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Admin
Not if you do a passthrough query (to the SPs that you have written on the SQL database, if you are at all sensible).
Admin
Admin
This WTF made me angry. Maxim was accused of incompetence and upon finding out the root cause (someone else's incompetence) he was shrugged at.
That would make me angry if that happened to me (and it has, and I've gotten angry enough to quit on the spot over it).
People are more concerned about being right than fixing problems. Whoever shrugged at Maxim just didn't want to admit he was wrong for calling Maxim incompetent.
Admin
#2 Mjolnir is not made of gold, or even gilded.
#3 The God of Thunder does not use his hammer as a first resort. For example, the competitions against the frost giant Utgard-Loki.
Admin
Working in a IT dept. for a financial institution that uses massive spreadheets for mission critical processes... And then they basically ignore the results and go on a hunch... I mean. Really. Why bother? We have been fighting tooth and nail for two years to identify every 'special' excell file and figure out what it does. I have nightmares about someone's laptop being stolen and then realisng that that was the only copy of his 'special' file. At least I am not alone.
Admin
Admin
The database behind a very well known and widely used accounts system uses floats for monetary fields.... (at least as of 2004, they may have fixed this now. I'd hope)
I know because I had to write code for payroll to interface with the database.
I have previously had to demo the Floating Point/Decimal problem by writing a suitable calculation in MS SQL, Oracle SQL Access VBA, Excel VBA, VB (and getting it written in C++ and some kind of Unix script by the peeps that knew that) to prove that we shouldn't be using floats for (in that instance) bond dividend calculations. The plethora of tools used was purely to prove that it's the datatype not the tool or even operating system...
Admin
It would have been more of a Dilbert WTF if they asked him to put the bugs back in.
Admin
Dirk the problem is actually with how the front-end Access programs are accessing SQL Server.
From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275561 :
I don't maintain or control the programs in question but as far as I know they are all older Access programs that are using Page Locking Mode. I've already suggested they use row level locking but they've been unable to fix the issue. I fundamentally believe that this kind of locking behavior shouldn't even be allowed when connecting to a database at all.
Admin
Ah, well, you see the difference is that I HAVE A LIFE.
Admin
And of course the real WTF is that they trusted something that mission-critical to a guy right out of college, and provided what sounds like no testing support whatsoever.
Admin
The one true answer would have been sth like here: Have you ever kissed a girl?
Admin
The problem is not the tool but the pointy haired dumbs that took the decision to use it for another purpose.
Admin
more dilbertian;-)
Admin
This is coming from the guy who wasted three paragraphs trying to explain that the maxim "To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." was something out of a comic book.
You pasted the link. Now go read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hammer
captcha: paratus. Because you should be.
Admin
We do precision guesswork.
Admin
A) ONE paragraph, and B) I didn't paste that link, I put one in to the Anti-patterns website (and I did it properly so that it actually was a link). See, I can do pedantic too! But weren't we talking about spreadsheets not comic books?
Admin
I work at an insurance broker.
Amongst other products, we handle performance bonds and similar bond products.
We have one client who literally has hundreds of bonds to cover their work locations (cell phone towers). Each of this must be renewed annually.
Years ago, someone from the client gave the account manager an Excel spreadsheet to help track the bonds for certain auditing purposes. The account manager gave this spreadsheet to someone on his support staff to actually keep track of it. She does the actual work of entering and removing the appropriate bonds from the spreadsheet each month.
You may have already guessed where this is going. Every month, IT gets a phone call... a formula is messed up, usually because of how she has inserted and/or deleted rows.
She no longer has a copy of the original spreadsheet, and neither does the Account Manager, nor the guy who replaced the guy he got it from. She never saves an old copy for reference. She has never had Excel training. Of any sort. She refuses to get Excel training. When we schedule her for mandatory Excel training, she gets out of it. She insists she doesn't need Excel training. Her immediate supervisor refuses to mandate that she gets Excel training "or else" because she insists she doesn't need it... And she insists that it's IT's fault that the spreadsheet gets messed up every month because we never fix it right.
sigh
Now, the real WTF:
The client is about to provide us with a new handy dandy program to do all of this for us (from the description, I suspect it's in Access, but I haven't seen it yet) and it's not in Excel.
She is refusing to use it because she knows Excel so well.
sigh
Admin
I read this too fast-- it looked like Dilbertarian. I think I like that even better. Meritocracy and guns.
Admin
Actually, I think you'll find that's the JET database engine, nothing to do with the Access Front End if ADO is used to connect to the remote database. (SQL Oracle etc).
Access is not a bad tool for RAD application GUIs... Although I must admit, I'd never use it!!
I'll start a fight now, for a laugh as your incompetance is amusing!! Hahahahaahha!
Admin
I guess in London the lack of decent dental plans rots the teeth as well as the brain :-)
Admin
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyep.
Admin
thanks for the story link!
Admin
The real WTF:
Maxim (is that a person's name?) is hired to program financial applications and he doesn't even know what yield is!
I guess Maxim never had a savings account either?
Admin
I got a good one.
A few years ago I was asked to synthesize the FX curve from the two interest rate curves underlying it. (For the layperson, once the spot FX exchange rate is determined by the market the forward rates - ie. those 1 week, 1 month, 3 months ahead etc - are solely determined by the 1 week, 1 month, 3 months interest rates in the two currencies.)
This is a very simple concept but it is fraught with difficulties in implementation (at least if you want to do it right) because there are all sorts of subtle effects caused by such things as holidays in the two countries and the arcana of how the various interest rates are quoted.
So, since I had done the same task a few years before hand (and also because I'm not entirely stupid) I - sotto voca - reused some old code from another site that was fully worked and tested but something I should definitely not have kept, as to do so was in violation of the confidentiality clauses in my old contract.
Viola, 1 day later, delivered code.
Or so I thought.
I was working with a junior trader who I will call Josef (not-his-real-name).
One month later, after many days of Josef saying "it's not right, you gotta do it this way" and me employing many polite versions of "are you quite sure you want to do it this bloody idiotic way that will work only when the moon is in the right phase?" I was sitting next to Josef on the trading floor while he tested my latest version.
For those familiar with FX markets it happened to be Thursday 30 June, with the weekend on the way. Keep this in mind.
After listening to his latest complaint I asked him to explain why he thought it was wrong, to which he replied "because the old system says so"
I asked him to show me and he did.
I looked at the screen of the old system. 6 currencies were displayed all showing a maturity ladder (spot, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months etc) [Really old FX hands can probably identify the old system at this point, let me just say I think it may have been misconfigured but the maturity ladder in that system does have this all-spot-dates-are-the-same flaw].
My next words were: "Josef, why is 4 July spot in all 6 currencies? Particularly since 5 July is also a holiday in Poland and that means spot for the zloty is 6 July?"
A small technical diversion. "Spot" means the day on which the currency trade settles, which means the banks have to be open - in both countries. Since the USD is the base currency, 4th July can never be spot, even in crosses like GBP against PLZ as they must settle against USD when crossed and it is required that the US banks also be open.
Got that? 4 July is the ultimate impossible date, yet there was the old system happily using it.
Further since 5 July was (that year) a holiday in Poland the spot date for any trade involving the zloty had to be moved a further day.
My original code took care (perfectly and with great performance) of all this arcana and I'd managed to preserve that behaviour through all of the hacks Josef had forced on me for the previous month.
Josef asked me what I meant and I spent about 10 minutes explaining my understanding of how all this stuff worked.
Josef's response was "no, no not like that, like this" explaining a very simplistic view. Then he thought for a moment and called his head trader over and repeated his view asking for validation.
The head trader's response was priceless. "Well if you wanna knock it out for yuks in a spreadsheet you might do it like that, but ...... [repeat of my view]"
I went back upstairs in triumph and restored the month old original. Josef didn't last long (but that's another story).
Admin
[quote user="Ollie Jones"]
Y'd think a bank might have an auditor on staff. [quote]
LOL.... you must never have worked at a bank.
Admin
Yes and no. The above is true for stocks (shares) but not for bonds. In that case
The nominal yield or coupon yield is the yearly total of coupons (or interest) paid divided by the Principal (Face) Value of the bond.
The current yield is those same payments divided by the bond's spot market price.
The yield to maturity is the IRR on the bond's cash flows: the purchase price, the coupons received and the principal at maturity.
The yield to call is the IRR on the bond's cash flows, assuming it is called at the first opportunity, instead of being held till maturity.
So there is some level of complexity to yield calculation
Admin
this made me think of a Tom Clancy novel, "debt of honor": there's a scene where someone causes a big stock market crash by selling lots of Citibank stock. since Citibank just happened to be one of the stocks that "trend analysis" programs watch double-closely, that made ALL the auto-trading programs think there was a general downward trend, so they all started selling EVERYTHING...
Admin
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