seconds expended effort to further reduce it to 13 seconds. The payback time for that last adjustment must probably be measured in centuries.
I was going to post precisely this. As a manager, I obviously wouldn't be that happy about a developer that wrote such poor code that it took forty minutes, but I also wouldn't be hugely happier about a developer who, having shaved 2380 seconds off that, spends significant further time taking that up to 2387.
Mike D.:
Of course, this also assumes that humans are as time-efficient as machines, i.e. that five minutes spent on one thing are equal to five minutes spent on something else. I've never mastered that level of self-management-fu. If I have five minutes, I can get five minutes of work (or optimizations or whatever) done on whatever I'm doing, or I can spend five minutes task-switching to something else.
If getting it down to 13 seconds really was five minutes' work, and he got it down to 20 seconds five minutes before a meeting or something, then sure, spend those further five minutes tweaking it further rather than waste them entirely. If, as I more suspect, he finished this then went onto something else, those five minutes of task switching were required either way, and the five minutes of optimizations were simply a waste. And I suspect we're talking more like an hour anyway!

I agree that there's little point spending significant time for relatively minor optimisation on a relatively insignificant app (let's face it, if it was allowed to run 40min originally, then 13 sec is not that much better than 20 sec). On the other hand, if the app were a little more critical (or resource hungry), it makes sense spending some time (within reason) to speed up process and minimise system impact.
Spending an hour to save 7 seconds seems a bit excessive (assuming the running of the app directly affects your work, it would take about 515 runs for you to get that hour back) - At once an hour (every hour) on weekdays it would take more than 4 weeks to regain that hour - business hours only (and assuming 8 hr days) it would take closer to 13 weeks.
If there is a constant overhead to initialise it, the saving would take even longer to gain.
If the process runs in the background, the change is basically insignificant.

It sometimes amazes me how obsessed people are with optimisation - and they often use the argument 'but if the system were much bigger....' This argument is only valid (IMO) if the system actually has a realistic chance (ie probability not possibility) of one day actually being significantly bigger. When people argue 'but we don't necessarily know if it will get that big, it could....' one wonders what they do in the early stages of the SDLC. Saving seconds is only important when you often save the seconds, and when there is potential harm in not saving those seconds. A database transaction that will be called a million times a day that can be reduced even by miliseconds may be of some value. A process that is run 10 times (or even 100 times) a day that affects nothing (or very little) has no great benefit in saving a few seconds (especially if the cost to make such a saving is relatively high).
Perhaps the Universities/Colleges are at fault because they try to teach people the importance of optimisation, but use examples such as enrollment systems at a school (and these enrollments would be reasonably constant at several thousand at most schools, not to mention would really only be used once or twice a year). Optimisation for the sake of optimisation is pointless, if it costs time. If a process runs without affecting anything else (ie doesn't block other processes), and is not required in 'realtime' (ie there isn't a client waiting for a response who is going to get upset that the user stares blankly at the screen for 20 seconds) then an optimisation, even by a few seconds is proably useless.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Franz Kafka:
Bim Job:
Franz Kafka:
Hubert Humphrey:
PLEASE PLEASE don't post articles like this without posting the code you wrote as a solution. The WTF code is only half the story.

my replacement for this mess is rsync + some cfg files.
Go on, then.

Given the rubric, why would you want to pester YerLuvinUncleSysAdmin to install rsync and deal with the cfg files?

You know, and I know, that it's a simple twenty line script in Perl. Or Python. Or PowerShell. Or WonderBra (now available in Enterprise Edition!).

You still convinced about rsync? I can show you some 8 by 10 color glossy pictures that will suggest that PowerShell is a better solution.

I'll bet that admin prefers rsync with its good docs and community support to whatever madness I'd come up with in 2 hours. Besides, powershell sounds sort of windowsy - run windows in production and you deserve what you get.

Awk (or possibly Sed): Gotta give respect twice over in one response. Sorry if I screw the quotes up, FK.

The latter shall be the former: Well, if you're on a Windows system (and I have a sneaking suspicion that the OP is on a Windows system), then being sort of windowsy is not necessarily a bad idea. There's a general mass-hallucinogenic belief out there that quite a number of wacky, laff-a-minute, FT100 companies out there run windows in production because they've been sold a pup. Being a libertarian socialist, I personally don't believe that they deserve what they get -- it's a nauseating amount of money for no real effort whatsoever. Personally, I think they should be sat in a chair with their eyes propped open with match-sticks, a la Clockwork Orange, and forced to "do their business" on the Ubuntu desktop, or on top of a LAMP spike.

But that's just me.

The former shall thus be the latter (and frankly something we'd have a more fruitful discussion upon):

Franz Kafka:
C++ is frequently a pain in the ass. simple stuff is better if it isn't performance critical in some way.

Interesting, because I don't think it's sane to choose C above C++ unless you're dealing with performance-critical software -- RTOS, these days. I'm not sure that the argument applies, even then.

It's a bit like the idea that "Money is the root of all evil," isn't it?

You can strip C++ of all the bits you don't like. Please, no multiple inheritance (akkk..). Please, no ... well, here's a minimum:

Simple templates (not template templates, etc etc, a la C++ at Sun cc 5.0)
Memory allocation via new/delete, wrapped in some sort of smart pointer. (As you say, any one of the four smart pointers offered by Boost.)
The STL. Algorithms (sadly) optional, because Joe Blow won't be able to maintain them.

You can even ban inheritance altogether (outside the libraries, obviously).

I've never been able to work out what the apparent difficulty is, here.

Anyway. We can both agree that the code in the OP is astonishingly bad, whether viewed through a C prism or a C++ prism. (I hope.) Therefore a meritorious WTF.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

aleph:
Hugh Brown:
So this code just returns the length of the file? You don't have to read any bytes of the file to know the file length -- no allocations/reallocations or file-reading necessary.

Bellinghman:
I love the way that pBuffer is declared as an array of pointers, but actually used as an array of BYTE.
pBuffer is a pointer to a pointer - standard C/C++ technique for returning extra stuff (particularly that created with new or malloc) from a function. BYTE ** doesn't necessarily imply that the first pointer points to an array. Usage would be something like
BYTE *fileData;
int length = ReadBinaryFile("file.txt", &fileData);
At which point *fileData is the contents of the file.

[Pedantry] Are you sure? Wouldn't fileData point to the beginning of the file, and *fileData contain the value of the first character? *fileData's type is a BYTE - can you fit the whole of the file in one BYTE?

Of course it would depend on what BYTE is defined as, but I assume (given how it is used) that BYTE would be an 8-bit Character....

[/pedantry]

fennec · 2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
You can strip C++ of all the bits you don't like. Please, no multiple inheritance (akkk..). Please, no ... well, here's a minimum:

Where I work, we have multiple inheritance toys such as (project)::Role::HasUUID (for a database object with a special UUID column) and Role::HasCredentials (for objects with passwords and the like) and and Role::Historian (it logs changes) like that, and we're really happy with them. It's quite effective to use them in a shallow manner like that (one deep inheritance tree, with assorted one-off "mix-in" style classes, which might possibly have ancestors themselves but generally not). (though, this isn't C++).

Multiple inheritance is like nuclear power. In the right hands, it can work wonders... but you can also use it to render your code uninhabitable without too much difficulty.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

I think he should have written it to use memcached or some kind of MPI so that he could just keep allocating memory from a farm of servers. That way, if designed properly, the program would have been somewhat fault tolerant and could survive a failure of a machine or two while running. It would probably only need each machine to have 16 or so Gigs to compare a pair of large directories.

A Beowulf cluster of PS3's would be perfect.

Also what the hell was he doing writing it in a language that others know? He should have written it in LISP or something.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:

Franz Kafka:
C++ is frequently a pain in the ass. simple stuff is better if it isn't performance critical in some way.
Interesting, because I don't think it's sane to choose C above C++ unless you're dealing with performance-critical software -- RTOS, these days. I'm not sure that the argument applies, even then.
It's a bit like the idea that "Money is the root of all evil," isn't it?

You can strip C++ of all the bits you don't like. Please, no multiple inheritance (akkk..). Please, no ... well, here's a minimum:

Simple templates (not template templates, etc etc, a la C++ at Sun cc 5.0)

Memory allocation via new/delete, wrapped in some sort of smart pointer. (As you say, any one of the four smart pointers offered by Boost.)

The STL. Algorithms (sadly) optional, because Joe Blow won't be able to maintain them.

You can even ban inheritance altogether (outside the libraries, obviously).

I've never been able to work out what the apparent difficulty is, here.

Anyway. We can both agree that the code in the OP is astonishingly bad, whether viewed through a C prism or a C++ prism. (I hope.) Therefore a meritorious WTF.

I was actually thinking that a task like this belongs to rsync or a scripting language like perl or python: a python script to do sysadminny tasks will often be a page or two of fairly clear code, and a lot of the STL stuff will be irrelevant to it - language features or simply not visible. Sure, it's slower, but if you're doing a simple task once a day, who cares? This task, done in python is probably the same speed (IO limited).

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Err, you work same place as me, or - of wtf this is scary.

You might recongize these two.

If the business critical application fails reboot the machine. Trouble is, not remmebering state over reboot, if the business critical application continues to fail - well hello here's your endless reboot cycle.

If the email alert job failed, queue a job to email alert the operator that we cant email alert to the operator.

I live in this world.

captcha: abbas

xtremezone · 2009-11-09 Reply Admin

ThePants999:
Brompot:
TRWTF is that Rik V, having brought it down to under 20 seconds expended effort to further reduce it to 13 seconds. The payback time for that last adjustment must probably be measured in centuries.
I was going to post precisely this. As a manager, I obviously wouldn't be that happy about a developer that wrote such poor code that it took forty minutes, but I also wouldn't be hugely happier about a developer who, having shaved 2380 seconds off that, spends significant further time taking that up to 2387.
Mike D.:
Of course, this also assumes that humans are as time-efficient as machines, i.e. that five minutes spent on one thing are equal to five minutes spent on something else. I've never mastered that level of self-management-fu. If I have five minutes, I can get five minutes of work (or optimizations or whatever) done on whatever I'm doing, or I can spend five minutes task-switching to something else.
If getting it down to 13 seconds really was five minutes' work, and he got it down to 20 seconds five minutes before a meeting or something, then sure, spend those further five minutes tweaking it further rather than waste them entirely. If, as I more suspect, he finished this then went onto something else, those five minutes of task switching were required either way, and the five minutes of optimizations were simply a waste. And I suspect we're talking more like an hour anyway!

Except that people are not machines. If he was thinking about that final optimization then whatever work he did instead would suffer. So he can do decent work where it isn't important or he can do terrible work where it is. Which would you prefer?

The people that jump around as told to do horrible work, IMHO. The reason is they don't care about anything they do and are happy to go where they're told, so long as they keep getting paid. The ones that do care aren't able to just stop caring at a moment's notice. You may force them to stop what they're doing, but it won't make them productive where you want them. I find that sometimes I just need time to get something off my chest before I can continue on with what I'm actually supposed to do. Otherwise, I'm much less productive.

In any case, he was also further developing his skills by shaving off those further 7 seconds, which might not have mattered now, but might end up being mission critical sometime in the future.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

The people that jump around as told to do horrible work, IMHO. The reason is they don't care about anything they do and are happy to go where they're told, so long as they keep getting paid.

Meanwhile, back in Realsville ...

The CxO said I must do 'Yada'. I explained to CxO that, okay, 'Yada' is a GoodIdea(tm), but if we do that then ... (badness) ... so let's do 'Blah'. 'Blah' gets all the upsides of 'Yada' with none of the downsides ... (badness) ... and the CxO said, "No, do 'Yada'", and now I am away to completely unrelated very important meeting with' Blankety-Blank Co' - report back to me on progress with 'Yada' two weeks from now.

... what's a developer to do? Answer 'Yada'! Here's the real WTF, every day, every where.

captcha: jugis

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Franz Kafka:
I was actually thinking that a task like this belongs to rsync or a scripting language like perl or python: a python script to do sysadminny tasks will often be a page or two of fairly clear code, and a lot of the STL stuff will be irrelevant to it - language features or simply not visible. Sure, it's slower, but if you're doing a simple task once a day, who cares? This task, done in python is probably the same speed (IO limited).

OK, leaving C/C++ to one side ... which is a shame, since this is a rare occurrence in the wild of a C/C++ WTF, and we both understand and appreciate the basics.

If you'll forgive me (or even not):

Bim Job:
This is one of the very, very few cases where I would opt for rewriting a C application, from scratch, in PHP.

Actually, even a rewrite in Assembler using INT 21h would be infinitely preferable.

Which was, of course, a joke. As an aside, I got paranoid when I typed int21h in to Google on Chrome, and my computer crashed ... but even I don't believe in Assembler Injection. It happened, honest.

Yes, I'd use Python, because I like Python. Actually, I'd use Perl, because that's easier to get past the SysAdmin Troll-Gate, and just as good for a simple file-munging script. If you remember, I pointed out that this is obviously a Windows shop: learning enough PowerShell wouldn't cause either one of us much pain.

It's a bit too late, I guess, and I screwed it up -- but the main point of the WTF is that it is wrong on many, many, levels. Not the least of which is that the original manager in charge should have asked for something that "compared two directories and put any files that had changed into a third." Not a lump of cretinous pseudo-C++ that needs to be wrapped in something else before achieving the task at a glacial pace, and even then failing, because the next layer up (which we don't see) is presumably going to have to do something like a memcmp() on two arbitrarily large buffers in memory. And then free the memory. Using the correct operators. Repeatedly, for each file in each directory.

Personally, I'd like to see the implementation of the memcmp().

Failing that, I trust you to sit down with me in some horrible pair programming environment, and we'll get a rock-solid solution to the actual problem, in ten lines or less, using a mutually-agreed (but not rsync and conf files, even though they have their place) scripting language.

It'll probably still not get past the SysAdmin Gatekeeper Trolls, though. One -- or both of us -- can only do their best.

For incidental pain:

fennec:
Where I work, we have multiple inheritance toys such as (project)::Role::HasUUID (for a database object with a special UUID column) and Role::HasCredentials (for objects with passwords and the like) and and Role::Historian (it logs changes) like that, and we're really happy with them. It's quite effective to use them in a shallow manner like that (one deep inheritance tree, with assorted one-off "mix-in" style classes, which might possibly have ancestors themselves but generally not). (though, this isn't C++).

Multiple inheritance is like nuclear power. In the right hands, it can work wonders... but you can also use it to render your code uninhabitable without too much difficulty.

Umm, I was arguing for a limited subset of C++ that works as a simple, but improved, drop-in for the C equivalent. It's a non-problem that I often have to face when dealing with an RTOS project. In that context, I could have argued for the use of a binary predicate functor in association with std::sort(), which is faster than a qsort() in C. But I didn't. Life is too (q)short.

Is this one of those daft SAT questions for which rich WASPs spend outrageous amounts of money in order for a menial college graduate to knock enough syllogisms into their spotty cretinous little sprog's head before said sprog gets to go to Stanford? (Motto: "We will never fail you. Partly because you have a theoretically huge and pointy head, plus which your hair is blond and your eyes are blue and you, or your parents, will be valued alumni. Plus which, we tried to give you miserable cretinous little bastards an F, and you went on strike!")

There is no possible meaningful way that you can compare or contrast multiple inheritance with nuclear power.

Show me the tensors.

DaveK · 2009-11-09 Reply Admin

... around 2.6.12-2.6.18 sort of timescale, as I discovered when I had to figure out why a 400MHz ARM CPU was apparently unable to shovel a mere 6MB of data in RAM from userspace to kernelspace before the hotplug firmware upload script timed out - after 60 seconds!

Turns out it was allocating kernel space one page at a time, copying a page worth of data from user space, then allocating a new space one page larger, copying the existing data across and uploading the rest, etc. etc.; after I told it to double the allocation every time up to 1MB and go in 1MB steps thereafter, it suddenly took under a second.

Eventually it got fixed, but it's pretty sad that it even made it through review like that in the first place.

I would say it's TRWTF, but this seems to be the week for it all over. We found a case in GNU grep just the other day where it was using this same kind of algorithm to handle i18n.

Learning not to write quadratic algorithms - or at least, to know when you're writing one and be able to decide based on the context if it'll matter - is one of the things that separates the professionals from the cowboys and amateurs in this industry.

(And learning when sometimes even a linear algorithm won't be fast enough and what to do about it is the next level...)

DaveK · 2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
There is no possible meaningful way that you can compare or contrast multiple inheritance with nuclear power.

Oh yeah?

fennec:
Multiple inheritance is like nuclear power. In the right hands, it can work wonders... but you can also use it to render your code uninhabitable without too much difficulty.

me:
No, MI is like nuclear power because in the right hands it can work wonders, but most of the time it's just a burdensomely expensive way of doing things you already have ways of doing anyway, and no matter what, you can be absolutely sure that it's going to leave a steaming great heap of noxious radioactive shit that some poor bugger's going to have to clean up somehow a few years down the line...

How about that? Both a comparison *and* a contrast...

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
Yes, I'd use Python, because I like Python. Actually, I'd use Perl, because that's easier to get past the SysAdmin Troll-Gate, and just as good for a simple file-munging script. If you remember, I pointed out that this is obviously a Windows shop: learning enough PowerShell wouldn't cause either one of us much pain.
It's a bit too late, I guess, and I screwed it up -- but the main point of the WTF is that it is wrong on many, many, levels. Not the least of which is that the original manager in charge should have asked for something that "compared two directories and put any files that had changed into a third." Not a lump of cretinous pseudo-C++ that needs to be wrapped in something else before achieving the task at a glacial pace, and even then failing, because the next layer up (which we don't see) is presumably going to have to do something like a memcmp() on two arbitrarily large buffers in memory. And then free the memory. Using the correct operators. Repeatedly, for each file in each directory.

Personally, I'd like to see the implementation of the memcmp().

Failing that, I trust you to sit down with me in some horrible pair programming environment, and we'll get a rock-solid solution to the actual problem, in ten lines or less, using a mutually-agreed (but not rsync and conf files, even though they have their place) scripting language.

Given the task to do myself, I'd either use a checksum lib like md5 and compare checksums + filesize for constant size operation or load 64k of each file at a time, compare, then overwrite the buffers with the next 64k, again for constant size operation.

But yeah, we'd probably end up with something workable and yes, this is a really WTFy WTF.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

DaveK:
Bim Job:
There is no possible meaningful way that you can compare or contrast multiple inheritance with nuclear power.
Oh yeah?
fennec:
Multiple inheritance is like nuclear power. In the right hands, it can work wonders... but you can also use it to render your code uninhabitable without too much difficulty.
me:
No, MI is like nuclear power because in the right hands it can work wonders <relevant cut/>
How about that? Both a comparison *and* a contrast...

But not meaningful, Dave.

We can talk about nuclear power, and to restore your adventitious addition here:

DaveK:
but most of the time it's just a burdensomely expensive way of doing things you already have ways of doing anyway, and no matter what, you can be absolutely sure that it's going to leave a steaming great heap of noxious radioactive shit that some poor bugger's going to have to clean up somehow a few years down the line...

. Not really fair to misquote fennec, is it? Particularly since I led him in to your little eco-fetish ex post facto. I mean, it's not as though he'd have known.

Did you read the OP? Do you have any comprehension of what an utter failure that was? Do you wish to argue about the OP? Have you followed the (standard blog, with excellent exceptions, as one might expect from the TDWTF) arguments?

Get to the fucking point, man. You're not an idiot, and you score highly on "Reading Comprehension."

You'll note that I'm not asking you to define or defend a "relevant cut." I'm happy wasting words. I'm not quite sure what makes you happy, but ... good luck.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
DaveK:
Bim Job:
There is no possible meaningful way that you can compare or contrast multiple inheritance with nuclear power.
Oh yeah?
fennec:
Multiple inheritance is like nuclear power. In the right hands, it can work wonders... but you can also use it to render your code uninhabitable without too much difficulty.
me:
No, MI is like nuclear power because in the right hands it can work wonders <relevant cut/>
How about that? Both a comparison *and* a contrast...
But not meaningful, Dave.
We can talk about nuclear power, and to restore your adventitious addition here:
DaveK:
but most of the time it's just a burdensomely expensive way of doing things you already have ways of doing anyway, and no matter what, you can be absolutely sure that it's going to leave a steaming great heap of noxious radioactive shit that some poor bugger's going to have to clean up somehow a few years down the line...
. Not really fair to misquote fennec, is it? Particularly since I led him in to your little eco-fetish ex post facto. I mean, it's not as though he'd have known.

Did you read the OP? Do you have any comprehension of what an utter failure that was? Do you wish to argue about the OP? Have you followed the (standard blog, with excellent exceptions, as one might expect from the TDWTF) arguments?

Get to the fucking point, man. You're not an idiot, and you score highly on "Reading Comprehension."

You'll note that I'm not asking you to define or defend a "relevant cut." I'm happy wasting words. I'm not quite sure what makes you happy, but ... good luck.

I'm also happy to excoriate myself. I believe you were referring to something like Stroustrup's idiotic defence of multiple inheritance in C++.

There's actually one better out there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Something to do with "it isn't necessary, but in two or three edge cases, it makes it easier to express what you mean."

You right. Me asshole.

I have to re-learn metaphors. Damn, it's been so long since Sophocles, and too many WTFs in between.

Little Jim: He's fallen in the water!

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

GettinSadda:

long ReadBinaryFile(CString strFile, BYTE** pResult)
{
    CFile file;
    if(!file.Open(strFile, CFile::modeRead)) return 0;
    pResult = new BYTE[file.GetLength()];
    if(!pResult) return 0;
    return file.Read(pBuffer, file.GetLength());
}

Missing *pResult = NULL before the first return 0; that baby's gonna crash 'n' burn!

Captcha: acsi. In the land of the blind the one i'd dyslexic character set is not binary.

2009-11-09 Reply Admin

WinMerge is my weapon of choice, although I do use robocopy for batch files.

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

Ninety FRist!

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

Rik:
I'm not sure if the guy was a moron or a genius. One the one hand, the code is absolutely appalling. On the other, it gave him the opportunity to say 'sorry, the app is still running; I've got to wait for it to finish' and then go back to reading the newspaper.

The same reason I'm reluctant to upgrade my five year old computer at work. As it is now I can still go with the compiling(!) excuse...

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

From fourty minutes? Is this the bonus WTF?

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

The real WTF is that all you "C++" programmers posting here are still using new[] and delete[].

"pResult = new BYTE[file.GetLength()]; if(!pResult) return 0;"

...and testing the result of memory allocation for null

(hint: it throws an exception and would leak any local memory which was allocated with new[])

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

Major Sir Jerry-Pending:
SR:
Reminds me of merging a couple of batch files long, long ago. The new process took 10 - 20 minutes depending on the size of the data sets. Easily time for a quick ciggie. I'd often see the boss in there: "smoking again SR?" she'd ask - "my PC's hard at it" I'd reply.
I'm glad the place closed down before we'd migrated off DOS 6.1 and onto that horroble multitasking Windows.

http://xkcd.com/303/

Enjoy

xkcd

Enjoy

Choose one.

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

ThePants999:
Brompot:
TRWTF is that Rik V, having brought it down to under 20 seconds expended effort to further reduce it to 13 seconds. The payback time for that last adjustment must probably be measured in centuries.
I was going to post precisely this. As a manager, I obviously wouldn't be that happy about a developer that wrote such poor code that it took forty minutes, but I also wouldn't be hugely happier about a developer who, having shaved 2380 seconds off that, spends significant further time taking that up to 2387.
Mike D.:
Of course, this also assumes that humans are as time-efficient as machines, i.e. that five minutes spent on one thing are equal to five minutes spent on something else. I've never mastered that level of self-management-fu. If I have five minutes, I can get five minutes of work (or optimizations or whatever) done on whatever I'm doing, or I can spend five minutes task-switching to something else.
If getting it down to 13 seconds really was five minutes' work, and he got it down to 20 seconds five minutes before a meeting or something, then sure, spend those further five minutes tweaking it further rather than waste them entirely. If, as I more suspect, he finished this then went onto something else, those five minutes of task switching were required either way, and the five minutes of optimizations were simply a waste. And I suspect we're talking more like an hour anyway!

So you perform extensive cost-benefit analysis on everything you do, and expect the same from everyone else? Sounds like a waste of some valuable time, to me

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

That code makes programming look like politics

2009-11-10 Reply Admin

I once saw a piece of code:

while(getTrue()) ...

but what made it particularly funny, was the implementation of the getTrue-function:

bool getTrue() { return false; }

Bellinghman · 2009-11-10 Reply Admin

aleph:
Bellinghman:
I love the way that pBuffer is declared as an array of pointers, but actually used as an array of BYTE.
pBuffer is a pointer to a pointer - standard C/C++ technique for returning extra stuff (particularly that created with new or malloc) from a function. BYTE ** doesn't necessarily imply that the first pointer points to an array. Usage would be something like
BYTE * fileData;
int length = ReadBinaryFile("file.txt", &fileData);
At which point *fileData is the contents of the file.

Oh, the irony! The thread title is just so appropriate.

I was talking about the following declaration:

BYTE* pBuffer[256];

This is standard C/C++ syntax for declaring an array of 256 pointers to BYTE. Given your interesting explanation which was completely irrelevant to pBuffer, perhaps you were looking at the declaration of the function parameter pResult?

Bellinghman · 2009-11-10 Reply Admin

Bim Job:
aleph:
... At which point *fileData is the contents of the file.
Yes, but hardly the point, is it? Are we critiquing the code in the OP, or the understanding of posters who aren't entirely au courant with C/C++?

Oh, I'm sure Aleph has a passing understanding of C and C++. He's just failed reading comprehension in this case, not seeing a deliciously silly case of the original code allocating a 256 * sizeof(BYTE*) buffer, and using it as 256 * sizeof(BYTE).

Not that it matters, because the first reaction of any sane person would be "Rewrite!" And no, this is not a good example of why you'd use C rather than C++ (in case anybody asks). Here are, in rough order, the problems:
(1) Shlemiel the painter algorithm.

Oh, agreed.

(2) Use of delete[]. This is almost invariably an awful idea; particularly in a loop.

Unless the memory was allocated with new[], of course. In which case, use of delete rather than delete[] has a fairly good chance of blowing up your memory manager. Or are you referring to it as a 'code smell'?

(3) Failure to ask yourself what you're trying to achieve. If you can actually make use of a stringified file that's 2GB long, then, fine. Preallocate *pResult as 2GB. (3a) See (1) and (2) in support of (3).

Oh, agreed

(4) RAII. Some poor fool is going to have to delete pResult. Oops, sorry, was that free() pResult? No, actually, it's delete[] pResult.

If we're talking RAII, then the in-loop buffer could more safely be using a std::vector - but then we're trying to put lipstick on the pig.

(4a) If, for some insane reason, you wanted to go this way, use an auto_ptr reference.

Unless the memory was allocated using new[], of course, in which case you have a pretty good chance of blowing up your memory manager (is there an echo in here?). When using arrays rather than scalars, use std::vector rather than std::auto_ptr. And perhaps pass the target vector in by reference unless you have either move semantics or good tail optimisation on your compiler, to avoid that final data copy.

(5) Do not coerce NULL into a long (vide the returned value if the file cannot be opened). (6) Gouge your eyes out before you even think of using ZeroMemory(). This is a surprisingly common Anti-Pattern amongst people who consider themselves C++ programmers, but haven't yet weaned themselves off the C string library. Mind you, it's not remotely necessary in this case. Use std::string, if you really have to do something like this.

Yes, the lovely idea of overwriting raw memory which is going to be overwritten, just in case the overwriting doesn't work?

(7) I wonder what happens if the file is 2.5GB long? Using the type "long" on purpose, of course ...

But you can't have a file that size. Honestly. (And this 6GB VPC image is an hallucination, honest.)

(8) How Long, O Lord? How Long before the Rapture?

and, of course,

(0) Consider using a more suitable tool. Not the tool whose sorry ass you just fired, obviously.

Apologies for stating the bleeding obvious, nine times over. Ya gotta start counting from 0, because that is the Zen of C.

Reading Comprehension

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