- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
All this beheading stuff is true, or is there a little exaggeration here?
Admin
Been there, done that. I run a website for a retail POS service company that holds records for all the stores they service for, and tracks open calls and the techs that are able to take the calls. One of their clients is an enormous retail giant, so we're talking 250000 site records. It's currently running on an old PII machine. Luckily, I was able to acquire an old Athlon machine (1Ghz, 3/4 gig ram) to run the database on.
Admin
There's a special place in Hell for somebody willing to work on a project like this. I wish programmers had the morality of librarians.
Admin
At the end of that story I would quit on the spot. I don't care about any ifs/ands/or buts. I would buy me a rifle and shine it daily on my porch!
Admin
I would image the laptop hard disk to a real server, boot to the recovery console, change to the appropriate HAL, reboot in VGA mode, set up backups, then retest. At least that box could handle the load while they troubleshoot.
Admin
That's what I don't get. For this to make sense, it must've happened just before Christian saw the laptop. Because if this temporary solution is to work for more than a VERY short amount of time, then you're better off taking an image of the laptop's drive and putting it on a test server so it can at least handle the load.
Otherwise, what they did with the laptop isn't all that bad. Unless it was like this for a long period of time, just waiting for a hard drive crash or overheat failure. If this was for a few short weeks or less and they had no alternatives or workarounds, what else is there to do? Yes yes, take an image and put it on a real machine. But hey, as long as the powers that be don't know anything.
Admin
Nothing is a WTF if failure means beheading except for taking the job in the first place.
Admin
I would image the laptop hard disk to a virtual machine, and would run it on that server.
Admin
I would assume it is not a trivial task to shut the application down so you can image the laptop.
Admin
I would image the servers to laptops and run it from there. How many other servers will have this bug in the future if they don't?
Admin
If it works in Visual Studio, but doesn't work in production, then chances are that the Windows heap "helpful" behavior of initializing new memory to junk causes an uninitialized variable to be non-zero. When not running in Visual Studio, you get whatever happened to be there, which is usually pristine zeros for a previously unused memory page. So, when you attach a debugger to debug the problem, the problem goes away. Visual Studio is "helpful" like that.
Regarding imaging the laptop: they already did a fail-over/move to the laptop, so clearly the system could be shut down enough to redirect traffic.
Admin
This one made me really laugh out loud. Really good one, Alex :)
If it was sitting there for a day, it's okay. They still had to debug the darn thing etc. If it sits there for a week, an image sent to the server would be a better solution. If it sits there for longer than a week, you're in big trouble, because then it becomes a permanent solution. And what if someone trips over some cable? At least put it somewhere in a rack...
Admin
The laptop bit is entertaining and all, but the most impressive thing is that they actually got the system in on time and 70% complete.
Admin
Hmmm... I think it's unusually clear in this case what the real WTF is. And it's not the laptop.
Admin
There's nothing like building a zillion dollar massively parallel redundant data pipe, and then ramming the entire thing through a single straw.
Admin
I cannot help this, but every time I read POS software, I'm not thinking about points of sale exactly... the WTF effect!
vern what? Oh you... ok then
Admin
Was this before or after Victor's big falling out with Reed and Sue?
Ya know, I don't think even dictatorships behead consultants who are simply visiting from Paris. Isn't it their own citizens who get the axe?
Admin
Haha I bet this happened in Romania!
Admin
The RealWTF(tm) is that they used Windoze.
Captcha: stinky (very appropriate)
Admin
Yes, what a fantastic comment!
Admin
I call bullshit. The nonsense beheading stuff is clearly bullshit, and so I very much doubt the rest is truthful.
Admin
I call urban legend on this one.
Admin
Great story!!!
Admin
Yep, the debug C lib DLL msvcrtd.dll. Can't tell you the number of times that thing has screwed me (or helped me, I can't tell which). Either initializing memory to zeros or shredding the frees, it's all good.
Admin
When the 'director' of some organization in an Eastern European country asks for you personally... DONT GO.
The bit about the laptop is neat though. Not really a WTF, in the sense that they needed an interim solution. The alternative was to just not have the sytem running.
And that they delivered it on time - extra plus! What's Christian's company? We can use them in the US :-)
Admin
The real WTF is that they spent millions on such a robust system and didn't properly test it.
Admin
"IDDTP" Install Deploy Don't Test Pray... simply LOL
Admin
Admin
Undoubtedly, some countries and regimes would do this, but I don't think very many would do it to travelling, temporary experts brought in from other countries. The potential costs of saying, "Yeah, we killed that citizen you sourced to us...er, he died in a car accident just like the last three. Yeah, this one got his head shorn off in the accident too." are just too great.
Then again, I didn't think Alex completely implied that the WRITER was in danger of being beheaded, but maybe I am giving him too much benefit of the doubt, considering how many submitters have complained in these comments about him going wildly overboard in adding the dramatic exaggerations...
Admin
Just to note, the beheading thing was mentioned in only two small areas. The first time jokingly referring to a previously fired coworker. The second time could be referring to the managers that headed up this project and outsourced the development, not the developers themselves.
Admin
I used to work for a huge, multi-national communications company. It wasn't always multi-national. In fact, it started in a small office in Vienna, VA.
Two years after our French Joint Venture, the DNS stopped resolving. If you were in the French Network, you could ping IPs, but not do any name resolution beyond your own hosts file. The DNS IPs had been hard coded in the software long ago, and now both IPs were no longer accessible. Sacre bleu!
So why didn't they use our main DNS? It turns out that they tested the whole system in the US, and had some plan to use DNS locally when it moved to Lens. so they assigned the IPs right then and there. So where did these IPs go? They didn't resolve to anything. They were in one of our MANY IPs blocks, so we knew it was our DNS server. It had to be So we went looking for the DNS servers.
It took two days to find them. We traced the IPs via router logs to a major data center that had the IP block, but it took a while for the traffic to show that requests went outside the data center to... our old, long-expired data center? The one we moved out of like a year ago?
Finally, we traced it back to our old Vienna offices. While we were in the last traces of moving out, there was still an office presence there. And look, one of their routers were FULL of DNS requests to those IPs. Further tracing led to an empty floor.
We found the "servers." It was really a beaten up 486 laptop in a lab on someone's desk, with a monochrome screen, running NT 3.5.1. The network had hung, but a system log showed the uptime was over three years. There was a sticker that had some forgotten data on it, but luckily someone wrote in fat marker a humorous warning, "DO NOT SHUT DOWN THIS LAPTOP UNDER PAIN OF DEATH!!" along with a production ID.
A 486 laptop with 32mb RAM had been running French DNS for over 2 years. Before the laptop was rebooted, the configs were saved to a floppy. This data was then used to populate some better equipment.
Admin
No, that's the real WTF.
Admin
This would not surprise me in the least.
/was there this past summer
Admin
I dunno. I worked on a case management system for a (U.S.) state court system a while back, and every time one of the judges got P.O.d about something in it we were threatened with jail time. Might not have been strictly legal, but the guys with guns answered to them, not to us. None of us were anxious to be the poster children for another 'raped in jail after an invalid arrest' lawsuit in this particular county.
Captcha: craaazy (and it was)
Admin
http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012
Admin
developers at Eastern European countries have lot of similar "proverbs" about US companies. hmm... at least we have something in common, 640kB of RAM is not enough
Admin
Can somebody please explain me why in the name of god would people with a zillion dollars project use a third party library to do anything? Time is not an excuse! You have the damn money! Just pay someone to make it and keep that damn code!
So, i can confirm now the whole history is bullshit: the Victor i know would never used third party libraries.
CAPTCHA: tacos. (please, not black font with black background again)
Admin
The right combination of windows patches? The WTF is that someone designed a system like this on a Windows platform. Microsoft is a toy, not a tool, people.
Admin
That'll teach those pesky developers to not use the old "it works on my machine" excuse!
Admin
I hate magic
Admin
The real WTF is they used VB.
Admin
See ? These guys were being stuck with a buggy 3rd party proprietary library and they couldn't do anything to fix it. Proprietary software RESTRICTS your freedom because in case of bugs, even if you have a support contract, you are ENTIRELY dependent on the vendor to fix bugs.
Whereas with open source software, in addition to support contracts that you can buy from companies providing OSS support (if you want to), you have access to source code and can fix bugs yourself. Or you can hire a contractor specialized in OSS. Or you can request help from the OSS community. There are, literally, thousands, tens of thousands of developers on this planet who can fix any bug in OSS applications.
This is one of the reason of why I promote OSS and why my company heavily and successfully relies on OSS.
Admin
Nice reference. I just spent 30 minutes on Wikipedia reading about Ogden Nash.
Admin
give me a break.
Admin
One of the common pieces of FUD from Microsoft in the past has been how difficult and expensive it is to get a OSS "expert" to maintain systems because everyone knows Microsoft!
It is true.. there are many more people in the workforce that can setup an Exchange server as opposed to Postfix but once you have a serious problem you have a serious problem.
I wonder how many people out there(if any) know EVERYTHING there is to know about Windows.
Even if you are not technically inclined, with a paypal account that has a little money in it.. you can get anything fixed or changed in OSS by visiting IRC. The only thing you couldn't get done is fix some compatibility issues with Microsoft products, but that is because no one actually knows how their formats and protocols work(not even Microsoft).
Admin
Billions, trillions, Zillions! there are entire galaxies of developers, entire universes, who can fix any bug in OSS applications. And i mean ANY bug. Pal, there´s no limit for what OSS can offer. Infinite possibilities!
(...)
Admin
Even if it is absolutely certain that nobody would suspect (even jokingly) that someone who was fired was later executed, it does serve well to illustrate how stubborn and, er, defensive the Defence people were in taking criticism.
Admin
Admin
What ever you do, do not use any other localhost address than 127.0.0.1 on a clean Windows XP SP 2 box. It took us a months to find this change and the Hotfix associated with it.
Admin