Forums
Though our time at WTF University this week was brief (especially compared to its unfortunate students), it was certainly fun and educational. To remember our experience at this great school, I present the WTFU Alma Mater, by Chris Conroy (refrain by Devin Goble):
WTFU Alma Mater
Today marks the end of our brief tour at WTFU. And what better a way to end it than how it probably should have started: with the university's public webpage. At least, that's the first place that Mike R. looked when he heard that WTFU offered some fairly good and relatively inexpensive graduate programs. Now this may come as a shock to some, but Mike reported that web-browsing experience at wtfuniversity.edu was just a bit less than optimal.
The first thing that Mike noticed was that none of the navigation links worked. When he watched more closely, he saw that clicking on "Graduate Studies" yielded a small JavaScript error. No big deal; as a Firefox user, Mike is used to this. Curious, he decided to have a look at the source:
Enric Naval was presented with an opportunity he couldn't pass up: a plump scholarship, real-world programming experience, and some spending money. All he had to do was give up sixteen measly hours each week for some work-study in the college's IT department. How hard could that be? According to this figure I just made up, 63% of college students spend at least that much time each day in World of Warcraft.
Enric's job didn't seem too hard, either. All he had to do was maintain the Student Registration System. How hard could that be? It's not like the Student Registration System really changes; all it needs is student, class, and schedule data imported. Maintenance should be a cinch.
Dan Bugglin needed to find a course to fill three hours of general elective study. As fun as Masterpieces of Inner City Scandinavian Drama sounded, he thought he'd be better off with something a bit more closely related to his major, and signed up for Applications of Security and Cryptography.
The course sounded like it'd be pretty fun. Dan and his fellow students would learn the different models of security for real-time, business, and other applications, and also about the different types of cryptography and encryption for sensitive data. The professor even built a course website with a message board to help students collaborate on various projects. Unfortunately, Dan realized far too late that the instructor was actually a visiting professor from WTFU.
Chris never really questioned his choice of university. Sure, the school wasn't at the top of the Best Universities list, but really, how many are? Well, technically, it wasn't even on the Best Universities list, but then again, it wasn't on the Worst Universities list, either. And not just because that list doesn't exist. The school was accredited after all; how bad could it be?
Chris didn't have any problems with the introductory courses. How could he? They had Princeton-quality lecture notes! Really, they did: googling the text in the PowerPoint lecture notes yielded an identical presentation (name and course number changed) from a Princeton professor. Sure, the book would sometimes conflict with the lecture notes (especially when they referred to non-existent page numbers), but really, who reads the book?
A lot of people don't realize how similar today's business operations are to those from sixty years ago. Consider, for example, what a 1940's manager would do when he needed a report: like today's manager, he would turn to his computer for help; also like today's manager, he would issue his computer a command: "Jenkins, I need the Commissionable Sales Report for June on my desk ASAP;" and like today's computer, if the report wasn't too complicated and the computer wasn't bogged down with other tasks, the manager would receive the report in a reasonable time period.
If you think about it, the only differences between then and now are in the details: people (well, normal people) don't converse with their computers, "reasonable time" is measured in seconds not days, and fedoras are no longer considered proper business attire. Aside from the lack of fedoras, businesses run much more efficiently than they did back then. At least, that's what Brandon believed.
It was a dark and stormy night; the kind of night whose only escape from the monotonous pattering of a torrential downpour was the deafening boom of thunder, violently shaking the very foundation each building; the kind of night where a momentary lapse in the deluge welcomed only powerful gusts of wind, eerily howling through every corridor and alleyway; the kind of night that -- ok, fine, it was a slightly overcast late-afternoon, but work with me here.
Wrapping up and otherwise uneventful day, Mark Churchill received a high-priority page. It was an automatic alert sent by Intel Platform DMI:
As a junior-level programmer in a non-major metropolitan area, Jim knew he wouldn't land the most glamorous programming job. Needless to say, he didn't quite expect having to work with The Tool ...
I work for a mid-sized software company that developers web sites and web applications for different clients. Nothing too fancy, just the standard "UI layer to business layer to database layer" applications. Before getting hired, I never thought to ask what type of technology they use to develop their web applications. I've used several different platforms and was open to using whatever they used. At least, I thought I would be.
Bryan Brouckaert's company decided that it was time to get a new global Content Management System. Though their current CMS worked fine (minor bugs and inconveniences aside), it felt old. It was very Web One-dot-Zeroy. After a bit of a search, they found a superb Web 2.0 CMS: slick-looking buttons, turning-gear icons, and plenty of drag-and-droppable stuff. Still better, the vendor was able to redevelop the old system's templates and migrate all of the content without a hitch. The whole migration went over surprisingly well.
That is, until they deployed the new CMS to the remote offices. And to clarify, not "remote" as in "located off the main campus" but "remote" as in "located in a basement office in the Republic of Elbonia." These are the offices where "broadband" refers to the 1/2-inch thick rubber-band and "high speed" means "more kilobits than you can count on two hands." It's for these offices that Bryan had to figure out why the new CMS didn't work.
It's easy to understand how Mike Hartnagel got himself into the classic "should I quit after three days?" dilemma. Who would have guessed that a single bullet point on the job description -- "utilizing some Excel Interoperability" -- actually described the architecture of the system: a horrid amalgamation of Excel spreadsheets interacting with C# interacting with other spreadsheets. Who would have thought that all other bullet points -- from "multi-tiered architecture using remoting" to "automated/integrated build process" -- were actually features they'd like to have at some point in the distant future.
Who? A hardened cynic -- that's who. And that's exactly what Mike became after being handed his first programming assignment: create overloads for the following function so that developers don't need use zeros if they don't need all of the 600+ parameters ...
It's been a while since I've done one of these. There should be something in here for everyone ...
We've all seen the "const ONE=1" plenty of times, so here's a fun variation that Matthew Farwell found in cost estimating software. To be fair to the original programmer, no one could have possibly anticipated that someone, somewhere, sometime might want to increase prices ...
It's time once again to break the "professional examples only" rule and showcase yet another HTML WTF. A.S. discovered it when he copy-pasted the university bookstore's extended hours into an email to his students. The poor fellow updating the bookstore's web page found a rather unique way to avoid learning to use linebreak tags:
Extended Hours January 17 - 27, 2006
Mot did a pretty good job in telling this tale of Long Distance DATE$ing, so I'll just turn it on over to him ...
VBA (not VB) is Visual Basic for Applicaitons, embedded into other apps. A fine, extensible subset and superset of VB commands. Works pretty well if you stay within its bounds.
Sindri Traustason came in to work one morning to find himself the new owner of a high-priority issue that one of their customers were experiencing: all pages in their web application were erroring-out. Sindri dug in and found the following stack trace in the error logs ...
A few months ago, David Brady's company gave a small, fourteen-page web application assignment to a contractor they had worked with in the past. Although he was known for over engineering and for refusing to accept any alterations to the purity of his designs, the contractor assured them that he could complete it in two weeks so long as he could work "undistracted" (read: unsupervised). The company was really in a pinch and figured that, worst case, he'd take a little more than a month to finish it. They gave him the go-ahead.
Four months into the project, the contractor said he might be able to finish in three more months, but wasn't promising anything. Fortunately, David was able to convince his higher-ups to dump the contractor and finish the application internally. Unfortunately, David was the one assigned to finish it.
For many more, check out the previous post from the series, Pop-up Potpourri: June Bugs.
Let's start things off with Carl Witthoft, who received this pop-up survey after searching for some information at hellomoto.com ...
D. Lambert was threading his way through a horrible mess of an inherited system and stumbled upon a rather remarkable function. Unlike so many other of the terrible routines within the system -- some spanning several printed pages with nested loops six-deep and variables whose scope has been violated back and forth and forth and back -- this function is subtle. Elegant. It's a tiny monument to twisted intent that should allow one to appreciate the totality of its ruin ...
Private Function Add(ByRef Which As Integer, ByVal HowMany As Integer) Which = Which + HowMany End Function
As an independent consultant, Steve G. sees his fair share bizarre, homebrewed applications that somehow manage to run a business. The story usually goes: the business owner's brother's sister-in-law's mother's second-cousin's son is a complete whiz and does this sort of thing all the time, and would be happy to whip together a quick system for them, and then a few months later, the business owner desperately calls Steve to try to fix the horrible mess. Today's example is different with only one exception ...
With most Americans (including myself) enjoying a long, Indepdence Day Weekend, here's another classic ...
The problem with "logic" is that it makes things out to be nothing but simple dualities. Proponents of logic want us to believe that everything is true or false, black or white, yes or no, paper or plastic, etc. Thankfully, there are some among us, like Mark Harrison's colleague, who are not afraid to stand up to these logic advocates and shout "no, I will not succumb to your false dichotomies!" Today, I think we all should salute those few brave people ...
Jun 06