• (cs) in reply to BiggerWTF
    BiggerWTF:
    There's a bigger WTF here. A: The programmer was testing with real customer data and didn't want clients to get emails from his testing.

    ...

    if (SEND_EMAIL) { message.send(); }

    Then you can setup your QA environment to send/not send emails. And when you want to test the email functions, you don't have customer's addresses in the database

    Why not have it compose the email and, if it's testing, send it to a test address as an attachment rather than sending it as an email to its own recepient address?

  • Franco (unregistered) in reply to Spacecoyote
    Spacecoyote:
    Pick is the real WTF. Its a database operating system from the 60's (like MUMPS, but for the Army), originally called GIRLS, written by Dick Pick, using ENGLISH as its query language. Also Cache is derived from Pick and MUMPS.

    Which is bad, of course. We all know that query languages should be written in FRENCH. Like SQL...

  • Kid (unregistered) in reply to chrismcb
    chrismcb:
    More than one person has pointed out that the Real WTF is the lack of testing... i don't see how more testers would have helped. All the testers would have said, "its broken" Holden says, no it works. It works on my machine.

    Holden might have found the problem using unit testing that used a different email address.

    To me the "well this stopped working a week ago" would have been a HUGE light bulb turning on over my head.

    We're trying to get t-shirts with "It Works On My Machine" made up for our development department.

    Any coder who consistently doesn't believe their testers when they say it's broken should be "invited" into the QA department for 6 months.

  • (cs) in reply to vt_mruhlin
    John:
    Also: who has lunch at night??!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!
    Me. I just had lunch at, oh, about 2:40 am. I like having lunch at night. I've had lunch as late as 6 or 7 am or more.
    vt_mruhlin:
    I've never pedaled that fast in my life. When I finally got to work, looked at code and made a few calls. Evidently I did remember to undo it. Hauled ass for nothing.
    Ah, yes, I know that feeling well -- worrying about having to sort out something major ... that you already sorted out :) One of those weird quirks of human memory, that the problem is far more memorable than the act of solving it, so you routinely worry about problems for nothing.
  • (cs) in reply to Franco

    Ironically enough, ENGLISH can be put into French mode:

    TRIEZ CLIENT PAR BILAN

  • (cs) in reply to foo
    foo:
    Dave Ross:
    Ahh the benefits of SVN. (Or your favorite SCM).

    Unfortunately, I've never heard of an SCM package that works on Pick. The closest I've come is a policy of copying changed programs into a backup directory before overwriting them in production.

    Using Pick has to be the biggest WTF. You know an OS is a little over the hill when its creator died in 1994.

    Kill Bill!

    So then, after that, I only have to wait until 2020 until I can work on a real OS again ...

  • kat (unregistered)

    I always add something like,

    print STDOUT "DEBUGGING - DO NOT USE LIVE!"; <STDIN>;

    This forces me to realize the code is broken.

  • An I/T Manager in Canada (unregistered)

    On our system the default is not to send out e-mails all; they're written out to a temporary file instead. On our (one) production server there's a file outside the source tree which declares that it's safe to actually send e-mails out into the net.

    This file is mentioned in the documentation we follow whenever we build a new developer's server, so the chances we'll not remember about it when building a new development server are small.

  • mattK (unregistered)

    Hmmm. If they had unit tests, this would never have been a problem.

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