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Admin
I thought only bytes had nibbles.
(well - and hot girls, but I don't get to see those so often)
Admin
My favorite all time Joeism is from a EE I worked with right out of college:
What's the difference between a hard drive and memory?
followed closely by (same guy):
Is a C compiler hard to write?
Admin
new project manager hired from *almost big 6* consulting company:
developers: documentuum cannot accept file streams as an argument so it has to accept the file name and path so it can retrieve it from the file system
project manager: "What's a file system?"
Admin
during my first week as a php developer at my current job i wrote a function to go through an array removing any duplicated data
when i added it to the library of our user defined functions and told my coworkers, they asked "why didn't you just use array_unique?!?"
so now before i write a function to do something, i search to make sure it doesn't already exist.
Admin
That's called a "fork bomb" or a "wabbit". You can write an even more concise version as a shell script: "$0 & $0 &". The exponential explosion will ruin your computer faster than you can react. Reboot time....
Admin
This is hilarious. I had no idea someone of that intelligence was even capable of getting a job.
Admin
Nothing against delimited files per se. The problems with CSV in particular are:
- Comma was a poor choice for the delimiter, since it is highly likely to occur in ordinary text. More likely than, for example, literal greater-than or less-than is in an HTML document.
- The solution for escaping commas, which is to surround the entire call with quotes, is harder to parse than if the comma was escaped with (for example) a backslash.
- Esacping of literal quotes is accomplished by doubling them. In other words, two different ways to escape things in one file format. This further complicates the parsing.
It is obvious that the format was originally designed by someone who just didn't think about things like "what happens if somebody wants to use a literal comma?". Then later someone did, and they had to hack in the quoting. Etc. The CSV format is a WTF all to itself.Admin
Okay, this one isn't completely fair since it involves someone who doesn't even claim to know anything about computers and doesn't work with them in his job, but his name WAS Joe. My wife told me the story of her first husband calling her up at her job (she was a tech writer) and pretending to be from the help desk and told her that he needed to repair her computer because it was reported that it was leaking ink.
Admin
"Files on a server will deteriorate over time and need to be refreshed" -- director of computing and networking at a relatively popular travel booking agency.
"CVS can't handle images, so don't use CVS if you want to checkin images; it will corrupt them." -- HTML 'coder' person at same travel booking agency.
7 classes (out of ~6500) were all named the same yet resided in different packages. When I asked another "developer" why that was, he responded:
Him: Well, they all have a subset of the data.
Me: Um, but none of them inherit from each other.
Him: Why would we want to do that? They have different pieces of the data.
Oh, and this same travel booking agency also instantiated factory classes. No no no, not a singleton method to get ahold of an instance of the class, they outright instantiated the class. eg "Factory myFactory = new Factory();".
Admin
Dear Lord, I've implemented code to parse CSV, and it's horrifying. It seems simple: rows are seperated with \r\n, columns are seperated by commas. What could be easier? Then the special cases arrive. Need a comma or a new lines? Wrap the field in double quotes. Need quotes in your quotes? Duplicate them. Fiddly and annoying. The real fun starts when you start coping with real data found in the field. A database dump I was responsible for parsing (I believe from Access, but I don't know) wouldn't put a string in quotes if there were no commas or new lines. That's all well and good, but is a problem if the string itself begins with a double quote. So when the code encountered a field starting with a double quote, it had to continue scanning as though it might be a naked string (scan until comma, no de-escaping) or a quoted string (scan until double quote followed by a copy, do de-escape. My original routine was quite simple, but it eventually bloated coping with these stupid exceptions, then optimizations to avoid scanning character-by-character while maintaining the exceptions. The end result, 80 lines of Perl. (I'm famliar with the various CPAN modules for CSV parsing. At the time none handled the "string begins with a double quote, but doesn't end with one" case correctly. Indeed, if I recall correctly, none were willing to handle newlines in the data either. Perhaps the situation has since improved.)
CAPTCHA: zork. A maze of twisty little passages indeed.
Admin
This was in an internship so normally I'd give the guy some slack.
Admin
I'm on the phone with a guy from another office trying my best to explain why his (brute force linear) search algorithm was causing major performance problems. That since the data did not depend on any specific ordering, and since it was searched through millions of times, and since the dataset was tens of thousands of items long - that sorting once and using a binary search would provide a substantial performance improvement with just a few lines of code.
His response was "We already thought of that, but we can't use a binary search because we're storing strings, not binary data."
Admin
A guy at my company sent an email to a discussion group (that encompassed more than half the company) asking if anyone had the cracked version of winzip.
Admin
a shared system and no one set up process limits properly? gg IT..
Admin
Well, yeah, if you don't mind getting into barfights on a regular basis...
Captcha: Foxtrot
Admin
RFC 4180 says:
Of course I'm joking that anyone would expect Access to abide by any RFC.
Admin
Yeah, in the mainframe world they call a csv file a "database". Joking... sort of.
Admin
I was hired to do QA at a place where the DBA didn't believe in enforcing referential integrity in the DB. He also didn't believe in documenting the system. So not only did no one else know how things were supposed to be related, they couldn't even derive it from the constraints.
After giving up on ever getting him to document anything, I just asked him point-blank, "If I don't know what the DB is supposed to be doing, how am I supposed to test it?"
"I write it, it works. That's how you test it."
Admin
During my tenure at a publishing company (one of the largest in the world), we had to let go of a "Senior J2EE Engineer" after about 3 weeks due to his lack of ability to produce even a single line of usable code, despite his extensive overtime. While firing him, we sited lack of acceptable progress, to which he responded, with a sales pitch-like tone in his voice, "Would it change anything if I told you I was able to successfully connect to the database?" No Barry. It wouldn't.
Admin
Good anonymous, you look kinda cool. What the heck were you writing, a replacement for /sbin/init?
Admin
One morning, at an old job, there was a note on my desk when I came in:
[themagni], there's a fly buzzing around the office. Don't hurt it. Catch it, and let it outside.
Admin
Ok. This one came from my high school programming class. We were asked (pre the days of the interweb) to write some code to display an information site about a local business. We were doing this in pascal. The code was then to be graded by a statewide education board. The problem was that the previous year the education board decided to merge the programming course with the 'Information Processing & Management' course (aka, Secretarial Studies). So, while the board was composed of 50% programmers, the other 50% were glorified typists, and knew just enough to be dangerous.
At the time, I was regularly involved in the demo scene and was pretty adept at x86 ASM. So, for my graphics routines, I wrote everything in ASM. My pascal code was pretty clean, lots of comments and decent style - typical suck-up code written by someone trying to impress.
My assignment came back with a B- (I was truly expecting an A+). The comments said that I had not used useful variable names - "Why is cx sometimes for loops and ax is for Y coordinates, when bx is for X coordinates - USE MEANINGFUL NAMES".
Admin
This is the coding counterpart of "hiding by closing your eyes".
Admin
> ulimit -u 32
> $0 & $0 &
> fork: killed
or something like that
Admin
He should've took one or two of them.
Admin
Boy, that reminds me of my very early days in VBS. I re-invented Split().
Sure, now I can laugh about it...
Admin
Context: a very very smart but pretty unstable developer has been increasingly absent and scattered. Finally comes in but is constantly going out in the hall to take cell calls. We figure he's interviewing. I come out of the bathroom to hear:
No! Look! I am NOT going to jail over this again!
Admin
In the early 90's I worked for a major computer manufacturer (based in South Dakota, large black and white boxes). Anyway, had a coworker who had done everything or knew everything, i.e. his father wrote OS/2 in the backseat of the station wagon, and was sueing IBM for royalties... We had programmable keyboards back then, you could program a series of keystrokes into a single key, usually used on the F-keys. This individual worked in tech support. We remapped his Enter keys to Ctrl-Alt-Del. In the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, this was a quick reboot. He'd actually called IT for a new keyboard before someone fessed up. Another time, a female coworker was talking about having a cyst on an ovary. Mister Done-That immediately pipes up, "Oh yeah, I had one of those a couple years ago!"
Captcha = clueless (How appropriate)
Admin
I assume you're talking about Visual Studio.
Give the guy a break. I've been programming for almost 30 years and been using Java IDE's for years, but using VS about a month. I'm always asking questions like this. VS just doesn't make sense -- completely unlike anything I've ever seen. BTW, as long as I have your attention - WTF is this AssemblyInfo.vb file good for?
Admin
In many other cases, contractors are brought in by the consulting company who doesn't really care how crappy they are as long as they are billable.
Admin
I worked at an aerospace company with a lot of old Joe's. Overheard from the cube next to mine:
Joe1: What this number 4096 I see everywhere? Why not use 4000 or something?
Joe2: It's two to the sixteenth.
And these guys were designing an IFF device for the air force.
captcha: paula (ha!)
Admin
I actually did that at school while studying computer programming, just to see how long the server would last.
It took ten seconds to put the school server completely out of order. Funnily enough, the teachers actually thanked me for the experimentation.
Admin
My objection is that they're not standard, usually not documented and frequently badly implemented.
You often have to generate CSV files just to see what format you're supposed to import. How does the output engine handle commas? Quotes them? Fine, how does it handle quotes? Double quoting, escape characters? Maybe it doesn't do anything with commas or quotes and then you're in for fun...
There's also no typing. So you get fun like Excel turning extension numbers (032) into numbers (32) even if you quote the things.
Don't get me wrong, I like and use delimited files but there are some issues there.
Rich
Admin
As a contractor, I had just finished explaining "how we're doing things" on the current project to the walrus er I mean new contractor hired by our grand leader. The description went something along the lines of:
Me: Classic OO ASP sucks the data out of our MS SQL server database, generating XML that is then rendered to the web page as HTML via an XSLT file we use, based on the current user's login. Some simple DHTML here and there livens things up a bit, but otherwise it's mostly simple web programming.
Walrus: *nods*
Me: So, Walrus, what sort of technologies are you comfortable with?
Walrus: Well, I just bought this digital set top box at home, it records TV to a hard drive, yeah that's pretty cool.
Me: .....
He was (apparently) the spitting image of our grand leader's *husband* and well, dumb as dog sh!t. He came in with no domain or technological knowledge and was made project manager. In one meeting, he was trying to convince us that the project we had to do (around 8 man weeks of work) could be done in two weeks, as long as we didn't try to "do it properly". I finally cracked it and asked:
Me: have you ever developed an online database application?
Walrus: I single-handedly developed the intranet for <INSERT PRESTIGIOUS COMPANY NAME HERE>
Me: and which database did you use there?
Walrus: it had 3000 html pages
The full-timers said I was far too abrupt / brusqe with him - calling him on his BS and generally not backing down on my desire to "code it properly". He seemed adamant that we could just throw it together then we would have time later to "go back and do it properly, later". Our meetings were basically hammer fests of him saying XYZ and me saying "uh, no, you can't say that and we aren't going to do it like that".
After one such meeting, we dispersed, and one of the non-developer types sitting a cubicle away stood up and fvcking applauded me, saying they agreed with my attitude of "do it right the first time". That was something I had not seen before.
Our grand leader used to hang sh!t on the IT manager behind his back, call him ugly, slow, stupid, a whole host of things. The Walrus was in a meeting with Grand Leader, IT manager and a couple of other managers, and essentially regurgitated EVERYTHING that had been said, but to the IT manager's face. I missed that meeting but a week or two later was there when some very important (lawyer) types came and escorted the contractor from the building.
I left not long after, and the other full-time developers were all gone inside 2-3 months.
Captcha: tango - as in, the complex dance of a contractor's life with PHBs and all that political BS.
Admin
An email arrives from HR outlining the policy about inappropriate content on company computers.
Developer> So, are you going to change your background and screen saver?
New Guy> You think they mean stuff like this? [gestures to topless woman not really wearing some frilly
lingerie on his screen]
New Guy on Phone to Girlfriend> Look just deposit my paycheck into your account... No, I can't put it in my account. That bitch garnished it for child support payments...Trust me, the cops will never find out you were involved.
Admin
Ask it whether the glass is half empty or half full.
Admin
Admin
Normally, I don't mention anything I read on the daily WTF in group meetings, mostly to avoid the possibility that someone may be offended because they think I'm talking about something they've done (again--thank goodness for layoffs). Let's face it, TDWTF is often too close to reality to be funny to a group of developers and their managers, or too specific to IT or development domains that we aren't involved in. Some members of our group actually don't know how to write a SQL INSERT statement, but we're all OK with that because that's not what we hired them for.
But not today. Today we can all lose a few minutes of productivity to those five lines. :-)
Admin
Why don't you put the solution in source control? Adding manually to the solution every file that someone happens to have added to source control sounds silly.
Admin
Context: a very very smart but pretty unstable developer has been increasingly absent and scattered. Finally comes in but is constantly going out in the hall to take cell calls. We figure he's interviewing. I come out of the bathroom to hear:
No! Look! I am NOT going to jail over this again!
I think I know this guy, was it in NYC?
Admin
Did they also thank you not to do it again?
Admin
A cornered 'Joe':
"I didn't change anything! I just modified it a little."
Admin
"I don't know about 'html tags', but there's a less-than sign, a B then an R, then a greater-than sign"
-CEO who prides himself on tech savvy
Admin
One going against the grain of anti-consultant posts here ...
I was once consulting with a few colleagues. A team of internal staff had produced a document that was supposed to be the design for some comms software, but was basically complete gibberish. Summoning up all of his reserves of diplomacy (after all, he was external and they were permanent staff) my colleague asked how they thought that programmers would be able to use the document.
One of the authors brightly: "Oh, we don't know. We're designers, not programmers."
Admin
I guess I should learn not to reply when I first encounter a reply-worthy post, but instead read thru all the rest of the comments to see if someone beat me to the punch (in this case, several times).
So, given the number of people here who understand what a WTF CSV is, do we have the critical mass necessary to Just Say No and eliminate this monstrosity?
Admin
I'm quite sure BOTH of them are winners too.
Admin
Delimiters in the strings. (Use quotes, of course)
Quotes in the strings. (Escape them of course!)
Escape characters in the strings. (Escape them of course!)
You argue against your self, "I loves CSV" and "Tabs are better than commas"
Admin
Admin
Not as long as I have specs that require I export data in CSV for import into Excel. I could write the export as a more acceptable DSV, but that would make it too hard for the unwashed masses to import into Excel (custom seperated file), and since they pay the bills....
Admin
I thought the collective noun for consultants was a "wallet"...