• (cs) in reply to Simmo
    Anonymous:
    John Hensley:
    codeman38:

    Oh, it gets even worse.  The French version of Excel uses a semicolon as the default delimiter, because commas are used as decimal points in French.

    Which, of course, means that Francophones and Anglophones can't share CSV files with the default settings.

    I wish I were joking.

    I would not be surprised if this difference were motivated more by French hypernationalism than any technical concerns.

    ... And that comment demonstrates anglocentricism (or perhaps North American stereotyping of French people?). The whole of Europe uses commas as decimal points. There is life outside your continent.

     That's not what he was saying... It wasn't "France uses commas because of hypernationalism." It was "the French version of Excel uses a different "C"SV format than the US version because of hypernationalism."

     I have no clue if this is true (the fact that they can escape commas lends a little credence to it anyway), but I think you misunderstood.
     

  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to Reed

    Anonymous:
    Any time you get a resume, run it through a filter which replaces any adjective with "???????".  If you can still get any information from the sentence, other than that someone has heard of some buzzwords, then you can go forward with that.

    Hey, genius, can you send me that filter? 

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:
    Anonymous:
    John Hensley:
    codeman38:

    Oh, it gets even worse.  The French version of Excel uses a semicolon as the default delimiter, because commas are used as decimal points in French.

    Which, of course, means that Francophones and Anglophones can't share CSV files with the default settings.

    I wish I were joking.

    I would not be surprised if this difference were motivated more by French hypernationalism than any technical concerns.

    ... And that comment demonstrates anglocentricism (or perhaps North American stereotyping of French people?). The whole of Europe uses commas as decimal points. There is life outside your continent.

     That's not what he was saying... It wasn't "France uses commas because of hypernationalism." It was "the French version of Excel uses a different "C"SV format than the US version because of hypernationalism."

     I have no clue if this is true (the fact that they can escape commas lends a little credence to it anyway), but I think you misunderstood.
     

     

    It doesn't look like he misunderstood to me.

    Besides, French nationalism is nothing compared to the flag waving, pompous self-promotion of the US.

    Face it. The French aren't bad people. Racist wankers like John Hensley are.
     

  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to jub
    Anonymous:

    > Also, CSV sucks, so I wouldn't hold it against the guy..

    As much as CSV files may suck, clearly they have some advantages over certain alternatives:

    - Over binary files: because CSV is a human-readable, non-proprietary format

    - Over fixed-length record files: Because nobody wants to draw vertical lines on a sheet of paper with a ruler and count columns just to be able to import a bloody file. And what if the field size changes? The field length and number of fields in CSV files are relatively simple to alter.

    - Over XML: because you don't *always* want to be bothered with a full-fledged hierarchical parser library, and the speed penalty of XML over CSV can be significant.

    Finally (although technically the files wouldn't be CSV anymore) it another separator is used (tabs are popular and easy to filter/replace by spaces), they are insanely easy to parse.

    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     

    For starters. . .   If an address is entered into a database as, for example Box 123, Station "A", when that database is converted to csv it is forever f*cked.

    "Box 123, Station","","A","",

    Tab delimited, pipe delimited, great.  Please, no CSV.

    csv was developed to save disk space.  With PKZip and such, those requirements have been obviated.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to Licky Lindsay
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     
    Nothing against delimited files per se. The problems with CSV in particular are:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.

    humbled, I am.  

    but on the same page 

  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to mleh

    "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."

     

    I can't comment on the rest of it, but this is true.  The magnetic domains on a hard-drive are re-written when they are read.  Just one of the reasons regular back-ups mean you won't need the back-ups.

     

     

     

     

     

    ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦→+

  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Anonymous:

    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."

     

     

    You owe me a new keyboard. snort snort snort   captcha wtf

  • Matt (unregistered) in reply to Morbii
    "We had a field replacer that replaces fields in a file.  It goes sequentially through the file, replacing all fields.  One of my prior co-workers thought he could one up this "slow" proceedure and wrote an "optimized" replace function.  His function used regular expressions for each field replaced value because regular expressions were "faster".  He actually named the function OptimizedReplace() or some such garbage."

    One of my problems with Python is that it's hard to know how to optimize things, because optimizing is not a matter of "doing it a more efficient way" but rather of "touching more native C code in the class library." And so doing a regex replace on a huge string is actually faster in Python than doing an "efficient" replace on a char stream.

  • John Hensley (unregistered) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:

     That's not what he was saying... It wasn't "France uses commas because of hypernationalism." It was "the French version of Excel uses a different "C"SV format than the US version because of hypernationalism."

    What I said is that the French will screw with anything that comes from English speaking countries, however, trivial, in order to pretend that they're the center of the world. Hope it's clear now.


  • Bramster (unregistered) in reply to me
    Anonymous:

    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".

     

     

     

    It took a bit, but then it registered. . . :) 

     

  • (cs) in reply to mleh
    mleh:

    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();".   

    What's wrong with this? Since when do factories have to be singletons?

  • Justin (unregistered)

    I have a roommate named Joe that works in QA at the company I work at.  He has a tenancy to call in sick for interesting reasons:

    I called in sick.

    What do you have?

    I'm not sick, I had WoW cards to organize.

     

    I called in cause my back hurts. 

    What did you do to it?

    I think I hurt it playing Guitar Hero.

     

  • (cs) in reply to Justin

    I thought this one was bad...


    "Can you use OpenGL from PHP?"

    until I Googled "PHP OpenGL"...

  • Ron Pakston (unregistered) in reply to cheesy

    I once worked with a Senior Developer that told me

    "In java, you cannot always assume that every class extends java.lang.Object, They might have provided their own implementation" 

    W(ho)tf is they ?

     

  • (cs) in reply to Just
    Just:
    mleh:
    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();".   

    What's wrong with this? Since when do factories have to be singletons?

    I'm no expert on design patterns, but I thought the sole job of a factory class was to create an instance of another class, in which case you can just use a class method rather than instantiate a class and use an instance method. If for whatever reason you need a instance, you probably only need one for the factory, in which case you should use the singleton pattern. But we have no idea of the context so I really don't know what they were thinking.

    Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'd like to understand these design patterns better.
  • Webzter (unregistered) in reply to Zlodo

    Zlodo:
    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.

    I don't know about you, but every version of VS I've used with every version control system I've used has been flaky about registering a change on the project file when new files are added to the solution. As a result, it's easily possible to have files in version control only to not have the file show up in the solution.

  • chris travers (unregistered) in reply to codemoose

    "Boy, that reminds me of my very early days in VBS. I re-invented Split().

    Sure, now I can laugh about it..."

    Yeah, I can, but then I was once teaching myself C. I had decided to write a simple program that did some financial arithmetic. I was taking in strings of formatted financial information, carefully parsing them out and returning int's when one of my co-workers said to me, "Dude, use atoi"

    Me: "What's atoi?" him: "It converts ascii to int's" me: "Where do I find it?" him: "In the standard library..."

    I have come a long way since then... Or so I hope...

    Captcha: awesomeness

  • (cs) in reply to suzilou

    suzilou wrote:

    For one client, when I was newly on the project, they set me up with my Unix account.  When I asked what the initial password was, they said "'yoyo'.  we give all new accounts that password.  it's easy to remember since it's root's"

    I'm eating some fruit right now. This one was so bad that I stopped mid-bite.

    Christ van Willegen

     

  • (cs)

    I attended some transition meeting sometime ago:

    Me: I noticed several try catch but most catch blocks are empty. Why?
    Dev: We need this to propagate the error to the calling class.
    Me: Isn't it that when the catch is empty, the exception will still be handled unless you throw it again?
    Dev: No. Not if you do this...
    Dev adds "(Exception ex)" to the catch statement
    Dev: This will catch the exception and then you can do what you want with it.
    Me: ...
    My Manager: You wouldn't believe him?
    Me: !!!
    Me: Ok... I'll just try it out later... sigh



  • akcoder (unregistered) in reply to dotNetChick

    4 months or so back we were forced to hire a guy because he met the mandatory hiring requirements (He was Alaska Native and had a degree in CS).  Some of the gems from the interview:

    Me:  How long do you think it will take you to learn C#?
    Him: I can master it in 2 weeks. 
    Mind you only knew some perl and some c/c++

     
    Another Dev:  What are design patterns?
    Him:  Well....  They are patterns of design.


    So 4 months after he was hired, he still barely knows C# and the .NET Framework, still can't create a simple class without being virtually told every single line to type; and every comment/check-in starts with "This is to"

    I could go on and on with the Randy'isms

    captcha: giggity 

  • NameNotFoundException (unregistered)

    I once had build a rather large order processing system involving XML documents. Some time later, the project manager, a middle aged lady, asked me: "So our system knows XML, doesn't it? Can it do ASCII, too?"

    I went to great lengths to explain the difference to her, but for some reason she just wouldn't understand. Only later I realized that she probably meant flat-files.

    That lady was responsible for quite a number of IT projects in that company. Needless to say, development went slow and meetings were a major PITA. OK, one thing in her favor: They were using SAP, and that moloch is a world of its own, completely detached from the basic concepts of common CS.

  • (cs) in reply to Simmo

    Anonymous:
    The whole of Europe uses commas as decimal points.

    Not all. UK doesn't, as an example.

  • benjymous (unregistered)

    My favourite was from an utterly useless co-worker (who eventually got fired for suggesting that a member of the team only got hired as she was sleeping with the boss)

    I was working at a games company making football management games at the time.. 

    Me:  Why is all the grass in your prototype a funny shade of blue?

    Him: Well, um, I couldn't work out the RGB value for green 

  • Tony (unregistered) in reply to benjymous

    I used to work with a uselss contractor 'affectionately' known as Crazy Dave.

    One day he tried to net send a message to his mate, which said "I bet that girl behind you has a shaven haven!" Unfortunately he guessed his mate's windows login incorrectly, and the message was sent to a female two floors down. We all found out what happened when she came up to find him, bringing the girl who sat behind her, to find out WTF he was doing!

     The most incredible part was that he managed to keep hold of his job!
     

  • Jon Haugsand (unregistered) in reply to Davr
    Anonymous:

    My favorite line of code generated by a coworker. It's almost zen-like:

    var xml_xml = new XML(xml); // parse xml

     

    Actually, the following is a typically Java idiom:

     FooService fooService = (FooService) ServiceLocator.getService(FooService.class);

     There is no other way to do it.
     

  • n00bcoder (unregistered) in reply to Jack Hardcastle
    Anonymous:

    We have a board like this in our office for dumb user comments.  My favorite (besides the user that wanted to plug her laptop into her hotel room cable television to make it "surf the internet faster") is from a training session involving a popular Mac-based painting program.  The technician (now my boss) was trying to teach a group of teachers how to use the program in their classes.  After having shown them all the basic tools (brushes, stamps, paint buckets) he set them loose with the challenge, "Go wild!"

     Five minutes later, he looked over at one teacher to find nothing but a solitary yellow circle in the middle of her screen.  "What's wrong?" he asked.  "Are you uncomfortable with the tools?"

     "I know computers are expensive.  I didn't want to waste the paint."
     

     

    Wow. What can you say in such a situation?

  • (cs)

    I haven't read this entire thread, but...

    Alex Papadimoulis:

    I just used spray foam instead of concrete. That way, bugs don't eat it.
    You know, bugs don't eat concrete, right?
    Pfft - yeah they do.

    I've recently heard of termites in Florida that can at least eat through concrete.

  • Peter Hickman (unregistered) in reply to Simmo

    No, here in the UK we use . for a decimal point and , for as a thousands separator. We are part of Europe too you know. An island to the west, before you get to all that wet stuff.

     
    Simple enough for you?

     

  • William Steenbergh (unregistered) in reply to Peter Hickman

    A colleague of mine once said:

     

    "I had a hard times accessing and setting the graphical elements on <our own developed user component>. My solution? O, I made the object public in my program...'

     

    The entire intention of the excercise was of course to further develop the component, thus writing methods for the handling of these settings, instead of r*ping the oo-paradigm.

  • (cs) in reply to Peter Hickman

    Yeeerst, but the amusing/irritating/futile/eccentric joy of being the UK is that we are part of Europe and yet not. Nominally, yes; we pay preposterous taxes to subsidise dodgy continental olive-growers and the Brussels gravy-train like everyone else, but on the other hand we drink beer in pints ( good ), drive on the left ( why not? ) in miles ( ok ), pay in our own currency not Euros( good IMO ), and measure ourselves in feet and inches ( futile ). Oh and we use decimal point to mean decimal point, unlike all the rest of Europe, so CSV is definitely an anglo-targeted format, and one that clearly sux. I wonder if the comma as decimal point was a French Revolutionary invention, like most SI units? That would explain why Britain never took it up ( like most SI units ).

  • (cs)

    Hello,

     I have a Joeism: I work for a company who makes rating and billig software for telecommunication companies. Customers pay million of dollors for a licence. That isn't to much for those companies since they have million of customers and billion of calls per day.

     A new trainee joined my team. He want (he wanted?) to be a software developer. After a short time he understood what we do. One of his first questions was: "Why do the customers buy such a software. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire ten thousend chinese to do the rating by hand"?

     Well, I was so perplexed I hadn't an answer. ;-)

     

    Regards
    <var></var>
     

  • antijoe (unregistered)

    Joe: Hibernate? We should be using technology that's not just used in some nerd's blog.

     This is the same place where I was laughed at for suggesting we write unit tests....
     

  • (cs)

    A few weeks ago I had a user call in about a program that was printing documents in reverse order. For whatever reason I couldn't remotely connect to her computer, so I asked her to reboot, figuring this would fix both problems at once.

     

    Her: If I reboot, then you might not be able to see the problem.

    Me: If you try printing and it works right, then I won't need to see the problem.

    Her: But how will you fix it if it happens again?

    Me: That's why we're rebooting.

    Her: But I don't want to reboot. It might solve the problem and you won't be able to see it!

    Me (getting a little frustrated): Just reboot the computer.

     

    First time I've had a customer who was more concerned about me seeing a problem than fixing it. 

  • 2tCkOr (unregistered)

    Well, at one of my former co-workers monthly "performance" reviews our new boss asked him "What are your future goals?"  To which he responded, "To be making industry standard in this field."  Best guess is that new boss didn't like this response and he was 'let go' along with half of the department in a 'restructuring'.

     Of course, New boss wasn't the brightest star in the sky either...

    His famous words to use were:

    Munge - as in, We need to just munge that data to put in the database
    Lop - as in, What if we just lop off the end of that string
    Chunkify - as in, We need to chunkify that data so that we don't lose anything

     Also, during the complete overhaul and new data model that was being put in place (with a timeline of less than a month) he decided he was going to restructure and get rid of half the developers... needless to say that was 4 months ago and they have yet to get that or anything else put into production.

  • (cs) in reply to Jason
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    This guy has a wife and a girlfriend?  Man, utter brainlessness must be quite the aphrodisiac.

     

    Women can relate.
     

    One shouldn't talk about what one doesn't know...

  • (cs) in reply to Bramster
    Anonymous:

    I can't comment on the rest of it, but this is true.  The magnetic domains on a hard-drive are re-written when they are read.  Just one of the reasons regular back-ups mean you won't need the back-ups.

    Huh?  Since when?  Some HD tech (metal-in-gap) even uses different heads for read and write.  How can the read heads rewrite the data?

     

  • Not telling (unregistered)

    Once we had a guy here who was the little brother of someone in an important position at a firm we worked with. He was hired as a favor (his father even offered to secretly pay his salary) as a trainee programmer. Of course he fancied himself hot stuff and didn't have a clue... but he also produced a number of priceless non-computer related phrases.

    One time, when his manager told him it wasn't a good idea for him to drink beer during his lunch (which he had in our kitchen, BTW) he pondered this for a while and replied: "Oh... I get it... you're telling me this as advice so I don't do this in some job I might get in the future... thanks!"

    Captcha: Craptastic. Yes... that was his name.
     

  • Bruce (unregistered) in reply to suzilou

    No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     *cackle cackle cackle*
     

  • R Edmo (unregistered) in reply to Trinian

    There are (almost) stupid women as men out there.

  • CJ (unregistered)

    One of my favorite quotes was from a new Tester we hired.  She had a Masters in computer science, but when she asked me "What do I do with that .exe file you sent me?", I lost all respect for the school.

  • Cynic (unregistered)

    Frankly, I think you just made up the whole story.

  • Jon H (unregistered) in reply to Cynic

    Not programming related, but funny nonetheless:-

    My wife's sister once asked (whilst we were watching crimewatch) "Where is Caucasia?" 

  • (cs)

    In my first company we had some interns helping us a bit.

    One came by to ask how you declare a boolean in C#. (luckely he realised this was a bit stupid)

    One of the others however was the max.  He couldn't even grasp the principle of objects, methods and parameters. (how he got in his final year is beyond me)

    He had created a method in C# and asked me how he could call that method ...  He didn't pass his final year, luckely for us :-).

    I also heard that someone of my class (at college) asked his fellow partners of their finals project if Java was 'case-sensitive' and if the ( ) for a method call were obligatory ... :-s

     

    yep guys like these are everywhere
     

  • Roberto (unregistered) in reply to V.

    I think one of them is sitting next to me at this very moment. He's been trying to summarise data from two database fields into a report for an entire day. Just for fun, I wrote the 20-line script that does it in 3 minutes just to make sure the people who need the results get them before I lost my patience explaining methods, variables and if/else statements.

  • (cs) in reply to Jason Clinton
    Anonymous:
    Most Regex engines have roughly the same performance that a given string scanning algorithm has.

    No they don't, unless your REs are extremely simple (no metacharacters), and even then I'm fairly sure they aren't.

    Anonymous:
    doing a regex replace on a huge string is actually faster in Python than doing an "efficient" replace on a char stream.

    Uh ever heard of string.replace?

  • Richard (unregistered) in reply to Mike

    I can actually relate to that... If were being hired to quickly learn another programming language we probably WILL ask stupid questions.

  • bod (unregistered)

    How did he get the job in the 1st place? Hate to whine, but people in glass houses.....don't hire an incompetent guy and then take the c**t out of him.

  • zhe (unregistered) in reply to Davr
    Anonymous:
    My favorite line of code generated by a coworker. It's almost zen-like:

    var xml_xml = new XML(xml); // parse xml

    ('xml' is a string var, and this creates a new instance of an XML object, which parses the 'xml' string, and is stored in the xml_xml variable)

    honestly, the real wtf is that he missed one more place to put XML in there: (the :XML indicates strong typing of the xml_xml variable)

    var xml_xml:XML = new XML(xml); // parse xml

    Nice, you get to use SML at work? 

  • jmw2 (unregistered)

    Hello,

     

    Whilst on my industrial year (at a big software company) I was lucky enough to work with some of the brightest software engineers, and one of the dumbest.

    Here's one of his best code offerings to our .NET project; the isNull method.

    Because why use the == equality operator when you can call a method and screw it up so completely:

     

            public bool isNull(Object obj)
            {
                try
                {
                    if (obj.Equals(null))
                    {
                        return true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        return false;
                    }
                }
                catch (NullReferenceException nre)
                {
                    return false;
                }
            }

     

    He used to call this method like this; "this.isNull(this)", he proceeds to assume that the Equals method has not been overriden and finally doesnt see that the else block will never be hit (unless Equals overriden which he would never assume...doubt he even knew about overriding).

     

    Another one of his moments of creative genius is this constructor....he sat there watching an infinite loop and then stack overflow more times than i care to mention:

             public Class1()

            {

                new Class1();
            } 

     

    This guy was actually fun to have around purely for entertainment value.
     

  • (cs)

    My favorite line of all is actually from a full-time employee (who no longer works with us) rather than a contractor:

     "I'm so confident that this code will work that I'm not even going  to test it. I'm just gonna check it in."

    (which he did. the code did not work...)
     

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