• Nagesh (unregistered)

    Intern is being need for supervision, no?

  • Trevor D'Arcy-Evans (unregistered)

    Good thing they didn't want 32 bit colours

  • (cs)

    That intern is FAST!

  • (cs)

    Timmy needs to learn that when someone invites questions, asking questions is OK. (And the related conundrum: people who say it but don't mean it. In this case, Timmy needs to develop a thick skin.)

    P.S. Am I the only one who thought of Ratbert and Timmy the Toilet Roll Man?

  • (cs) in reply to @Deprecated
    @Deprecated:
    That intern is FAST!
    Actually, there's hope for Timmy. At least he was lazy enough to write code to create all the images rather than building them by hand...
  • (cs)

    I'm willing to bet TDWTF's home-grown CAPTCHA generator would blow Timmy's mind.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered)

    There should be 16777216 colours here but all I see is #BADBAD

  • Uncle Al (unregistered)

    Or, if one is an intern, one might not be expected to know tricks like the masking technique and assume that one was handed this job because of the grunt work of creating all those images. -1 to Matthew for not checking in on the intern's approach when the job started to take longer than expected.

  • Warren (unregistered)

    I call shenanigans. Would anyone even do this for money (by hand - we'd all write a program assuming we could), let alone for free?

  • (cs)

    Like a Bauss!

  • Henning Makholm (unregistered)

    Obviously he should have written a stored procedure in SQL that constructs an image file with the right color at run time.

  • Mathy (unregistered)

    604800 seconds in a week. 16,777,216 JPGs.

    0.036 seconds each.

    That's pretty impressive. The made up ones really annoy me.

    Captcha: facilisi. Tautology?

  • (cs)

    I assume he spent ages learning about some method of generating images, but failed to make it work on-the-fly.

  • BentFranklin (unregistered)

    They should have been GIFs.

  • (cs) in reply to Mathy
    Mathy:
    604800 seconds in a week. 16,777,216 JPGs.

    0.036 seconds each.

    That's pretty impressive. The made up ones really annoy me.

    Perhaps you and the other cynics should read the HTML comments in the story. Your objection has been anticipated.
  • Matthew (unregistered) in reply to Mathy

    The story says "generate" not "draw by hand."

  • anon (unregistered)

    Yea, anyone working out the time is an idiot, it would have taken years to do this by hand. The part that doesn't make any sense is why he had to stay awake while his script was running.

  • Mathy (unregistered)

    If it was automated then there wouldn't be a need to be up all night, surely? And even some generating software would struggle producing 30 a second, and that'd only be if he started right away.

    I demand proof - upload them all to Flickr so I can verify.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Should be a "teachable moment" no? Clearly Timmy must have written some kind of program in some kind of environment to generate the images. So ask to see it, and discuss porting it the server and then discuss the trick of doing it all in CSS.

    Seems like a pretty minor WTF. He delivered what needed, although in a completely insane way, but he's a fucking intern. He works for free and in return you're supposed to help him learn.

  • capt-gambisk (unregistered)

    I call shenanigans too, its not completly unplausable, I can see a younger version of myself doing something like this for something smaller but not for the guts of 17 million jpgs. And why JPG surely png or gif is more appropriate

  • (cs)

    Hey, I want timmy on my team.. Not knowing what to do, and solving the problem (but in a curious way) is better than developing a process of 10000 lines of code to say hello world!

    Kudos to timmy in this case.. the WTF was not him... The WTF is that you now have a folder with 16m jpg :)

  • (cs) in reply to capt-gambisk

    It never ceases to amaze me that people expect interns to know anything beyond the most basic things.

    BTW: who said the files were generated in a single thread of a single task? For all you know, Timmy may have recognized that it would take too long, so he launched multiple copies of his script on different machines to produce subsets of the total.

    Junior people might be able to make that leap, if not the one to the correct way of doing it.

    As others have noted, interns are there to LEARN, implying those in the know must TEACH them!

  • MK (unregistered) in reply to DaveK

    I've never spotted the cornify() js in the stories before - it is truly awesome but made my colleagues notice my browsing, so I'll avoid clicking around to activate them in future!

  • Colin (unregistered)

    I hope he did it with a script. Manually creating those sounds pretty impossible.

  • An Old Hacker (unregistered)

    I want to know what file system he was on that didn't get irritable about having 2^24 files (in one directory!)

    Cute stork, queue laugh track.

  • blurp! (unregistered)

    I guess at least he automated the circle image creation process. Otherwise he is really fast!, about 27 images per second!!

    But my guess is that the guy is very smart. He took a week off, and made the method in a way it looks like it would take him some time. I would do the same if someone tells me to something that easy and then explains it to me as if I'm retarded or something.

    Cheated days off: smart interim 7 - senior developer 0

  • kktkkr (unregistered)

    Remember that if you're using PNG or GIF, you have the option of transparency, and probably can cut the total down. Not sure exactly how well it will work.

    If not (pesky management issues) you can stick with divs. Just make 1 for each pixel, and position them manually with code. (The total amount of computation should be smaller, so you can guarantee the page will display within a week!)

  • Timmy (unregistered)

    [south park]

    Timmy!

  • (cs)

    > each perfectly round

    That would require infinity by infinity resolution, which could explain why it took such a long time...

  • TheClassic (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Perhaps you and the other cynics should read the HTML comments in the story. Your objection has been anticipated.
    Are there always comments in the html?
  • (cs)

    Bad move, Timmy. You could have simply generated a single JPG (a PNG would have better) with 16,777,216 evenly spaced circles, then used the width, height, and background-position properties to the display the correct one. Get to work calculating those offsets, Timmy!

  • DonaldK (unregistered)

    I'm schocked that people suggest 8-bit GIF as alternative. 33% is not a pass...

    But at least you can technically render a better perfect circle in GIF than JPEG....

  • Mathy (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Perhaps you should read the HTML comments in the story.
    I refuse to do anything so idiotic.
  • Larry (unregistered)

    TRWTF is competent supervisors.

  • The Corrector (unregistered)
    The Article:
    Making anything circular on a web-page takes a little know-how.
    FTFY
  • MaxUK (unregistered)

    Lol if you click on 'little round' in the article it cornifies the page :D I love the unicorns!!

  • gallier2 (unregistered) in reply to DonaldK
    DonaldK:
    I'm schocked that people suggest 8-bit GIF as alternative. 33% is not a pass...

    But at least you can technically render a better perfect circle in GIF than JPEG....

    If would have worked perfectly, the 8 bit is an index in CLUT. gif can represent 2^24 colors but only 256 at a time.

  • QA Tester (unregistered)

    Bug report:

    On the preferences page, setting your swatch colour does not always work properly.

    Steps to reproduce:

    • Browse to preferences page
    • Enter colour #12AA12
    • Click save

    Expected result: round swatch should show colour #12AA12 Actual result: round swatch shows colour #10AA12

  • (cs) in reply to Henning Makholm
    Henning Makholm:
    Obviously he should have written a stored procedure in SQL that retrieves an image file with the right color from a table of images at run time.

    FTFY

  • boog (unregistered)

    I'm pretty sure I would have strangled the intern instead of telling him what he did wrong.

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Mathy:
    604800 seconds in a week. 16,777,216 JPGs.

    0.036 seconds each.

    That's pretty impressive. The made up ones really annoy me.

    Perhaps you and the other cynics should read the HTML comments in the story. Your objection has been anticipated.
    What? And pass up a perfectly good opportunity to cry shenanigans?
  • (cs) in reply to boog
    boog (defective clone):
    I'm pretty sure I would have strangled the intern instead of telling him what he did wrong.
    And if you didn't, I'm sure one of the 16,777,215 other copies would have.
  • Timmeh (unregistered)

    See Timmy make JPGs. Make JPGs, Timmy, make JPGs.

  • (cs)

    My question is when does the "hmm, there has to be a better way of doing this" moment kick in? In this case, never. Would I hire him back next summer? Never...

    Yes, yes, interns learn, blah blah, but all but the most retarded of individuals would stop, think, and maybe even ask someone if they know of a better way when trying to fill the gas tank with a thimble, no?

    Also, assuming images are 4k each, wouldn't that be roughly 64 gig of "circles"? And how would the OS handle having that many images in a single folder?

  • Zed (unregistered)

    We're gonna need a new Timmy!

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Mathy:
    604800 seconds in a week. 16,777,216 JPGs.

    0.036 seconds each.

    That's pretty impressive. The made up ones really annoy me.

    Perhaps you and the other cynics should read the HTML comments in the story. Your objection has been anticipated.

    Putting relevant content in a comment tag is what passes for "clever" these days?

  • Next task please (unregistered)

    <!doctype html>

    <head/> <body>

    n

    n

    n

    n

    n

    n

    n

    </body> </html>
  • bs (unregistered)

    Assuming Timmy was generating these by hand at the pace of one per second (highly optimistic!) it would take at least 27 days.

    Something about this story doesnt add up.

  • anonymous_coward (unregistered)

    The intern shows great potential!

  • (cs) in reply to anonymous_coward
    anonymous_coward:
    The intern shows great potential!

    As what, a door jam?

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