• (cs)

    Fight club was not bad movie.

  • nobulate (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    Fight club was not bad movie.

    You call the rendition of a corporate slave breaking apart psychologically forming multiple personalities as a coping mechanism for reality, "not bad movie"?

    You must be one of those people who enjoys Will Smith films too.

    Shame.

  • Mark (unregistered)

    'the Number_Text field sometimes contained a value like "nine", and other times contained a value like "17"' may not be such a bonus WTF.

    My employer's corporate style/writing guide mandates numbers <=nine written in letters, and >=10 in numerals.

  • agbeladem (unregistered)

    Fourst.

    That's like the ABC of programming.

  • (cs)

    As one of Alex's "frist" deleting minions, I'm going to pull back the curtain and explain the secret to keeping your "frist" comment from getting deleted: be clever and entertaining.

    A simple "frist" is going to get deleted. For an article like this,SELECT * FROM comments WHERE comment_text = 'frist' might stick around (personally, I'm a little tired of SQL-based "frists"). The key point is- if it makes us laugh, we're less likely to delete it.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    I call BS.

    No self respecting Enterprise system would be caught dead using lowercase or allowing the total number of characters in a record to exceed 80.

    It's just not done.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    As one of Alex's "frist" deleting minions, I'm going to pull back the curtain and explain the secret to keeping your "frist" comment from getting deleted: be clever and entertaining.

    A simple "frist" is going to get deleted. For an article like this,SELECT * FROM comments WHERE comment_text = 'frist' might stick around (personally, I'm a little tired of SQL-based "frists"). The key point is- if it makes us laugh, we're less likely to delete it.

    Good point, but why did you delete all the posts that made fun of the original "frist" post? Or does the "might" extend to those as well?

  • Jim Blog (unregistered)

    If only there were well-established methods for converting integers into strings or roman-numerals, or globally unique identifiers. One day, some clever person will invent them and become very, very rich. Ah well. Until that happens, we'll just have to use a lookup in a database table...

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    'the Number_Text field sometimes contained a value like "nine", and other times contained a value like "17"' may not be such a bonus WTF.

    My employer's corporate style/writing guide mandates numbers <=nine written in letters, and >=10 in numerals.

    Pretty sure I read in some general "writing style" guide somewhere that that is how you should represent numbers when writing. It just looks better. Apparently.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag

    Our delete button gives us two options- "Just this comment" or "This comment and all replies". Unless I see something really genius mocking the original "frist", I hit the "delete all replies" option.

  • (cs)

    It would be a fun project to create a book titled "How to know your Enterprise Software is crap" with stuff like:

    Does your software goes to the database to perform stupid ops?

    Does your sofware has 5 or more layers of abstraction?

    Does your software use Struts?

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Our delete button gives us two options- "Just this comment" or "This comment and all replies". Unless I see something really genius mocking the original "frist", I hit the "delete all replies" option.
    But I didn't reply to the original "frist" post - I quoted a reply/quote of the original one, so I was at least one step removed.

    You're not only going for the children, but for the grandchildren too... Machiavelli would approve, if I remember "The Prince" correctly :-)

  • (cs) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    It would be a fun project to create a book titled "How to know your Enterprise Software is crap"

    see also: Remy's Law of Software. "If the term 'enterprise' is used anywhere in the description of your software, it is a piece of garbage."

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag

    I do believe it is recursive.

  • (cs)

    I like how they assign a GUID to each number. But, a GUID is a 16-byte number, so do they store GUIDs in this table to, and do they assign GUIDs to their GUIDS? Yo dawg...

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    For an article like this,SELECT * FROM comments WHERE comment_text = 'frist' might stick around (personally, I'm a little tired of SQL-based "frists").
    How about:

    SELECT C.Comment_Text AS [Comment] FROM dbo.stbl_Comments C WHERE C.Comment_ID = 1

    Using:

    CREATE TABLE [dbo].[stbl_Comments] AS ( Comment_ID INT NOT NULL, -- Number of comment Comment VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, -- The comment Comment_Text VARCHAR(255) NULL, -- Textual representation of the comment, should always match the value in the Comment field Comment_Irish VARCHAR(255) NULL, -- Irish translation of the comment Comment_GUID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL -- Globally unique identifier for the comment )

  • (cs) in reply to Bob

    Nice. You left out, however:

    Comment_GUID_Roman VARCHAR(255) NULL --the GUID represented as a series of Roman numerals
  • chreng (unregistered) in reply to nobulate
    nobulate:
    Nagesh:
    Fight club was not bad movie.

    You call the rendition of a corporate slave breaking apart psychologically forming multiple personalities as a coping mechanism for reality, "not bad movie"?

    You must be one of those people who enjoys Will Smith films too.

    Shame.

    You guys are stunning! You managed to comment on the article almost a week before it was published!

    Keep up the good work.

  • EvilSnack (unregistered)

    Apparently the first rule of prepping TDWTF articles for publication is to make a forced cultural allusion.

  • Beve Stallmer (unregistered)

    Now that's ENTERPRISE QUALITY!

  • nobulate (unregistered)

    Data Integrity

    Because one cannot trust a database to store the value given, you should always record your data twice.

    Case Study:

    Number_ID INT NOT NULL, -- Number ID. Should always match the value in the Number field
Number INT NOT NULL, -- The number

    Same Number Theory

    Because numbers may be the same value in an imaginary plane, one should always assign them unique identifiers to differentiate those that look similar.

    Case Study:

    Number_GUID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL -- Globally unique identifier for the number

    Oh and for the record: forming multiple personalities is also a coping mechanism for working with Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Beve Stallmer

    I'd like to know how many records were actually in the number table!

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    As one of Alex's "frist" deleting minions, I'm going to pull back the curtain and explain the secret to keeping your "frist" comment from getting deleted: be clever and entertaining.

    A simple "frist" is going to get deleted. For an article like this,SELECT * FROM comments WHERE comment_text = 'frist' might stick around (personally, I'm a little tired of SQL-based "frists"). The key point is- if it makes us laugh, we're less likely to delete it.

    Just add a "text != 'frist'" constraint and go get a beer! Jeez!

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Remy Porter:
    A simple "frist" is going to get deleted. For an article like this,SELECT * FROM comments WHERE comment_text = 'frist' might stick around (personally, I'm a little tired of SQL-based "frists"). The key point is- if it makes us laugh, we're less likely to delete it.
    Just add a "text != 'frist'" constraint and go get a beer! Jeez!
    Hooray! Now we can start a long discussion about text-based blacklists!

    And this post can serve as the fr1st example why they don't work.

  • Le Forgeron (unregistered)

    The structure of the table looks like someone exposed to Unicode without brain.

    The Number_text would hold the glyph(s). The Number_roman would hold the us-ascii. Number would be the the value for computation.

    Number_ID and Number_GUID are looking like a primary key and index from outer space. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey.

    As any misshaped table, it has to be misused too. Adding letters is just one step. It can be used to convert hexadecimal too.

  • Foobar (unregistered)

    TRTWF here is using KLOC as the primary measure of your programmers' job performance.

    To be honest, I'm surprised that 65 and 80 are hard-coded into that procedure, rather than calling another table for the ASCII values of a and z.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Foobar
    Foobar:
    To be honest, I'm surprised that 65 and 80 are hard-coded into that procedure, rather than calling another table for the ASCII values of a and z.
    Because that SELECT on that other table would return 97 and 122?
  • Les (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that there's no "Order By" in the query. That means that the alphabet is not guaranteed to be in alphabetical order.

  • (cs) in reply to nobulate

    nobulate - are you new around here? Feeding Nagesh is not always the best idea. Then again, I don't know the current economic situation in Hyderabad, so he might actually need feeding.

  • GWO (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter

    Having read his articles, I suspect the intersection between "Things that make Remy Porter laugh" and "Things that are actually either witty, original or intelligent" is a pretty small set.

  • Dale (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Remy Porter:
    Our delete button gives us two options- "Just this comment" or "This comment and all replies". Unless I see something really genius mocking the original "frist", I hit the "delete all replies" option.
    But I didn't reply to the original "frist" post - I quoted a reply/quote of the original one, so I was at least one step removed.

    You're not only going for the children, but for the grandchildren too... Machiavelli would approve, if I remember "The Prince" correctly :-)

    You can't leave dangling references behind! The entire DBMS might crash!!!

  • Dale (unregistered) in reply to Jim Blog
    Jim Blog:
    If only there were well-established methods for converting integers into strings or roman-numerals, or globally unique identifiers. One day, some clever person will invent them and become very, very rich. Ah well. Until that happens, we'll just have to use a lookup in a database table...

    Yes, it's truly fascinating that each number is assigned a GUID... as if there's no reliable way to tell if two number really are the same. Then again, perhaps the table has multiple rows with the same number value that must be distinguished... shudder.

  • Andy (unregistered)

    Unless I have misunderstood completely TORWTF is using the word 'Roman' 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 are ARABIC numerals

    I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII,IX are the corresponding Roman numerals

  • lolwtfbbq (unregistered) in reply to nobulate
    nobulate:
    Nagesh:
    Fight club was not bad movie.

    You call the rendition of a corporate slave breaking apart psychologically forming multiple personalities as a coping mechanism for reality, "not bad movie"?

    You must be one of those people who enjoys Will Smith films too.

    Shame.

    A movie doesn't have to describe utopia in order to be "not bad"

  • (cs) in reply to Les
    Les:
    TRWTF is that there's no "Order By" in the query. That means that the alphabet is not guaranteed to be in alphabetical order.
    The concept of an ordered alphabet is kind of arbitrary (is there really any good reason why A comes before B, other than your mother told you so?), so why insist that the letters be returned without some entropy?
  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    The concept of an ordered alphabet is kind of arbitrary (is there really any good reason why A comes before B, other than your mother told you so?), so why insist that the letters be returned without some entropy?
    I really hope you never branch out into publishing a dictionary...
  • (cs)

    I bet they have an incident when the database switches to Unicode.

  • I feel your pain (unregistered)

    And you know what the true cherry on this banana split of fail is? If you change the text representation to anything other than "17" for the number 17, I bet the the payroll subsystem will throw a silent exception and no one will get their checks deposited at the end of the month.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to I feel your pain
    I feel your pain:
    And you know what the true cherry on this banana split of fail is? If you change the text representation to anything other than "17" for the number 17, I bet the the payroll subsystem will throw a silent exception and no one will get their checks deposited at the end of the month.

    That would have been highly appropriate.

  • (cs) 
    SELECT * FROM dbo.stbl_Number WHERE Number_ID = 42;

NUMBER_ID   NUMBER     NUMBER_TEXT      NUMBER_ROMAN    NUMBER_GUID
----------- ---------- ---------------- --------------- ----------------------------
42          54         six times nine   LIV             <null>
  • Kevin (unregistered) in reply to Dale
    Dale:
    Yes, it's truly fascinating that each number is assigned a GUID... as if there's no reliable way to tell if two number really are the same.

    what? I don't even... what?!

  • Hawk (unregistered) in reply to zelmak

    We apologize for the inconvenience

    captacha: sagaciter - citing the saga of the hitchhiker.

  • Bruce Johnson (unregistered) in reply to derari

    I've actually been at a company where GUIDs were not considered unique enough (yeah, I know what unique means). So instead of using GUIDs as keys, they used three GUIDs concatenated together. Because what are the odds of three identical GUIDs being generated when a record is created.

    As it turns out, if you looked in the data table directly, you would see that the second and third GUIDs were set to all zeroes. Because what are the odds that...oh, never mind.

  • n9ds (unregistered)

    ...and what happens if the system happens to use EBCDIC or some other collating sequence?

  • Iggy (unregistered) in reply to zelmak
    zelmak:
    SELECT * FROM dbo.stbl_Number WHERE Number_ID = 42;

    NUMBER_ID   NUMBER     NUMBER_TEXT      NUMBER_ROMAN    NUMBER_GUID
    

    

    42          54         six times nine   LIV             <null>

    The answer of that SELECT statement is much more simple:

    "I can't remember the question."

  • golddog (unregistered)

    Speaking of Roman numerals, I read this joke last night and kind of liked it:

    A Roman general walks into a bar. Holds up two fingers and says, "I'll have five beers."

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to golddog
    golddog:
    Speaking of Roman numerals, I read this joke last night and kind of liked it:

    A Roman general walks into a bar. Holds up two fingers and says, "I'll have five beers."

    Wow, I'm impressed. Next!

  • Ninny (unregistered)

    What happens when grandma starts getting her fingers dirty on the keyboard: This happens.

  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    golddog:
    Speaking of Roman numerals, I read this joke last night and kind of liked it:

    A Roman general walks into a bar. Holds up two fingers and says, "I'll have five beers."

    Wow, I'm impressed. Next!
    Roman walks into a bar. "Gimme a martinus." "You mean martini, don't you?" "If I wanted two, I'd have asked for two!"

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Our delete button gives us two options- "Just this comment" or "This comment and all replies". Unless I see something really genius mocking the original "frist", I hit the "delete all replies" option.
    Thanks for explaining.

    Clearly TDWTF needs to upgrade to an enterprise-class delete button. With moar XML, just because.

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