The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

Uh, granted it's hard for me to tell, but isn't my_trim being called with an empty string, not a string containing a blank? Just what would that do?

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

Sigh. Nevermind. my_trim is never called.

Matt Westwood · 2013-07-25 Reply Admin

JW:
Here is a brief discussion on the geek community and racism, sexism, and other -isms, full of gross generalities and blanket statements:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well. Nevertheless, they are often unintentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera. And when you call them on that, they get pissed, 'cause they think "meaning well" is enough. And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it.

(Lengthy discussion of "privilege" skipped for space reasons.)

"... And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it. ..."

So who died and made you moral arbiter of the universe? You pompous, pious prig. I bet you're a Christian as well as being a complete knob-end.

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

Charles F.:
The only explanation I can come up with is based on a suspicion I've had for a while: some coders get paid by the line and nobody has let me in on this lucrative arrangement.
Yesterday, I found this in some code: (variable names changed to protect the innocent):
HashSet<String> moarNames = new HashSet<String>();
nameSet.addAll(moarNames);
This was then dutifully cut-n-pasted all over the code including just yesterday but a colleague. I asked him why he didn't delete those two lines and he explained that "I don't want to change the style of the code because that makes it harder to maintain." This is the stupidest coding practice I know (i.e. "Let's persist bad coding practices so that we don't muddle the style."). It's also further evidence of my theory about pay-per-line.

"I don't want to change the style of the code because that makes it harder to maintain." = "I don't actually know what it does, but I saw it that way on StckOverflow"

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
Anonymous Bob:
eViLegion:
Can all you dicks who're getting offended by stuff, stop getting offended by stuff? Thanks!

I find your tone offensive.

Something has to be done about this rampant toneism.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice!

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

JW:
Here is a brief discussion on the geek community and racism, sexism, and other -isms, full of gross generalities and blanket statements:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well. Nevertheless, they are often unintentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera. And when you call them on that, they get pissed, 'cause they think "meaning well" is enough. And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it.

(Lengthy discussion of "privilege" skipped for space reasons.)

I take offense to that!

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

Jordan:
JW:
Here is a brief discussion on the geek community and racism, sexism, and other -isms, full of gross generalities and blanket statements:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well. Nevertheless, they are often unintentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera. And when you call them on that, they get pissed, 'cause they think "meaning well" is enough. And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it.

(Lengthy discussion of "privilege" skipped for space reasons.)
I take offense to that!

Yup. I never understand why I'm not allowed to put people into categories because it's offensive when young, white, heterosexual men do that.

Incidentally, was the original rant quoted somewhere, because I'm surprised that the geek community* is mostly white and straight (young, male, racist, sexist ageist etc not so surprised about). If by geeks we mean "smart people orienting toward mathematical sciences" I'd say there's a lot of Asian people that fit the bill, and if it's a "people who go to comicon an the like" type definition, then I'd think there's quite a multi-cultural spattering with again large representation from the Indian sub-continent and Asia.....

*As someone said, perhaps it depends how you define the geek community. EG, were/are Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alan Turing, Aryabhata, Ken Ono, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Rāman, Anand Kumar and others part of the geek community?

But maybe me even thinking that way just shows my bigotted being....

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

Mickey Blue:
Jordan:
JW:
Here is a brief discussion on the geek community and racism, sexism, and other -isms, full of gross generalities and blanket statements:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well. Nevertheless, they are often unintentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera. And when you call them on that, they get pissed, 'cause they think "meaning well" is enough. And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it.

(Lengthy discussion of "privilege" skipped for space reasons.)
I take offense to that!
Yup. I never understand why I'm not allowed to put people into categories because it's offensive when young, white, heterosexual men do that.

Incidentally, was the original rant quoted somewhere, because I'm surprised that the geek community* is mostly white and straight (young, male, racist, sexist ageist etc not so surprised about). If by geeks we mean "smart people orienting toward mathematical sciences" I'd say there's a lot of Asian people that fit the bill, and if it's a "people who go to comicon an the like" type definition, then I'd think there's quite a multi-cultural spattering with again large representation from the Indian sub-continent and Asia.....

*As someone said, perhaps it depends how you define the geek community. EG, were/are Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alan Turing, Aryabhata, Ken Ono, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Rāman, Anand Kumar and others part of the geek community?

But maybe me even thinking that way just shows my bigotted being....

Geeks are just nerd wanna-bes. Fact: Nerds are better than geeks.

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

"the time it was taking to load was worse than an old lady with a walker trying to cross an intersection"

Then make a ticket for it.

After all, that's what police did to an old lady with a walker trying to cross an intersection. The light changed when she was part way across.

2013-07-25 Reply Admin

JW:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well.

The geek community tends to be very male, very yellow, mostly straight, mostly racist, not particularly homophobic or ageist or ableist, and not caring about being racist and sexist. The non-geek community is mostly the same except for being only about 50% male (which doesn't lessen the amount of sexism very much).

Actually racism isn't exactly the right word for it because they don't only discriminate against browns and blacks and whites; they discriminate against yellows who are the same race as Japanese but get found out when they have Korean or Chinese names and have alien registration cards. Even among us foreigners, non-Japanese yellows far outnumber browns and blacks and whites.

On the other hand, this isn't the country where police issued a ticket to an old lady with a walker crossing an intersection.

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

not to mention the * instead of + in case you want to replace a lack of blank space as well as a blank space.....

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

pscs:
I'm not sure this is that big a WTF. I'm guessing he viewed the source in the web browser, so AFTER it has been processed by the server.
So, the source on the server probably says something like:
var LDAPEnableMode = "<?php getEnableMode()?>";

if (LDAPEnableMode==2)
{
    tStr = my_trim( '<?php getAttribute('email')?>' );
    if (tStr.length > 0) { dNames[x++] = tStr; }
    tStr = my_trim( '<?php getAttribute('address')?>' );
...
or whatever. So, here they're doing work in Javascript that could be done in PHP, but maybe their real server can't do clever things like PHP, so can just do text substitution, in which case Javascript has to do the work - so, it's not that big a problem.

The delay must be somewhere else

That's what I thought as well. Followed by: if the only thing this blackbox can do is string substitution, then how easy would it be to exploit an XSS vulnerability in it, combine it with say CSRF, and take control over the servers?

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

Also: [code] dNames.sort; [code] is the real WTF.

The irony is that if they add () brackets to call it then it will probably break, as the error messages will now not match the order of fields...

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

So how is making sweeping generalizations about the "geek community" different than making them about blacks, women, etc?

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
Mickey Blue:
Jordan:
JW:
Here is a brief discussion on the geek community and racism, sexism, and other -isms, full of gross generalities and blanket statements:
The geek community tends to be very male, very white, mostly straight, and very convincved that they're not racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. And they mostly mean well. Nevertheless, they are often unintentionally racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera. And when you call them on that, they get pissed, 'cause they think "meaning well" is enough. And it's really not. So they get defensive, and say it was just a joke, and people shouldn't be so sensitive, which is terribly easy to say when you're not the one being made fun of. So, when I see such things here, I'm gonna call people on it.

(Lengthy discussion of "privilege" skipped for space reasons.)
I take offense to that!
Yup. I never understand why I'm not allowed to put people into categories because it's offensive when young, white, heterosexual men do that.

Incidentally, was the original rant quoted somewhere, because I'm surprised that the geek community* is mostly white and straight (young, male, racist, sexist ageist etc not so surprised about). If by geeks we mean "smart people orienting toward mathematical sciences" I'd say there's a lot of Asian people that fit the bill, and if it's a "people who go to comicon an the like" type definition, then I'd think there's quite a multi-cultural spattering with again large representation from the Indian sub-continent and Asia.....

*As someone said, perhaps it depends how you define the geek community. EG, were/are Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alan Turing, Aryabhata, Ken Ono, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Rāman, Anand Kumar and others part of the geek community?

But maybe me even thinking that way just shows my bigotted being....

Geeks are just nerd wanna-bes. Fact: Nerds are better than geeks.

Geeks make shit happen. Nerds read about how to make shit happen. You got that the wrong way around -- nerds are just wanna-be geeks!

2013-07-26 Reply Admin

Disappointed:
Articles like this make me embarassed that I tell people to read TDWTF, let alone to read it myself.
Why do we have writers who either can't read code or can't apply critical thinking?
You got a classic code snippet, I'm with ya. You needed a compelling reason for it to be found, so you took your writers liberties, reached into the bag of common motivators, and pulled out "sluggish response time". Why didn't you bother to think about whether you could attribute the response time to the code??

I understand that there must be new content every day to keep the site alive, but it's really frustrating to see articles of this quality.

Captcha - ludus: We continuously try to chase down great articles, no matter how often they 'ludus.

Reading comprehension fail. They did clearly point out that this wasn't what was causing the slowdown -- this is the point at which Nav facepalmed and gave up on finding that cause.

chubertdev · 2013-07-26 Reply Admin

urza9814:
Reading comprehension fail. They did clearly point out that this wasn't what was causing the slowdown -- this is the point at which Nav facepalmed and gave up on finding that cause.

Heh.

Wondering what might cause the slowness, Nav viewed the source of the login page and came away thankful that it loaded at all.

2013-07-29 Reply Admin

Yeah, the code snippet has nothing to do with the supposed problem of the "slow response time". A function that is never called can't be the problem. ;)

So, TRWTF is the poor writing of this article.

Pawprint · 2013-07-29 Reply Admin

urza9814:
Disappointed:
Articles like this make me embarassed that I tell people to read TDWTF, let alone to read it myself.
Why do we have writers who either can't read code or can't apply critical thinking?
You got a classic code snippet, I'm with ya. You needed a compelling reason for it to be found, so you took your writers liberties, reached into the bag of common motivators, and pulled out "sluggish response time". Why didn't you bother to think about whether you could attribute the response time to the code??

I understand that there must be new content every day to keep the site alive, but it's really frustrating to see articles of this quality.

Captcha - ludus: We continuously try to chase down great articles, no matter how often they 'ludus.

Reading comprehension fail. They did clearly point out that this wasn't what was causing the slowdown -- this is the point at which Nav facepalmed and gave up on finding that cause.

You and I have different definitions of the phrase "clearly point out."

Ubertrim

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