• plis (unregistered)

    compareToIgnoreCase("frist")

  • DQ (unregistered)

    So the crapy code didn't cause the crash? Then why fix it?

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    Logging this much is worthless, what you want to do is log stuff you can actually get value out of and provide some way to filter out everything else. It's like Target buying a security monitoring system and then turning it on and seeing too many security warnings to read the other logs. So they turned it off. 3 months later they turned it on again and it was still spewing out warnings. Then someone wondered why...

  • guest (unregistered)

    Stop the whining. I agree that too much logging does as much damage as not enough. The article said the program group was Michael's responsibility. Streamline it where possible and diagrahm the sh*t of it so that in the event is does(will) fail Michael can resolve it quickly. Just a logical approach.

  • Martijn (unregistered)

    someone in oops! hit “Ok” on a security update

  • His Derpiness (unregistered)

    No, the fix for that utter shitstain of a mess is not to analyse the broken code, and keep all the broken assumptions that the previous dev made. The fix is to talk to business and users and analyse need and do a completely fresh implementation that is not broken by design. And, I am pretty convinced that there will be a drop-in replacement that does the job properly in a whole slew of backup services available.

  • Angus (unregistered)

    YES! The Unicorns are back! I never knew how much they meant until they went away.

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to DQ

    Yeah, better wait until it causes another company-wide outage. Then fix it. Then you'll be the hero. Right?

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Michael still wanted to fix the archiver program, but there was another problem with that. Because he was responsible for the archiver program, and the archiver program had failed, Michael was let go.

  • David (unregistered)

    The fact that Java implemented Generics in 2004 doesn’t say anything about being able to use generics. If the environment is enterprisy enough it might very well forbid using these newfangled cutting edge technologies.

  • Pjrz (unregistered) in reply to His Derpiness

    ha ha ha! As if that would work or even be allowed!

    Any attempt at persuading the Powers That Be that the best thing would be to throw away the rubbish and start again would be met with a flurry of angry rebukes about cost, wasting time and so on (regardless of how much time and money in fixes and maintenance the existing rubbish causes).

    And even if you got past that hurdle by some miracle, getting user's actual business requirements would be met with an answer of "Well...I, like, wanna be able to push that, like, button thing and...the stuff happens". And when you ask: What stuff? The answer will be "Well...you know, the stuff that I wanna happen."

  • Deez (unregistered)

    Should be "known-safe"

  • Dave (unregistered)

    "//Remy: I didn't elide any code from the inside of that while loop- that is exactly how it's written, as an empty loop."

    You elide only when speaking.

  • Descriptivist (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    My favorite thing about the stalwarts of prescriptivism is when they're wrong.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elide Definition of elide elided; eliding transitive verb 1 a : to suppress or alter (something, such as a vowel or syllable) by elision b : to strike out (something, such as a written word)

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to Descriptivist

    Can we really rely on Merriam-Webster to provide us with accurate definitions when Dave seems to be so quick on the ball?

  • DQ (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    But it wasn't the program that caused the crash! I agree that you should replace the entire thing, but do you really believe it will ever be approved?

  • 🤷 (unregistered)

    The takeaway from this story? Never hit "Ok" on a security update, it will break things!

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to DQ

    It might be the program that causes the next crash. Don't know if it will be approved, but you can try, and get the refusal in writing, so you have some defense when it happens.

  • Jack Lumber (unregistered)

    Michael may have gotten bamboozled by the branch manager in the logging software ownership lottery: the short stick tends to be just as short regardless of which end you grab.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Paul Neumann

    You can't ever rely on M-W to provide accurate definitions. Although it so happens that in this case the other Dave is wrong and M-W is right.

  • Rob (unregistered)

    I like the potential NPE in checking TO. Let's first check if it's not empty (not even using isEmpty()...), and only then check for null.

  • Michael Wheeler (google)

    Michael had access to the code to determine why it was failing, but because he wasn't authorized to modify it, he was lumped with it.

  • Simon (unregistered)

    It only throws exceptions if you don’t supply a destination, or if you don’t have permissions to the files. Otherwise, it just returns false on a failure.

    Yep, that's Java for you. Failure conditions are signalled by throwing exceptions... except for a handful of cases in the core APIs where they decided to signal failure through a return value instead. Can't remember what it was now, but I wasted a few hours trying to track down a problem quite similar to this one... the calling code had pretty good exception handling, but the developer hadn't noticed that one of the APIs they were calling could fail without throwing.

  • Some Guy (unregistered) in reply to David

    I'm working on an enterprisey as anything system, and we're still on Java 8. Java 9 isn't even on our list of wishes of things we want to do. Sorry but at some point you have to start upgrading. And 1.4 -> something that's actually supported is one of those things.

    Unless you want to pay disgusting amounts of moolah-lah to IBM or Oracle, or you want to be without security updates, you'd have migrated off of that thing yonks ago.

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