- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
- Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Other Series
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Admin
Admin
The Real WTF is that the person responsible for screwing up things was actually punished for it.
Admin
The best example is the box model in CSS, which is messed up in the standard, followed strictly in Mozilla/Firefox, and implemented incorrectly (but in a way that makes sense) in Internet Explorer 6. It has to do with making a box 100% wide and giving it a border and/or margin, or something of the sort.
Admin
Admin
If only Tim actually did any of that monitoring. But the point was that Tim didn't, couldn't and wouldn't. He also totally missed the danger signs.
Admin
Don't get me wrong, I do understand what you're saying and I can see the sense of at least "failing gracefully" in some situations, even if it doesn't follow the standard to the letter. But it really is an impossible argument, where do you draw the line? There are lots of things in the standard that don't make sense to some people but if every one of those people just ignored the standard we'd have chaos, cats and dogs living together, etc etc.
I may not agree with the standards all the time but I still believe you should follow them, in the same way I may not agree with the law all the time but I still think it needs to be followed. If you disagree with a standard then submit a correction to it and hope that one day in the future it gets ratified (this has about as much chance of working as submitting a correction to a law and having that ratified, but hey, it feels good to vent).
Admin
Admin
The real wtf is this story having a happy end. Dumb guy fired, smart guy in charge. Looks like some fairy tale.
captcha: erat .... hm... eraticate?
Admin
So, the real WTF was "--" firefox?
Admin
Not from the Tim-crowd's mouth, it doesn't. Management saw it for what it was, calling Tim on it and putting a realistic hard dead-line that actually matched to an actual, urgent need:
To be done by EOB (he got "four hours") so that the offshore team could have something to work on during the weekend (as opposed to having them sit idle... possibly while being on on the clock.)
I know what you are saying - managers of that type. But you also have to understand where they are coming from as well as the context. In software we like to pad things, specially schedules. Sometimes we need to in order to cope with unknowns affecting engineering decisions.
In other cases, we do because we are slackers with our heads up our asses, we don't know what to do and we are oblivious (or don't give a crap) about serious deadlines affecting the people who write our paychecks.
Or they are just padding their schedule so that they can scratch their itches while the whole building burns. It all depends on the context AND on the people making the estimates.
Just because someone gives you an estimate, that doesn't mean it is sufficiently right... or that the estimator is being honest.
It is Tim's fault for not knowing what should be part of his job. I'm sure there were other culprits in this situation, but one cannot exonerate someone (an admin) from not knowing how to do one of his job tasks (freeing space in a server.)
Better yet, you should not get angry and instead work objectively towards fixing the problem. THAT is management.
Admin
'Went Om Nom Nom'.. really TDWTF?
Admin
And still noone spotted this Monty Python-quote!?
Admin
Admin
"There are those who call me... 'Tim'?"
Yours is misquoted as well, FWIW.
Admin
Don't remember exactly what it was about, so the above paragraph is a bit useless, but the impression I got was that they really believed in standards, and might even worship them.
Admin
Turns out that "some call me tim" is a cheat code in a an RPG:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_the_Enchanter
Admin
So, the thing with the comment is according to the SGML standard, which was the best thing available until the HTML 5 standard came along, which is what Firefox 4 will use.
As for the CSS box model, CSS3 now includes box-sizing which will allow you to measure an element including the border, and this is implemented (possibly with a vendor-specific prefix) in at least Gecko, Webkit and Presto.
Firefox 4 will also support CSS3 calc(), which is another way to work around the problem.
Admin
No, but ionice would.
Admin
Standards that are stupid need to be changed. Laws that are nothing more than pointless oppression need to be disobeyed.
When I started at the place I work, the standard for commenting was futile, pointless and wasteful of time (specifically the insistence of a line of ! at the RHS putting the comments into a neat little box). There's an article in Code Complete about that. From day one I subverted it, as I was damned if I was going to spend all day filling the line with spaces and putting a neat little ! in column 80. Life was too short.
A while later it was noticed that my productivity was somewhat greater than that of my colleagues. The above act of rebellion, coupled with the fact that I knew how to set up keyboard macros and adjust my terminal emulator to view more than a 24x80 screen, contributed to that extra productivity. So I got bigger more exciting work to do, and eventually got moved forward to more up-to-date languages and systems.
And every now and then I have to look over the shoulders of the various colleagues of mine who are still doing the same old work ... still using the 24x80 screen, still typing space space space space .... space space space exclamationmark at the end of every comment they write.
Admin
Admin
Noscript is not enough for you. Try NoBrain
Admin
Admin
It appears that when one quote fails they all fail, likely due to some nesting issue.
Admin
Enjoyed the references, both Burn Notice and Maven/Motley (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/progressive_development/about.aspx for those who aren't familiar with it).
Admin
Muhahah!
CAPTCHA: causa - Causa I said so.
Admin
I agree. That was the worst writing ever and in places didn't make any sense. Not only did it make Firfox barf but made me barf too.... Being English (not American) I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our countries' language! And, by the way it's COLOUR, not color!!!
Admin
Fixed that four ewe.
Admin
Nevar!
Also, I didn't get any of the references this time :(
Admin
Except for the terrible writing, not bad.
Seriously, the people who submit these don't need to try and use it as their first mini-novel.
Admin
No, no, TRWTF is the comment in the HTML, near the Google Custom Search.
<!-- *snipped* a bunch of JavaScript that Google told us to put in. Seemed pretty pointless and caused an error. We don't need no stinking JavaScript. -->
Clbuttic!
Admin
I don't get all the complaining about how "terrible" or "worst ever" the writing was. It was fine.
Admin
Admin
The nice side effect of how Aegis does things is that you have full traceability in case there were compiler / build script bugs: you have stuff to reproduce the problem from.
I used to use Aegis, but it became a big hassle when we decided to do some builds on Windows. Aegis could be ported to Windows, because Windows supports similar file system protection model to what Aegis depends on, but it's a slight hassle. You need to create a user for Aegis, and repository files need to be owned by Aegis, visible to everyone who uses the repository, and only the Aegis executable needs to be able to modify them and noone else (to maintain repository integrity). Aegis really needs a client-server split.
Admin
Brevity is wit.
Admin
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
Admin
Great. Fucking unicorns all over the page. Clicking one causes more to appear.
Admin
Admin
The more appropriate (and accurate) heading is "Some may call me Tim"
The may allows for the latitude of calling him useless.
Admin
Actually, I've been in Darrell's position. After "Tim" left, I asked my boss if I should assist. Our VP, who happened to be right there, said, "No. Prepare for it. If he doesn't complete the job in the 3 hours we've given him, you take over. If he performs less than half of the work in his 3 hours, and you complete the job in under 1 hour, he's fired. We would prefer to pay the 3000 hours of unproductive time and remove someone as incompetent as he seems to be. But make sure you don't block his efforts."
I went back to my desk, my manager followed me and watched everything I did.
First, I set up a top window, updating every 15 seconds, so I'd know if the system was CPU or IO bound (also, gave me some view what "Tim" was doing.) Second, I went to the problematic directory and wrote a command-line perl script to find the largest 10 files, with a usleep(100) after examining each file. I explained that should keep it from IO bounding the system. Third, I ran it.
We watched the top window, as "Tim" tried valiantly to compress files on a filesystem which was 100% full. One CPU was pegged by that activity, but the other was basically idle. IO wait never went above 15%. I got my 10 filenames with about 30 minutes to spare.
Fourth, I ran a long listing on the 10 files. Fifth, I typed in the 9 filenames that were old enough they could be removed without concern, followed with a double ampersand, a 'df -k .', another double ampersand, and then a find command to remove all the rest of the files over the threshold age. Sixth, I moved the cursor to the start of the line, and typed "rm ".
Seventh, we waited for the rest of the time to expire. When our VP came in my cube, with "Tim" in tow, and told us it was my turn, I pressed return.
The df -k came back about 20 seconds later, indicating we had enough free space to restore service in degraded mode. I announced this and restored service. Tim then got the honor of being walked out the door by a VP.
Admin
This wouldn't have been on a whim, this would've been a clear 'for cause' termination. And, it sounds like there may have been people who were not mid-level managers around who would've been happy to perform the honors. (Admittedly, it probably wouldn't have gotten all the way up to the VP level like my tale did, unless this was the flagship product and an internationally announced build.)
This is career end game, given that all work for the group is stopped and Tim wasn't even paying attention enough to know when he was being asked to identify himself as the responsible party. Management may prefer a sink or swim at this point.
If Tim had expressed a more concerned attitude during the meeting, assistance probably would've been appropriate, if needed. Given the description of the problem, it really should not have been needed.
Admin
Obviously a fabricated story, since the guilty party was actually held accountable and appropriately punished.
Admin
The WTF is the OMNOMNOM pony's.