• Richard (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius

    I think the best lesson I took away from this entire system was that no matter how well placed your intentions now, decisions taken when you were still a baby will do their best to screw you over.

    The problem with Sculptor was that it was an excellent green screen, centralised data entry and reporting system - it was quick to develop in, it was fast on the right hardware and it worked.

    Unfortunately, that was in 1985, when the company was in its infancy - but sure, it worked for the next 25 years, and it worked as originally intended.

    The downside was that Sculptor (the company) went from being an active entity with dozens of developers to essentially a single person releasing maintenance releases every now and then.

    The bigger downside was that it was never designed to talk to anything else - hence the kludge described above. So moving from Sculptor became a harder and harder problem the more you used it - but I'm going to guess that the same could be said for any one of dozens of other 1980s RAD systems out there that are still in use today.

  • (cs)

    Shades of XKCD #763.

    When will we ever reach a state such that people stop using such Rube Goldberg kluges as this to move data around, and use sensible approaches?

  • (cs)

    TRWTF is that the IT department did not make a back-up of the PC before they reimaged it.

    Seriously. The employee was here for 35 years and suddenly passes away without a chance to hand anything over, and you don't take a snapshot/image of the system before reimaging it just in case? You never know what "mission critical" stuff people store on a PC.

    When I was running the show at a previous employer, I put down a policy to ALWAYS take an image of the machine before reimaging. Many considered it overkill, but at the small-to-medium sized companies I have been at it really saves you in the long run, especially when the other/previous IT had very loose control over workstations. You would not believe how many times that "mission critical" worksheet was stored in some obscure place (office temp files) that you do not normally back-up and restore.

    The amount of time and money it saved us made it a worthwhile process.

  • dc (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    That's the back-end to the Business Information Technology Historical E-System.

    A BITH huh? Must be what you choke down after taking a bite?

  • Nagesh (unregistered)

    I having noticed that I ain't commented on this code still.

  • (cs) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    I don't get it... If nobody ever accessed that data, how did they notice the system was gone in the first place?
    They started hearing the incessant clacking of the CD-ROM drive on ITAPPMONROBOT.

    Seriously, it could have just been an SNMP trap; although I would have been really surprised they would bother trapping alerts from a PC that wasn't even important enough to put in the data center.

  • Rover (unregistered)
    1. User visits website 2. PHP takes required parameters 3. PHP formats parameters into a command line structure 4. PHP calls rsh with the command line structure as a parameter to a shell script 5. rsh connects to the AIX server and runs the given command ...
    If anything, this process is over-documented. Once you know that PHP is building a command line, the rest is pretty obvious. As is TRWTF. Did anyone know how to properly handle web form parameters passed to commands back then? For that matter, did PHP even exist 25 years ago?
  • Jack (unregistered)

    We laugh at the IT guy who reimaged a computer without knowing what it was doing, but just a couple days ago we had an IT guy who closed a browser window without knowing what it was doing either. Same error, just on a different scale.

    Oh yeah, he should be laughed at too.

    Carry on.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to Mark Donoghue
    Mark Donoghue:
    Warehouse Historical Order Retrieval E-System = WHORE

    Surely a made up name?

    Ummm ... yes.

    All the names in these stories are changed.

    Next baffling mystery: Why is it that so many people whose dead bodies are found with no identification are named "John Doe" or "Jane Doe"? Is there something wrong with the Doe family?

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    Shades of XKCD #763.

    When will we ever reach a state such that people stop using such Rube Goldberg kluges as this to move data around, and use sensible approaches?

    This will probably happen at about the same time that "sensible" approaches can be implemented more quickly and more cheaply than kludges.

  • jay (unregistered)

    Just from a dramatic/story-telling point of view, a serious flaw to this story is that the fact that all the orders on the system are 25 years old is never mentioned until the hero points this out as the key to the solution. For good story-telling, you should give the reader SOME clue to the solution before suddenly revealing it.

    This would be like writing a murder mystery where at the climax the brilliant detective reveals that he knew Mr Brimmer was the killer when he observed that the design on his ring matched the oddly-shaped scar on the victim's face, and that the reason why he went through the odd show of telling Mr Brimmer's fortune by reading his palm was so he could examine the ring ... but never before this in the story did you mention the scar or the ring and you never had a scene where the detective read Mr Brimmer's palm.

  • bored_again (unregistered) in reply to Mark Donoghue
    Mark Donoghue:
    Warehouse Historical Order Retrieval E-System = WHORE

    Surely a made up name?

    No it's not, stop calling me Shirley!

  • Comrade Aachen (unregistered) in reply to Mr Keith

    Sorry, Stan Kelly-Bootle used that pun about 1990 in Unix Review...

    captcha: wisi, as in widi, winki

  • (cs) in reply to bored_again

    that is funnier heard than read

  • (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    PiisAWheeL:
    Also, Why the hell would somebody bother reimaging a 25 year old server for use? The artical should read "Somebody decided to throw it out the window and that lead to the discovery that their 25 year old records were no longer available because it landed on the ceo's car." or some other such nonsense.

    What it takes to get something new added to the workplace: a single chance randomly-fired neuron in the brain of some marketing guy.

    What it takes to get something old and unused removed from the workplace: a complete reversal of the Earth's axis. If you're lucky.

    Also, I thought we were going to learn that for the last 25 of those 35 dedicated years, Jim had been running an illegal bookmaking business out of his cubicle using the company's critical server.

    The oldest computer I own is a 700mhz pentium something or other (I have a small web cluster, but that one is my email box). I'm sure if you asked anybody if they wanted to donate an old box to a project, you could probably find one. I can understand being lazy and letting what is working just continue to work, but anything from 25 years ago is gonna be so ancient I don't know what you would actually do with it.

    As for point 2, I throw things out around here all the time. I can understand if its useful, but this server doesnt sound like it is.

    If jim was running and illegal bookmaking business, the evidence was lost when it was reimaged.

    And I would like the namebrand of that hard drive that sat there quietly and did its job for 25 years, and then went on to be reimaged. They don't build em like that anymore.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to dc
    dc:
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    That's the back-end to the Business Information Clearinghouse Technology Historical E-System.
    A BITH huh? Must be what you choke down after taking a bite?
    Oops, sorry about that. Those responsible have been stacked.
  • (cs) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    Seriously, it could have just been an SNMP trap; although I would have been really surprised they would bother trapping alerts from a PC that wasn't even important enough to put in the data center.
    It was in the data center. It was just in a dark corner somewhere in it. Maybe a basement, or possibly, it had a few more pcs and some wood stacked on it to make a makeshift table for jims late night gambling operations.
  • Some Jerk (unregistered) in reply to Some Jerk
    Some Jerk:
    that is funnier heard than read
    You're funnier anything other than read.
  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Just from a dramatic/story-telling point of view, a serious flaw to this story is that the fact that all the orders on the system are 25 years old is never mentioned until the hero points this out as the key to the solution.
    The most serious flaw is that 90% of this story is complete and utter fiction. Hey, Alex, you do comprehend that the draw of sites like this is that they feature TRUE stories, yes?
  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    The most serious flaw is that 90% of this story is complete and utter fiction.
    A curious perversion, indeed!
  • Zylon (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    jay:
    Just from a dramatic/story-telling point of view, a serious flaw to this story is that the fact that all the orders on the system are 25 years old is never mentioned until the hero points this out as the key to the solution.
    The most serious flaw is that 90% of this story is complete and utter fiction. Hey, Alex, you do comprehend that the draw of sites like this is that they feature TRUE stories, yes?
    Nice observation, b00b the perpetual n00b.
  • Wonk (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    dc:
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    That's the back-end to the Business Information Clearinghouse Technology Historical E-System.
    A BITH huh? Must be what you choke down after taking a bite?
    Oops, sorry about that. Those responsible have been stacked.

    Ah, yes. Of course....The BICTHES system.

  • (cs)

    Acronyms (there are so many)...

    Florine Uranium Carbon Potassium

    Well sort of!

  • (cs) in reply to herby
    herby:
    Acronyms (there are so many)...

    Florine Uranium Carbon Potassium

    Well sort of!

    Frequent Use Can Kickoff Emergency Reboot

  • gfhfdhrdudyuinyr (unregistered)

    Hey guys, has anyone pointed out yet that the name spells WHORES? Let me know.

  • (cs) in reply to gfhfdhrdudyuinyr

    yes... several times

  • YR (unregistered) in reply to gfhfdhrdudyuinyr
    gfhfdhrdudyuinyr:
    Hey guys, has anyone pointed out yet that the name spells WHORES? Let me know.

    Rescue Environment Auxiliary Documenting the Central Omniscient Master Mega E-Neuron Troubleshooting Server

  • s73v3r (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Coyne:
    Shades of XKCD #763.

    When will we ever reach a state such that people stop using such Rube Goldberg kluges as this to move data around, and use sensible approaches?

    This will probably happen at about the same time that "sensible" approaches can be implemented more quickly and more cheaply than kludges.

    Or when those who dictate the implementation of the cheap kludges are the ones who actually have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to Wonk
    Wonk:
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    dc:
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    That's the back-end to the Business Information Clearinghouse Technology Historical E-System.
    A BITH huh? Must be what you choke down after taking a bite?
    Oops, sorry about that. Those responsible have been stacked.

    Ah, yes. Of course....The BICTHES system.

    This is gaining humor the more he screws it up.

  • (cs) in reply to YR
    YR:
    gfhfdhrdudyuinyr:
    Hey guys, has anyone pointed out yet that the name spells WHORES? Let me know.

    Rescue Environment Auxiliary Documenting the Central Omniscient Master Mega E-Neuron Troubleshooting Server

    +1 I like it.

  • (cs) in reply to Richard

    I'm probably going to get murdered by Alex for this, but I think its well accepted (and admitted by himself) that he "fictionalises" accounts to

    boost the comment count as everyone piles on about how unbelievable it is.

  • Jimbles (unregistered) in reply to Richard
    Richard:
    That was all fictionalised - there is no "WHORE", it's not an ecommerce platform, the server wasn't reimaged and there was no hurried remplementation.

    See my last post.

    Hmm....how do you know that this is YOUR submission, if the story is totally different? Perhaps the list is a coinky-dink

  • Only in America (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Mark Donoghue:
    Warehouse Historical Order Retrieval E-System = WHORE

    Surely a made up name?

    Ummm ... yes.

    All the names in these stories are changed.

    Next baffling mystery: Why is it that so many people whose dead bodies are found with no identification are named "John Doe" or "Jane Doe"? Is there something wrong with the Doe family?

    wikipedia:
    Origin

    The name "John Doe", often spelled "Doo," along with "Richard Roe" or "Roo" were regularly invoked in English legal instruments to satisfy technical requirements governing standing and jurisdiction, beginning perhaps as early as the reign of England's King Edward III (1312–1377).[5]

    Other fictitious names for a person involved in litigation under English law were John-a-Noakes, or John Noakes/Nokes and John-a-Stiles/John Stiles.[6]

    The Oxford English Dictionary states that John Doe is "the name given to the fictitious lessee of the plaintiff, in the (now obsolete in the UK) mixed action of ejectment, the fictitious defendant being called Richard Roe".

    This particular use became obsolete in the UK in 1852:

    As is well known, the device of involving real people as notional lessees and ejectors was used to enable freeholders to sue the real ejectors. These were then replaced by the fictional characters John Doe and Richard Roe. Eventually the medieval remedies were (mostly) abolished by the Real Property Limitation Act of 1833; the fictional characters of John Doe and Richard Roe by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852; and the forms of action themselves by the Judicature Acts 1873-75."
Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Respondent) v Meier and another(FC) (Appellant) and others and another (FC)(Appellant) and another (2009).[7]

    The term 'John Doe Injunction' (or John Doe Order)[8] is used in the UK to describe an injunction sought against someone whose identity is not known at the time it is issued:

    "8.02 If an unknown person has possession of the confidential personal information and is threatening to disclose it, a 'John Doe' injunction may be sought against that person. The first time this form of injunction was used since 1852 in the United Kingdom was in 2005 when lawyers acting for JK Rowling and her publishers obtained an interim order against an unidentified person who had offered to sell chapters of a stolen copy of an unpublished Harry Potter novel to the media".[9]

    Unlike in the United States the name (John) Doe does not actually appear in the formal name of the case, for example: X & Y v Persons Unknown [2007] HRLR 4.[10]

    It's amazing what Wikipedia comes up with.....or not
  • (cs) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    and come on, that last comment of mine was brilliant, you must feature it...
    Confucius say: man who begs for features has no features.
  • Dirk (unregistered) in reply to PiisAWheeL
    PiisAWheeL:
    "Somebody decided to throw it out the window and that lead to the discovery that their 25 year old records were no longer available because it landed on the ceo's car."
    That's funny.
  • Endurion (unregistered)

    As sad as it seems, that process description beats everything I've seen in the last years in clearness and conciseness.

  • Dirk (unregistered) in reply to Endurion
    Endurion:
    As sad as it seems, that process description beats everything I've seen in the last years in clearness and conciseness.
    1. Do something

    This is even more clear and concise, however, not very helpfull.

  • Randy Snicker (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    I don't get it... If nobody ever accessed that data, how did they notice the system was gone in the first place?
    I have a feeling they also actively added to that data - i.e. the old server essentially ran the company.
  • (cs) in reply to The Bytemaster
    The Bytemaster:
    Seriously. The employee was here for 35 years and suddenly passes away without a chance to hand anything over, and you don't take a snapshot/image of the system before reimaging it just in case?
    Although it is not explicitly mentioned, the two events were causally linked. Just not in the direction most people assume.
  • (cs) in reply to Richard
    Richard:
    I think the best lesson I took away from this entire system was that no matter how well placed your intentions *now*, decisions taken when you were still a baby will do their best to screw you over.

    The problem with Sculptor was that it was an excellent green screen, centralised data entry and reporting system - it was quick to develop in, it was fast on the right hardware and it worked.

    Unfortunately, that was in 1985, when the company was in its infancy - but sure, it worked for the next 25 years, and it worked as originally intended.

    The downside was that Sculptor (the company) went from being an active entity with dozens of developers to essentially a single person releasing maintenance releases every now and then.

    The bigger downside was that it was never designed to talk to anything else - hence the kludge described above. So moving from Sculptor became a harder and harder problem the more you used it - but I'm going to guess that the same could be said for any one of dozens of other 1980s RAD systems out there that are still in use today.

    So: the real WTF is programs, processes and applications which are so good and work so well, they need next-to-no maintenance, and so when they fail, it's because the hardware they run on has deteriorated to such an extent that it will no longer support them?

    It appears to be a truism, therefore, that it pays to write shoddy, crashy, high-maintenance applications which constantly alert you (by failure) to their presence, ensuring that you never forget to guide them by the arm as they stagger decrepitly across the rickety gang-plank of Upgrade.

  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Just from a dramatic/story-telling point of view, a serious flaw to this story is that the fact that all the orders on the system are 25 years old is never mentioned until the hero points this out as the key to the solution. For good story-telling, you should give the reader SOME clue to the solution before suddenly revealing it.

    This would be like writing a murder mystery where at the climax the brilliant detective reveals that he knew Mr Brimmer was the killer when he observed that the design on his ring matched the oddly-shaped scar on the victim's face, and that the reason why he went through the odd show of telling Mr Brimmer's fortune by reading his palm was so he could examine the ring ... but never before this in the story did you mention the scar or the ring and you never had a scene where the detective read Mr Brimmer's palm.

    Won't work. If he's examining his palm, then, assuming the scar is caused by the perp hitting him in the face with a clenched fist, he's not going to be able to see the design on the ring, as this will then be face down towards the table. Think again ...

  • (cs)

    This site is becoming a WTF.

    There is no WTF at all in the fact that someone wrote a system that worked perfectly at the time in 1985 with the technology that was available to them, and was good enough to keep going for 25 years or so.

    Most WTFs that I have experienced are not really that funny. And WTF code on the systems of any company I work is private / copyrighted to the company no matter how bad it is, and cannot be published on the internet.

    Some of it is badly written, other stuff, whilst looking valid is plain inefficient, and I have encountered much code that is both without being so WTF'y to make you laugh, i.e. it needs a moderate amount of expertise to see what is wrong with it, and possibly some explanation for the less intuitive.

    My own personal WTF in the workplace is I so often feel I am being misplaced, wasting a lot of time waiting around, not being given the projects / work I would be most effective doing with managerial views that we are paid by the line and thus they can cut costs by not authorising projects that involve writing code whilst still retaining our services to fix bugs or make small enhancements.

  • (cs) in reply to Watson
    Watson:
    The Bytemaster:
    Seriously. The employee was here for 35 years and suddenly passes away without a chance to hand anything over, and you don't take a snapshot/image of the system before reimaging it just in case?
    Although it is not explicitly mentioned, the two events were causally linked. Just not in the direction most people assume.

    Perhaps the real WTF is that some people can not afford to retire, e.g. because their pensions have been the victims of corporate raiding / embezzlement, etc., or because the governmental / financial infrastructure has no provision for care of the elderly and all that pinko commie rubbish, and so people have to work till they drop dead. While I was seconded for a year or two to the US office of the last company I worked for this happened twice: once it was an old girl in her mid-80s who worked in a data input department, and the second time was a Vietnam vet in poor health who had a heart-attack in the office. IMO this sort of attitude is unhealthy.

  • (cs) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    stagger decrepitly across the rickety gang-plank of Upgrade.

    Woah! I think I'm in love!

  • (cs) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    This site is becoming a WTF.

    (Long rant snipped.)

    You're just mad because you'll never get a featured comment.
  • (cs) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    There is no WTF at all in the fact that someone wrote a system that worked perfectly at the time in 1985 with the technology that was available to them, and was good enough to keep going for 25 years or so.
    The "WTF" in this case is simply the tendency that "well-designed" systems don't usually last 25 years, but that systems put together with baling wire and duct tape, the systems that should barely even work in the first place by proper design standards, are the systems that persist for years to come -- usually without problems.
    Cbuttius:
    Most WTFs that I have experienced are not really that funny. And WTF code on the systems of any company I work is private / copyrighted to the company no matter how bad it is, and cannot be published on the internet.
    I'm guessing this is the same for most companies. That said, most of what gets posted here can be sufficiently anonymized while illustrating the problem. I'd be hard-pressed to believe that every single line of code you consider to be a WTF in your business is so unique that it would immediately identify your company and its industry. Flip side of that is, if your code is that unique that it's creating new categories of bad coding practices, they're unique enough that no one else will have enough information to be able to identify it back to your company.
    Cbuttius:
    Some of it is badly written, other stuff, whilst looking valid is plain inefficient, and I have encountered much code that is both without being so WTF'y to make you laugh, i.e. it needs a moderate amount of expertise to see what is wrong with it, and possibly some explanation for the less intuitive.
    There are posts all the time here where someone needs to provide background or explanation. I'm not seeing the problem. As a person who does programming every so often but not regularly (my primary job is a network engineer), I appreciate the explanations. Sometimes I understand the problem on my own; sometimes I need background. I understand Java and C++ concepts but have never written application-grade programs in them. I've never written anything C# but I get the gist of what's going on in the code snippets. The site says "Curious Perversions in Information Technology", not "Curious Perversions in Programming." So there are people here who need background.

    If I tell you I had a spanning-tree loop for years because of an incorrect VLAN ID on an encapsulation dot1Q statement on a Cisco AP, you may go "Huh?" Whereas someone else would go "Oh hell yeah, I had a problem like that too that drove me to Hellenback!" (It was an AP that was already up and running when I joined the networking team; the core router's routing protocol would complain about two potential neighbors not being on the same subnet. That was my clue there were two VLANs being bridged somewhere along the line.)

    Cbuttius:
    My own personal WTF in the workplace is I so often feel I am being misplaced, wasting a lot of time waiting around, not being given the projects / work I would be most effective doing with managerial views that we are paid by the line and thus they can cut costs by not authorising projects that involve writing code whilst still retaining our services to fix bugs or make small enhancements.
    Sounds like many of the stories here. Writing about it can be cathartic. Why do you think people like Snoofle submit so many stories? They've got to get it off their chests or they'll explode.

    For me, I have a story I'll be posting soon to the Side Bar that made me storm out of the conference room the other day shaking my head. Four hours of my life I'll never get back, not to mention four hours that I could've been doing something much more productive.

    If you think the stories are weak, go back through the archives. I found I really enjoy Tales From the Interview and have gone back through many of those. CodeSOD is my least favorite, simply because coding is not what I do every day.

    This site is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a relief. If it's not doing that for you, well, maybe you should take a break from it. If what is supposed to be relief is just adding to your frustrations, then you need to find another outlet.

  • (cs) in reply to nonpartisan
    nonpartisan:
    This site is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a relief. If it's not doing that for you, well, maybe you should take a break from it. If what is supposed to be relief is just adding to your frustrations, then you need to find another outlet.
    +1
  • Dman (unregistered) in reply to Don
    Don:
    Warehouse Historical Order Retrieval E-System Not the first time WHORES stopped production...

    more appropriate: Not the first time the WHORE went down

  • (cs) in reply to Dman
    Dman:
    Don:
    Warehouse Historical Order Retrieval E-System Not the first time WHORES stopped production...

    more appropriate: Not the first time the WHORE went down

    They may not be producing... but it is a safe bet that they are reproducing.

  • Clean Developer (unregistered)

    Story would have been better without the curse word; it was unnecessary.

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