Jake Vinson

Nov 2007

How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You?

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Reverse psychology is hard to resist, especially when it comes at you fourfold.


(submitted by Zach)

60 comments - Last comment @ 2009-05-18

Notepad Translation Error

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For several days, Rick was fighting with a third party vendor. Rick's system was supposed to talk to his vendor's system using XML files, but their files were coming back with invalid XML data. Rick complained to a technical contact ("Terry") that the XML they returned was invalid. Terry argued that they were processing the file wrong.

The issue that Rick discovered was that one of the attribute values in the XML file used single quotes instead of double quotes. Terry insisted that the XML file used only double quotes, and made his case by sending over screenshots from XMLSpy and IE, showing that they were indeed double quotes. The screenshot from IE would've looked something like this:

203 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-28

Portrait, Landscape, or Actual Landscape?

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Finally, thought Marcin, a company that takes "landscape" literally.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2009-04-04

The Omni ID

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Joshua had recently started his job at a consulting firm. To get his feet wet, he was added to the team on an application they maintained for the juvenile court system. Fortunately, it had been developed entirely by the company, and everyone Joshua had met at the company seemed to have a good head on their shoulders. Plus it wasn't too big of an application, making it an ideal environment for Joshua to learn.

Joshua's first task was to prepare some reports for the users — an ideal first task for a developer new to a system. Except that it was practically impossible to create the reports they wanted.

110 comments - Last comment @ 2007-12-04

A Non-Smoking Room, Please

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"I'm sorry, we don't have X, would you like X instead?"


(submitted by Mike D.)

57 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-19

Intellisense Comes Alive!

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Two faces or a vase? Half full or half empty? Singing or childishly mocking?


(submitted by Drew)

55 comments - Last comment @ 2011-11-01

Leave That One Alone

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"H... hello?" Cid groaned, looking at his clock. It was 4:53 AM.

"Hi, good morning, is this Cid? I hope I'm not waking you up."

95 comments - Last comment @ 2008-02-08

Any Key... or Any Other Key

by in Error'd on

From Roberto C.:

59 comments - Last comment @ 2011-07-02

I Hope it's Subtitled

by in Error'd on

E. D. enjoyed a foreign film that was produced in a country that apparently communicates via special characters and fractions.

113 comments - Last comment @ 2008-11-30

Taking a Good Thing Too Far

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If you're good at what you do, you can judge when to employ which design patterns. And, on the other hand, when employing said design patterns would make the means too complicated to justify the ends. Dale M. sent in an example of this sort of overcomplication:

Interface: 10 lines (4 Lines Of Code w/o comments)
     core/src/com/.../enterprise/util/codetable/IYesNo.java
Factory: 141 lines (69 LOC)
     core/src/com/.../enterprise/util/codetable/YesNoFactory.java
     (Note that the factory includes an inner class called YesNoInstanceType)
Abstract class: 43 lines (17 LOC)
     core-restricted/src/com/.../enterprise/util/codetable/restricted/YesNo.java
Concrete class: 87 lines (61 LOC)
     core-restricted/src/com/.../enterprise/util/codetable/restricted/nonpersistent/YesNo.java

110 comments - Last comment @ 2009-04-19

Protection From Robots, By Robots

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This CAPTCHA stuff is getting ridiculous. What is this, like... underscore-hyphen-hyphen-accent-subscripted hyphen-underscore?


(submitted by Adrian K.)

70 comments - Last comment @ 2007-11-15

Doomed from the Start

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When Sergey L. showed up for his first day at his new job, he wasn't really sure what he'd be working on. The hiring manager wasn't very specific. "Database skills are very important," he told Sergey. "You'll be our first real sysadmin maintaining some stuff that a bunch of consultants set up."

Sergey was the first sysadmin that the company had ever hired in its five year history. And no one was really sure what to do with him or where he fit in the environment. As such, he didn't really have a boss. He had a team of bosses. Specifically, everyone in the company.

120 comments - Last comment @ 2007-11-18

Oh The Weather Outside is Frightful

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Martin W. usually leaves for work at 8:00 AM, but he left a little later on April 18 due to "Martian storms and temperatures below absolute zero."

111 comments - Last comment @ 2011-03-26

Really Descriptive Names

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You've probably encountered more than your fair share of inadequately descriptive variable and function names. Debugging a function with variables named a, a1, a2, a0, aO, al, a1l, al1, aIl, a1I, and al1I is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

On the opposite end, we have this code from an anonymous submitter:

159 comments - Last comment @ 2008-05-07

The Opposite of Backup

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In the early 1980s, George C. was IT support on a team overseeing a large installation of workstations. At the time, this was a pretty novel concept. Several Unix site managers applied to help out but wanted "too much money," according to management. Instead, the IT manager rounded up a bunch of recent college graduates (who were much cheaper). Problem solved.

There were roughly 80 workstations that were being installed, each with two 70MB drives. One drive kept the operating system files (which the users couldn't modify), the other was the user drive for work files. Each system was backed up and updated nightly with a three step process:

  1. Back up all files that have changed on each client's user drive.
  2. Replace old files on each client's system drive.
  3. Delete files that are no longer needed from each client's system drive. For this step it'd just remove any files from the system drive on the client's machine that didn't exist on the server so everyone had a consistent system drive.
120 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-30

From the Billing Department

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Keep your fingers crossed that that F. B. won't have to pay the 2.25 million billion dollars. Or at least that he can pay in two 1.12 million billion dollar installments.

70 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-16

Trouble Sort

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Suppose you're using C# and you have a bunch of RSS data that you want to sort and put into a file. Think about how you'd approach the task.

You might consider a generic list. Maybe a DataTable and a DataView. Guilherme's colleague decided on (and invented) the Multi Array Bubble Sort technique.

81 comments - Last comment @ 2007-12-06

Internal Feud

by in Error'd on

I think this is a case of the department responsible for spam filtering having a grudge against the copywriting department.


(submitted by Matt G.)

74 comments - Last comment @ 2008-01-16

That's One Way to Secure It

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Most of the WTFs we get are like light snacks. Some programmer didn't know better, screwed something up, we laugh at it, and hopefully everyone learns something. Other times WTFs are Homerian epics. Today's story is one of those.

Jared L. is our Odysseus in this story. As a fresh college graduate, he landed a good position as a Java webmaster in charge of about 25 web sites. He'd never written a single line of JSP code in his life, but he figured he could pick it up pretty quickly. And during his interview he mentioned that he didn't have any JSP experience, but they made him an offer anyway — it wasn't like he'd lied about his experience level.

99 comments - Last comment @ 2008-01-17
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