The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Matt Westwood · 2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Nutster:
Not stupid, per se, but careless and ignorant. It is not that they can not learn; it is just that they have not learned yet.

More to the point, they don't no how ignerant they our. And so they dont' realise that they're grammer isnt' perfict in the frist plaice.

Dunning and Kruger ride again.

chubertdev · 2013-08-19 Reply Admin

JiP:
JimmyCrackedCorn:
Working on an international web site, UTF-8 has been the norm for many years. But this was the first site in years of development where anyone cared about anything outside the U.S.
It seems, these days the US still don't really care about anything outside the US...

Why should we? :-D

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
faoileag:
ObiWayneKenobi:
Props for using the tone of The Hobbit.
Errmm... would that be the tone of LOTR? The title of the article is a reference on the title of the book about the voyage Bilbo undertook in The Hobbit, that Bilbo is writing at the beginning of LOTR.

Nope. The opening clearly echoes the opening paragraph of The Hobbit:

The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole, with nothing in it to down on or to drink. It was a Hobbit hole, and that meant comfort.

(Yes I wrote that from memory, and I'm pretty sure it's correct)

I'm pretty sure the last paragraph echoes the last paragraph of The Hobbit, but it's been so long since I read it that I can't recall exactly, and it could very well echo part of the first paragraphs of Fellowship of the Ring.

The book Bilbo is writing IS "The Hobbit". "There and Back Again, a Hobbit's Tale" is its alternate (in Universe) title.

Lorne Kates · 2013-08-19 Reply Admin

name:
The book Bilbo is writing IS "The Hobbit". "There and Back Again, a Hobbit's Tale" is its alternate (in Universe) title.

I've always wondered if "There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Tale" ends with the title character writing a book about his adventures.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Patrick:
Hannes:
TRWTF is the name. Well, maybe not. But "Anders" is german for "different". And sometimes it means "special". You know, "special" like Ralph Wiggum.

Well, that is indeed a name. There's even a book series called "Anders", referring to the main character of that book. By the german(!) Author Wolfgang Hohlbein. I was a bit confused about this first, but it seems to be not that special indeed.

The name "Hohlbein" is special as well: "Hollow leg". I bet he had to endure quite some mocking as a kid.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
TRWTF is Slashdot's continual lack of Unicode support.

Huh? The site loads and renders fine for me. Are you sure you have a Japanese font installed on your computer?

CAPTCHA: facilisi - Word of advice: don't be a fascist sissy

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Hannes:
Patrick:
Hannes:
TRWTF is the name. Well, maybe not. But "Anders" is german for "different". And sometimes it means "special". You know, "special" like Ralph Wiggum.

Well, that is indeed a name. There's even a book series called "Anders", referring to the main character of that book. By the german(!) Author Wolfgang Hohlbein. I was a bit confused about this first, but it seems to be not that special indeed.

The name "Hohlbein" is special as well: "Hollow leg". I bet he had to endure quite some mocking as a kid.

He was different/special in the sense that he could fix the bug.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Its not an axiom if you have to prove it.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Cole Johnson:
¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
TRWTF is Slashdot's continual lack of Unicode support.
Huh? The site loads and renders fine for me. Are you sure you have a Japanese font installed on your computer?
CAPTCHA: facilisi - Word of advice: don't be a fascist sissy

WOOOOOOOOSH!

Slashdot prime doesn't support Unicode, but clearly someone has been able to make it work with the same code base. Ergo, Slashdot must be willfully not supporting Unicode.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
TRWTF is Slashdot's continual lack of Unicode support.

Actually, Slashdot DOES support Unicode. In fact, it always had.

It's just that a bunch of random idiots decided to break the page layout playing with the various Unicode codepoints that they implemented a rather strict WHITELIST of allowed codepoints.

And the whitelist excludes anything that has a HTML entity representation as well, and of course, excludes the generic HTML codepoint implementation as well.

There was a pile of it involving the force right-to-left character that screwed up page layouts and other things that people used to fake moderation scores and other such crap.

tl;dr version - It supports Unicode, but idiots being idiots forced there to be a whitelist of codepoints.

Captcha: damnum. Damnum idiot /. posters abusing Unicode forcing this crap on the rest of the people.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Worf:
¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
TRWTF is Slashdot's continual lack of Unicode support.

Actually, Slashdot DOES support Unicode. In fact, it always had.

It's just that a bunch of random idiots decided to break the page layout playing with the various Unicode codepoints that they implemented a rather strict WHITELIST of allowed codepoints.

And the whitelist excludes anything that has a HTML entity representation as well, and of course, excludes the generic HTML codepoint implementation as well.

There was a pile of it involving the force right-to-left character that screwed up page layouts and other things that people used to fake moderation scores and other such crap.

tl;dr version - It supports Unicode, but idiots being idiots forced there to be a whitelist of codepoints.

Captcha: damnum. Damnum idiot /. posters abusing Unicode forcing this crap on the rest of the people.

Untrue, Slashdot's D2 system supports a handful of code points/HTML entities that they apparently dug out of cowboyneal's ass. For instance, the whitelist allows the “ character (as well as the “ entity, in HTML posting mode); however, it does not support the … (horizontal ellipsis) or its corresponding entity, …. Such "disallowed" characters are silently stripped out, if you're using the D2 system.

tl;dr: Yes, it has a whitelist, which sucks because it's too small.

However, if you're using the D1 system (middle-click a post title to open it in a new tab and you'll find yourself using the D1 reply form), you get to see what it originally did, which is convert UTF-8 to ANSI with what appears to be this exact routine:

function _utf8Encode(&$arr){
for($i=0;$i<(count($arr['parameters']));$i++){
$arr['parameters'][$i]= $arr['parameters'][$i];
}
}

In other words, you get funny accented characters for all of the code points that require more than 1 byte in UTF-8.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

That whitelist is apparently so strict that "smart quotes" are always messed up. The UKP symbol is usually broken, but sometimes a poster figures out how to make it work, probably by doing something unusual like using entities.

I know about the problem with direction reversal characters, and it's not rocket science to simply filter them. You don't need to blacklist 99% of Unicode for the <1% of character codes (mostly in the 20xx range) that cause problems. That is much more of a WTF than simply not properly supporting UTF-8.

Lorne Kates · 2013-08-19 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
I know about the problem with direction reversal characters, and it's not rocket science to simply filter them. You don't need to blacklist 99% of Unicode for the <1% of character codes (mostly in the 20xx range) that cause problems. That is much more of a WTF than simply not properly supporting UTF-8.

As much as I agree with you, have you SEEN some of the crazy shift that goes on in TDWTF's own forums? :|

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that PHP (which this appears to be) has built-in functions for handling UTF-8:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-encode.php

(The second is at function.utf8-decode.php - I guess I can't post two links.)

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Three cheers for Muphry's Law!

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Lorne Kates:
Matt Westwood:
It's Pat:
For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.
Your right, English grammar is just to torturous.
You misspelled grammer.

You mispelled.

2013-08-19 Reply Admin

Cole Johnson:
¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
TRWTF is Slashdot's continual lack of Unicode support.
Huh? The site loads and renders fine for me. Are you sure you have a Japanese font installed on your computer?

Besides which, Japanese sites worked fine when coded in EUC and ShiftJIS. UTF-8 should have been made incompatible with ASCII in order to share the pain of converting from national character encodings to Unicode.

Replacement characters used to come from web sites that used Canadian (accented French Canadian alphabetic) and other characters that didn't represent valid EUC or ShiftJIS encodings, where the webmasters forgot to declare that they used a foreign encoding.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Lorne Kates:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?
When its beaten into us enough times.
(Fixed article)

Since "it's" is an abbreviation for "it is", I propose "its'" for the possessive!

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

It's Pat:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être
Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?

For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.

"Might" versus "may" (for those who don't get it: "is possible" versus "is permitted").

SCSimmons · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

pjt33:
And the guy who later implemented them kept the unimplemented copies around, wrapped in comment blocks. What's the benefit? Code which isn't needed or executed should be deleted, not left to waste screen space and reduce the effectiveness of searching.

Depends on the programming environment, really. If there's good versioning and source control, delete away. If there's not, and you're replacing some code that's already been in production, it's not a bad idea to leave the record of the original code as a comment in the source.

Then again, that's a WTF system of versioning. So never mind.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Hannes:
TRWTF is the name. Well, maybe not. But "Anders" is german for "different". And sometimes it means "special". You know, "special" like Ralph Wiggum.

Anders is a very common Swedish name. Compare Andersson, what means the son of Anders

Matt Westwood · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Geoff:
It's Pat:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être
Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?

For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.
"Might" versus "may" (for those who don't get it: "is possible" versus "is permitted").

"Might" refers to something in the past did not happen but could have. "May" refers to something which has a possibility of happening in the future, or something in the past or present about whose occurrence is uncertain.

"Please don't commit your code changes yet, you may break the application and now would not be a good time."

"I told you not to commit your code changes. You may have broken the application."

"I specifically asked you not to commit your changes. You might have broken the application. Fortunately it seems okay this time, but please don't do it again when asked not to."

aihtdikh · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Thanks Lorne, that was a good read.

HardwareGeek · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
"Please don't commit your code changes yet, you may break the application and now would not be a good time."
"I told you not to commit your code changes. You may have broken the application."

"I specifically asked you not to commit your changes. You might have broken the application. Fortunately it seems okay this time, but please don't do it again when asked not to."

Around here that conversation would be followed by, "That didn't mean, 'Work for the next month without ever committing anything.'" headdesk (preferably his head, with great force)

HardwareGeek · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

aihtdikh:
Thanks Lorne, that was a good read.

Agreed -- one of the best front page articles I've read recently. The WTF was obvious even to someone not familiar with the specific language, and the story was well written (grammar Nazis notwithstanding) and entertaining.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Geoff:
It's Pat:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être
Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?

For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.
"Might" versus "may" (for those who don't get it: "is possible" versus "is permitted").

"Might" refers to something in the past did not happen but could have. "May" refers to something which has a possibility of happening in the future, or something in the past or present about whose occurrence is uncertain.

"Please don't commit your code changes yet, you may break the application and now would not be a good time."

"I told you not to commit your code changes. You may have broken the application."

"I specifically asked you not to commit your changes. You might have broken the application. Fortunately it seems okay this time, but please don't do it again when asked not to."

"Before leaving the aircraft, please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board."

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
That whitelist is apparently so strict that "smart quotes" are always messed up. The UKP symbol is usually broken, but sometimes a poster figures out how to make it work, probably by doing something unusual like using entities.
I know about the problem with direction reversal characters, and it's not rocket science to simply filter them. You don't need to blacklist 99% of Unicode for the <1% of character codes (mostly in the 20xx range) that cause problems. That is much more of a WTF than simply not properly supporting UTF-8.

By UKP, do you mean GBP?

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Hannes:
Matt Westwood:
Geoff:
It's Pat:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être
Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?

For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.
"Might" versus "may" (for those who don't get it: "is possible" versus "is permitted").

"Might" refers to something in the past did not happen but could have. "May" refers to something which has a possibility of happening in the future, or something in the past or present about whose occurrence is uncertain.

"Please don't commit your code changes yet, you may break the application and now would not be a good time."

"I told you not to commit your code changes. You may have broken the application."

"I specifically asked you not to commit your changes. You might have broken the application. Fortunately it seems okay this time, but please don't do it again when asked not to."

"Before leaving the aircraft, please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board."

Maybe it's because British English and American English have drifted apart in meaning, but to us elderly limeys this would have the meaning of "... any personal belongings that, if you had at any time had the opportunity of bringing on board, you would have, but didn't." (Apologies for the clumsy construction of this sentence, crafting it was more difficult than I thought it would be.)

As such, this message comes across as amusingly whimsical.

"Hmm, what can I look around for? I know, my golf clubs, which I left in the conservatory. No, they're not here. What about my cat, whom I left sunning herself in the lounge? No, she's not here either ..."

And so on.

(Whatever she herself thinks about the ownership situation, my cat most definitely is one of my personal possessions.)

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

QJo:
Hannes:
"Before leaving the aircraft, please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board."

Maybe it's because British English and American English have drifted apart in meaning, but to us elderly limeys this would have the meaning of "... any personal belongings that, if you had at any time had the opportunity of bringing on board, you would have, but didn't." (Apologies for the clumsy construction of this sentence, crafting it was more difficult than I thought it would be.)

As such, this message comes across as amusingly whimsical.

"Hmm, what can I look around for? I know, my golf clubs, which I left in the conservatory. No, they're not here. What about my cat, whom I left sunning herself in the lounge? No, she's not here either ..."

And so on.

(Whatever she herself thinks about the ownership situation, my cat most definitely is one of my personal possessions.)

That's what George Carlin said as well: "Well... I MIGHT have brought my arrowhead collection! But I didn't. SO I'M NOT GOING TO LOOK FOR IT! I'm going to look for things I BROUGHT on board! It would seem to increase the likelihood of my finding something, wouldn't you say?"

pjt33 · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

QJo:
Hannes:
"Before leaving the aircraft, please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board."
Maybe it's because British English and American English have drifted apart in meaning, but to us elderly limeys this would have the meaning of "... any personal belongings that, if you had at any time had the opportunity of bringing on board, you would have, but didn't." (Apologies for the clumsy construction of this sentence, crafting it was more difficult than I thought it would be.)

Still, it's not as bad as "We will take off momentarily".

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

I wouldn't bother with UTF-8. If ASCII is good enough for jesus it's good enough for me.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

pjt33:
QJo:
Hannes:
"Before leaving the aircraft, please check around your immediate seating area for any personal belongings you might have brought on board."
Maybe it's because British English and American English have drifted apart in meaning, but to us elderly limeys this would have the meaning of "... any personal belongings that, if you had at any time had the opportunity of bringing on board, you would have, but didn't." (Apologies for the clumsy construction of this sentence, crafting it was more difficult than I thought it would be.)

Still, it's not as bad as "We will take off momentarily".

Or referring to the room where one rids oneself of body waste as the "bathroom".

eViLegion · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Why should we? :-D

Because slowly, but surely, it's gathering up enough momentum, to the point where it kicks your arse.

Then the question will become "why didn't someone make us pay attention?"

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

You don't need functions to encode and decode UTF8. You need functions to encode and decode other character sets into UTF.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Using count in for loop condition is plain stupid if there is no way array size can change during looping.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Come on! The real WTF here is that there is a webservice to encode text to and from UTF-8.

That's like seriously having a web service in production that adds numbers for you. Need to add two numbers? Don't use the + operator, but to a webservice call...

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
UTF-8 should have been made incompatible with ASCII in order to share the pain of converting from national character encodings to Unicode.

If Unicode had been made incompatible with ASCII, I think that would have been great. Most Americans (get over it, that's what we call ourselves) would not want the expense and pain of converting, so I could ignore it completely.

chubertdev · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Hasse:
Compare Andersson, what means the son of Anders

whoa!

chubertdev · 2013-08-20 Reply Admin

eViLegion:
chubertdev:
Why should we? :-D

Because slowly, but surely, it's gathering up enough momentum, to the point where it kicks your arse.

Then the question will become "why didn't someone make us pay attention?"

pssht, I won't be alive for that.

2013-08-20 Reply Admin

Still confused how a web startup has a System that has been around since "time out of mind". Well, it was a web startup cubicle anyway, so what was it doing in Anders' company?

2013-08-21 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Geoff:
It's Pat:
Grammar Nazi:
> it's raison d'être
Any props for attempting to write literately are negated by basic English failure.... why can't people learn "its" vs. "it's"?

For the same reason they can't learn, "They're there in their room." For the same reason they use "should of" when they mean "should have" and are trying to write the contraction "should've." For the same reason, to, too, and two are continually messed up.
"Might" versus "may" (for those who don't get it: "is possible" versus "is permitted").

"Might" refers to something in the past did not happen but could have. "May" refers to something which has a possibility of happening in the future, or something in the past or present about whose occurrence is uncertain.

"Please don't commit your code changes yet, you may break the application and now would not be a good time."

"I told you not to commit your code changes. You may have broken the application."

"I specifically asked you not to commit your changes. You might have broken the application. Fortunately it seems okay this time, but please don't do it again when asked not to."

MacMillan Dictionary, meaning 1, example 1:

You never know what might happen in the future.

Lorne Kates · 2013-08-21 Reply Admin

Hairy Cow:
Still confused how a web startup has a System that has been around since "time out of mind". Well, it was a web startup cubicle anyway, so what was it doing in Anders' company?

What once was a web startup will always be a web startup.

2013-08-22 Reply Admin

bjelleklang:
ztrem:
$arr['parameters'][$i]= $arr['parameters'][$i];
So the WTF is that it gets set to itself?

That, plus the fact that the encode/decode doesn't even try to encode/decode anything

In all fairness, it does work for a certain subset of UTF-8 :-)

2013-08-24 Reply Admin

Shouldn't that be "Grammar Nazgul" (rather than Nazi)? Give or take a few special characters I didn't encode in my comment. (I'm gonna do it later)

2013-08-27 Reply Admin

Shouldn't that be "Grammar Nazgûl" (rather than Nazi)?FTFY.

fruey · 2013-09-05 Reply Admin

Both in the article & in this example, shouldn't the function return something too?

function _utf8Encode(&$arr){ // insert real utf8 encode function here return &$arr; } function _utf8Decode(&$arr){ // insert real utf8 decode function here return &$arr; }

2013-09-05 Reply Admin

fruey:
Both in the article & in this example, shouldn't the function return something too?
function _utf8Encode(&$arr){ // insert real utf8 encode function here return &$arr; } function _utf8Decode(&$arr){ // insert real utf8 decode function here return &$arr; }

It's passed by reference, so whatever the function does to $arr will change the original array, not a copy of it.

2018-01-27 Reply Admin

I got hung up on the phrase "well-to-do programmer".

"Well-to-do" means "rich". What is a rich programmer doing working in a hole, er, cubicle?

I don' think tha' word means what you think it means...

There and Back Again

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