The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Matt Westwood · 2011-06-30 Reply Admin

method1:
C-Octothorpe:
Obviously the comments were written by a neural network.
One of the greatest poems written in the English language. The moving saga of the pig and the dove will live forever.

Excellent, my screen needed a coffeewash. No quack.

Still no progress on the scattered space question. Just spent 2 hours documenting Bert Jansch albums for bandtoband instead. Well it needed to be done.

Perhaps I need to reconsider where "isolated point" is being used, whether it means "isolated in the space" or "isolated in the subset" when used in the various proofs and definitions I'm researching. Heck and darnation, why can't topologists be consistent?

Matt Westwood · 2011-06-30 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
boog:
hoodaticus:
I'm also a manager
That's quite unlikely.
Which just goes to show you what terrible luck I have. Code doesn't get PMS. Nuff said.

How many women with PMS does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. Why? IT JUST DOES, ALL RIGHT?

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

I miss Master Plan Software.

Captain Oblivious · 2011-06-30 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
boog = Peter = Cocktothorpe:
Peter:
C-Octothorpe:
Hortical:
Anyone smell that? It's the odd stench of an unjustified superiority complex.
Oh, wait, here it is:

C-Octothorpe:
Oh wow, you actually think I care what an anonymous loser on a forum thinks of me. Cool!
AND you even took the time to tell everyone about it...
Speaking as another anonymous loser on an internet forum, I enjoy reading your posts. I don't know why your contributions seem to have attracted so much hostility of late.

Seriously, I like what you write here. Keep it up!
So you're real name is Peter, eh boog? Don't think that I forgot you use your first name when posting anonymously.

If you lot are anything like me, you haunt this site when you're procrastinating.

Sigh ... back to work. Now, what actually is the definition of a scattered space? Is it a space where every non-empty subset contains at least one isolated point, or a space where every non-empty closed set contains at least one isolated point? I really need to know ... and my sources contradict one another. The latter (found on PlanetMath) makes most sense in the context of demonstrating that the Either-Or topology is scattered, but in the context of something else I can't remember now it seems too restrictive. The former (found in Steen and Seebach) seems to lead to contradictions. Both MathWorld and Wikipedia are silent on the issue. And don't bother to look at ProofWiki, it's self-contradictory on the subject.

It hardly matters. Just pick one and go with it.

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

PedanticCurmudgeon:
Whoever designed the camera reset function has been visiting trollscience.com much too often.

Prick!!!!!!! I swear I lost some brain cells by visiting trollscience to see what it is

GumGum Jelly...

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
zunesis:
C-Octothorpe:
alegr:
Yo dog, I herd you like installers, so I made an installer for your installation manager installer.
No, no. no... It's:
Yo dog, I herd you like managing your installations, so I made an installation manager installer so you can install your installation manager while you manage your installations.

Hey, nice work! You're so much smarter than that guy, being able to cite memes and all. Thank God for you, C-Octothorpe. The contributions you add to the comments are just so important.
Glad I can't help.

FTFY

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
Hortical:
Anyone smell that? It's the odd stench of an unjustified superiority complex.
Oh, wait, here it is:

C-Octothorpe:

Oh wow, you actually think I care what an anonymous loser on a forum thinks of me. Cool!

AND you even took the time to tell everyone about it...

It appears you care enough to respond.

Why the F must you always create a fight in every comments thread (especially against your alter-ego)?

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

Peter:
C-Octothorpe:
Hortical:
Anyone smell that? It's the odd stench of an unjustified superiority complex.
Oh, wait, here it is:

C-Octothorpe:
Oh wow, you actually think I care what an anonymous loser on a forum thinks of me. Cool!
AND you even took the time to tell everyone about it...
Speaking as another anonymous loser on an internet forum, I enjoy reading your posts. I don't know why your contributions seem to have attracted so much hostility of late.

Seriously, I like what you write here. Keep it up!

++

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

Ted:
Ralph:
Peter:
What? No! Is it really that hard to believe that someone genuinely appreciates his input? Maybe there are more and they just don't say anything? At least I'd like to think so...

Completely apart from anything any other unrelated posters might say (who are not me, by the way), I think C-Octothorpe is the best thing that ever happened to this site. Without him, this site would be a dreary wasteland, bereft of wit or substance.

Wait, that wasn't Ralph who said that, it was me.

I take that statement and raise you 500...

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
hoodaticus:
Hey C-Octothorpe! Guess where I've been? Remember when you mentioned the Bastard Operator from Hell a few months back? Well, I read every single article that was ever written. Priceless. Thanks man.
Now that that's done, I can resume reading TDWTF.

Fuck off, are you serious?!

I thought you died!

RE BOFH: I too got sucked into reading every article once too. Well, not every article, just for the past 5 years or so.

13 seconds is pretty quick to log out from one account and into another.

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

Design Pattern:
Anon:
You wouldn't want people to accidentally reset to factory settings whenever they fiddle with the buttons.
That's not what Mike T asked for:
Mike T:
...but we're finding that the hardware and software design are just not quite Enterprisey enough for our liking.
Here's the enterprisey way of doing a factory reset:

Print out an XML-Document (like WSDL of your average Webservice).

Lay printout on wooden table.

Photograph with digital camera.

Order foto print by 3rd party company. Bonus points when done via a webservice.

When foto print arrives, hold foto print for 5 seconds in front of lens of the TV conference camera.

What happens if you can't take the picture because the camera you want to reset is the only one u got?

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

KattMan:
The Proclaimer:

Do you really think all this site is full of people who have focused their attention on you?

No, I really think there are only three people on this site. Me, Alex, and some dude having conversations with himself using many different accounts.

I reckon there's 4, cos I ain't you, I ain't alex, and though I have many aliases, I don't use accounts

You can see some of them must live in different parts of the world because of their detached posting (like the last 10 entries might be me, or they might not), but none of the first 100 are....

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

boog:
hoodaticus:
I'm also a manager
That's highly unlikely.

FTFY

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

hello:
C-Octothorpe:
hoodaticus:
Hey C-Octothorpe! Guess where I've been? Remember when you mentioned the Bastard Operator from Hell a few months back? Well, I read every single article that was ever written. Priceless. Thanks man.
Now that that's done, I can resume reading TDWTF.

Fuck off, are you serious?!

I thought you died!

RE BOFH: I too got sucked into reading every article once too. Well, not every article, just for the past 5 years or so.
13 seconds is pretty quick to log out from one account and into another.

That's why god made...

2011-06-30 Reply Admin

hello:
C-Octothorpe:
hoodaticus:
Hey C-Octothorpe! Guess where I've been? Remember when you mentioned the Bastard Operator from Hell a few months back? Well, I read every single article that was ever written. Priceless. Thanks man.
Now that that's done, I can resume reading TDWTF.

Fuck off, are you serious?!

I thought you died!

RE BOFH: I too got sucked into reading every article once too. Well, not every article, just for the past 5 years or so.
13 seconds is pretty quick to log out from one account and into another.

...multiple browsers.

Kuba · 2011-06-30 Reply Admin

Bagel:
I agree. I think a reed switch is a slick solution, rather than having to blindly stab a paper clip through a small hole in the case, hopefully hitting a switch that doesn't have enough of a click to let me know I hit anything at all. And then probably hold the switch for at least 15 seconds before seeing any indication that I've done anything.

I'm worried that it may not be a reed switch. Reed switches are bulky and a general pain to deal with. The SMT (surface mount) versions cost ~$2 in 1k quantities, so that's a lot of money to spend on something that may never be used. A hall switch costs 10x less (about $0.16 in 1k qty). Now hall switches are usually more sensitive, so I'm worried that they may be susceptible to stray triggering. Of course you won't be placing it next to big solenoids because it belongs on a table somewhere. But I'm pretty damn sure that a relay the size of an AA battery could easily trigger that hall switch. I've had small PCB-mount relays saturate magnetic data isolator ICs, and those need a hefty field to get saturated.

Kuba · 2011-06-30 Reply Admin

CoderHero:
Lockwood:
I was going to comment on the comment manager comment manager comment, but I had a problem with my hard dish and couldn't find a magnet.
There's your problem! Magnets and hard disks don't mix.

OTOH, magnets levitate over hard, um, superconducting dishes.

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

You dawg, I herd you like installers, so I put an installer in you installer, so you can install while you are installing.

Severity One · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Completely apart from anything any other unrelated posters might say (who are not me, by the way), I think C-Octothorpe is the best thing that ever happened to this site. Without him, this site would be a dreary wasteland, bereft of wit or substance.

Gee, thanks. :)

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Jochen:
IBM's setup programs are epic.
Once, I had to install an update for IBM's WebSphere Application Server. You are supposed to install such updates using the UpdateInstaller for WAS. The only problem was that my installed version of UpdateInstaller was too old, so I had to update the UpdateInstaller first. Luckily, updates for the UpdateInstaller don't require another UpdateInstaller. The update program for the UpdateInstaller even found my existing installation of UpdateInstaller, but it hung while creating an uninstaller for the update of the UpdateInstaller. I had to uninstall the UpdateInstaller completely and re-install the updated UpdateInstaller in order to use it to install the update for WAS.

I guess that's what you should expect from a 100 year old company. Enterprise^2.

That's what you get for having Rube Goldberg as your chief architect.

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

if you want to know real pain, forget about just using rational clearcase, try using it in combination with intersystems cache (there is an old WTF about cache/mumps somewhere, go read that, and add on an IDE which seems like it came from 1995)

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Back before IBM bought Rational, Clear case had good easy to read documentation. That was the first thing IBM F'd up as soon as they got their hands on it.

forbjok · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

In soviet russia manual installs you!

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

The instructions you see are a glyph-by-glyph translation of one huge eastern-world language to english. Unfortunately all too common approach, still, even though there are tools like Google translate that do quite well -- sometimes. The problem is, that the statistic translators, like Google, do not work very well with rare languages.

Few months back I was looking for stegfs and Ashley, the owner of the web site had installed automatic Google translation there. What I read about the stegfs looked like my language but did not look like it were about stegfs. Had to write Ash to turn off the translation for my language, which he kindly did, and now I can read the site. Unfortunately there are still many sites that use Google translate directly.

Now, last week I read about another approach to machine translation: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028175.400-cracking-the-code-of-machine-translation.html Good luck! But I am sure this will be another dead end: without knowing the structure of the grammar, trying to deduce the word-by-word correspondences, but for the most common and obvious words, will not be possible.

Severity One · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Microsoft is doing that now, auto-translating their KB articles to Dutch. And even though Dutch is the closest major language to English (the closest minor one would be Frisian), it just looks awkward, especially since they're leaving out quite important words (like verbs). It looks like they haven't figured out very well in what way Dutch word order differs from English, and is much more like German.

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Jochen:
IBM's setup programs are epic.
Once, I had to install an update for IBM's WebSphere Application Server. You are supposed to install such updates using the UpdateInstaller for WAS. The only problem was that my installed version of UpdateInstaller was too old, so I had to update the UpdateInstaller first. Luckily, updates for the UpdateInstaller don't require another UpdateInstaller. The update program for the UpdateInstaller even found my existing installation of UpdateInstaller, but it hung while creating an uninstaller for the update of the UpdateInstaller. I had to uninstall the UpdateInstaller completely and re-install the updated UpdateInstaller in order to use it to install the update for WAS.

I guess that's what you should expect from a 100 year old company. Enterprise^2.

I think the same happened to me! HORRIBLE!! But kind of funny when you think about it. I'm so glad I hopefully won't need to use Websphere or IBM software for anything... ever!!!

Captcha acsi (dyslexic ASCII)???

hoodaticus · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
hoodaticus:
boog:
hoodaticus:
I'm also a manager
That's quite unlikely.
Which just goes to show you what terrible luck I have. Code doesn't get PMS. Nuff said.

How many women with PMS does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. Why? IT JUST DOES, ALL RIGHT?

Exactry!

PedanticCurmudgeon · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Polar:
PedanticCurmudgeon:
Whoever designed the camera reset function has been visiting trollscience.com much too often.
Prick!!!!!!! I swear I lost some brain cells by visiting trollscience to see what it is
GumGum Jelly...

What exactly did you expect to happen? Enlightenment or learning from a site named "Troll Science"?

Protip for newbies: don't visit unknown sites referenced on internet forums without doing a google search first.

hoodaticus · 2011-07-01 Reply Admin

PedanticCurmudgeon:
Polar:
PedanticCurmudgeon:
Whoever designed the camera reset function has been visiting trollscience.com much too often.
Prick!!!!!!! I swear I lost some brain cells by visiting trollscience to see what it is
GumGum Jelly...
What exactly did you expect to happen? Enlightenment or learning from a site named "Troll Science"?

Protip for newbies: don't visit unknown sites referenced on internet forums without doing a google search first.

Holy shit that site is retarded.

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

Hortical:
CoderHero:
Lockwood:
I was going to comment on the comment manager comment manager comment, but I had a problem with my hard dish and couldn't find a magnet.
There's your problem! Magnets and hard disks don't mix.

Oh, you said disks... Sorry, my mind was wandering. :P

Indeed. I once got my dick caught between two NdFeB magnets. I had these magnets about the size of a dime and was demonstrating to my now wife how large the magnetic field was. After showing how the magnets will stick together with one on each side of my hand, I decided to demonstrate how even the width of my dick was not enough to fail these magnets. So I put them on opposite sides of my dick and the magnetic force held them in place.

After a few steps of walking around like this something awful happened. The magnets both at the same time flipped 180 degrees and stuck together... With a good portion of my skin between them.

Now this was not painful. There are apparently not many pain receptors in that part of a male's body. However, anyone that has played with these NdFeB magnets is well aware of what kind of force is necessary to separate them when they are that close together. For those that don't know: You can't just pull them apart. They have to be slid apart with great force.

Minutes of panic passed. She was laughing. I was not. With my eyes closed and braced for great pain, I slid them apart.

There was but a minor scratch where the magnets had been. Had CoderHero's original misread been the case in my situation (a hard dick), this would not have been an issue for me. There would not have been substantial loose skin to get caught between the magnets.

True story.

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

This reminds me of instructions for the old IBM RS/6000 for getting a tape out if the tape drive jammed, which went something like this (all illustrated with little line drawings):

Ready your tools - screwdriver, wirecutters and a penlight battery
Unscrew the drive and pull it out of the machine case
Snip the correct wire
Bridge cut wire with the battery to drive the eject motor.
(Exercise for reader) patch up and reassemble the whole mess.

Thank god we never had a jammed drive !

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

"The hard dish installs the manual or it gets the hose again!"

2011-07-01 Reply Admin

I'm tired of being a "Wanna-Be League Bowler!" "I Wanna-Be a League Bowler!"

2011-07-02 Reply Admin

Just Me:
Maybe I'm just too geeky but I liked the factory reset procedure for the Xcaster. Factory reset is not an usual procedure and can cause a lot of trouble if done inadvertently. Using a magnet there is no need for a small hole (as is common in a lot of products).

What's wrong with the 30/30/30 reset used by many routers? That's at least as hard to trigger accidentally as a magnet reset, and it's standardised enough that you can just go ahead and do it without needing to Google for online help (which is particularly useful when the router that you need in order to get the online help isn't routing any more because it needs a factory reset).

2011-07-02 Reply Admin

Meep:
Frankie:
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Captcha: transverbero

Frog blast the vent core!

Bog blast all of you.

2011-07-02 Reply Admin

paul:
I once got my dick caught between two NdFeB magnets. I had these magnets about the size of a dime and was demonstrating to my now wife how large the magnetic field was. After showing how the magnets will stick together with one on each side of my hand, I decided to demonstrate how even the width of my dick was not enough to fail these magnets. So I put them on opposite sides of my dick and the magnetic force held them in place.

I once got my dick caught in a sheep. I was trying to demonstrate... oh, never mind, the police didn't believe it anyway.

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-02 Reply Admin

paul:
Hortical:
CoderHero:
Lockwood:
I was going to comment on the comment manager comment manager comment, but I had a problem with my hard dish and couldn't find a magnet.
There's your problem! Magnets and hard disks don't mix.

Oh, you said disks... Sorry, my mind was wandering. :P

Indeed. I once got my dick caught between two NdFeB magnets. I had these magnets about the size of a dime and was demonstrating to my now wife how large the magnetic field was. After showing how the magnets will stick together with one on each side of my hand, I decided to demonstrate how even the width of my dick was not enough to fail these magnets. So I put them on opposite sides of my dick and the magnetic force held them in place.

After a few steps of walking around like this something awful happened. The magnets both at the same time flipped 180 degrees and stuck together... With a good portion of my skin between them.

Now this was not painful. There are apparently not many pain receptors in that part of a male's body. However, anyone that has played with these NdFeB magnets is well aware of what kind of force is necessary to separate them when they are that close together. For those that don't know: You can't just pull them apart. They have to be slid apart with great force.

Minutes of panic passed. She was laughing. I was not. With my eyes closed and braced for great pain, I slid them apart.

There was but a minor scratch where the magnets had been. Had CoderHero's original misread been the case in my situation (a hard dick), this would not have been an issue for me. There would not have been substantial loose skin to get caught between the magnets.

True story.

Tried doing the same thing, but the width of my dick is too great to get this trick to work. Shame.

2011-07-02 Reply Admin

hello:
Design Pattern:

Mike T:
...but we're finding that the hardware and software design are just not quite Enterprisey enough for our liking.
Here's the enterprisey way of doing a factory reset:

Print out an XML-Document (like WSDL of your average Webservice).

Lay printout on wooden table.

Photograph with digital camera.

Order foto print by 3rd party company. Bonus points when done via a webservice.

When foto print arrives, hold foto print for 5 seconds in front of lens of the TV conference camera.

What happens if you can't take the picture because the camera you want to reset is the only one u got?

As we are still in the enterprisey part of the forum, the following will happen: * User will open a support ticket at the manufucturer of the camera to send a guy with a camera to perform the enterprisey factory reset. * The manufucturer asks if the camera already has the latest firmware installed. It recommends to install the latest firmware version which is not officially released yet. (OK that is more like Sybase handles bugs in their JDBC driver). * As it is not possible to install the firmware without doing a factory reset first, one employee offers to bring his own digital camera. * After taking the picture, the employee detects that it is not possible to connect the camera to one of the companies computers. * Asking IT support, he learns that it is against company security rules that employees can interchange data between their own storage devices and company computers. No exceptions. * So employee asks his PHB to let company order a second digital camera (cost 50$). PHB refuses, ast he "will not waste company money for that, we already have a camera". * Two months later, company buys a new video conference system for 10Mio$ as it is "vastly superior to the old one" and has "dedicated cameras to perform snapshots of printed XML documents to trigger a factory reset via cloud services". * The next time someone wants to use the video conference he learns that it is not working because Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is offline again.

2011-07-03 Reply Admin

The only reason anyone even bothers with Rational garbage is that it has an IBM logo on it and most management-type-people are conditioned that anything that comes from IBM is automatically good.

2011-07-04 Reply Admin

The Euro coins have been around for more than ten years now (just shy of ten years as the only currency in the Eurozone), so using then as a reference should be OK by now.

I figure it would be the same for Europeans if they had used one of those new-fangled quarter dollar coins those people on the other side of the pond seem to have taken a liking to.

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
Hortical:
Anyone smell that? It's the odd stench of an unjustified superiority complex.
Oh, wait, here it is:

C-Octothorpe:

Oh wow, you actually think I care what an anonymous loser on a forum thinks of me. Cool!

AND you even took the time to tell everyone about it...

Don't feed the Troll

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

Peter:
C-Octothorpe:
Hortical:
Anyone smell that? It's the odd stench of an unjustified superiority complex.
Oh, wait, here it is:

C-Octothorpe:
Oh wow, you actually think I care what an anonymous loser on a forum thinks of me. Cool!
AND you even took the time to tell everyone about it...
Speaking as another anonymous loser on an internet forum, I enjoy reading your posts. I don't know why your contributions seem to have attracted so much hostility of late.

Seriously, I like what you write here. Keep it up!

Irony - hah, I love it. Obviously not a Septic

2011-07-05 Reply Admin

The Rational ClearCase anecdote is 100% true, I had the misfortune to find myself in the same situation when I worked at big blue. God, what an awful pile of huming crap.

2011-07-06 Reply Admin

Childish:
The Factory Reset magnet trick takes me back to my first home computer, a Mac Plus.
Circa 1985, I got the Macintosh and Lisa Assembly Language programming kit. It had some 3.5" disks, a book, & a small plastic switch.

It turns out that the plastic switch was the reset button. Find the air slot on the side of the Mac Plus, & snap it in. Since Macintosh was user friendly, they didn't want regular people to have a reset switch.

Yeah, had the same thing with a mac; and the reset switch was located at the side at the back. With my first PC, I was amazed that it came with a reset switch as standard, and that it was on the front. Then I started using PCs and learnt why.

2011-07-06 Reply Admin

The »Installs the Manual« engrish is typical for languages which don't have a concept of articles (a, the). Bad translators will then just randomly insert "a" or "the" in places where they think they should go. If you take them all out, it's suddenly almost correct English.

2011-07-06 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
Hey C-Octothorpe! Guess where I've been? Remember when you mentioned the Bastard Operator from Hell a few months back? Well, I read every single article that was ever written. Priceless. Thanks man.
Now that that's done, I can resume reading TDWTF.

While I was never a mainframe sysop, I often worked closely with them as an admin for unix/windows boxen.

BOFH was our bible.

Actually, while the ops I met were never as cynical as the B, their mgmt was, well, WTFworthy.

I'll have to see if I can write something up & run it through the alexfilter.

rar

2011-07-14 Reply Admin

Is it wrong that the "Installs the Manual" instructions turned me on?

2017-09-08 Reply Admin

reminds me of one of my old computers: it had a very noisy hard drive, making a noisy buzzing sound, which i could sometimes quiet down by squeezing the sides of the case. finally i opened the case (for a different reason) and found that the drive was hanging at an odd angle, with the SINGLE SCREW barely in the hole! tightening the screw fixed the noise. (i would have added a second screw if i had one the right size)

2017-12-16 Reply Admin

And yet, we see the Install Wizard run Install Shield, which first runs an Update to Install Shield, and think nothing of it. The moral: name utils properly and your manuals won't have WTF phrases like IBM's does.

Unstructions: The Factory Reset, Irrational Installation, and Installs the Manual

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