The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Phoning It In

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-01-29

In the late 1980s, Andrew Harkavy was working as a lead developer for a large hotel chain. He was responsible for 240 hotels that ran off 4 regional minicomputers. Each minicomputer served around 60 hotels, with six ports designated for each one for its terminals, printers, IT dial-in support, etc. Most of the time things worked pretty well, though the hardware was being pushed to the limit.

One day, Andrew got a call from a hotel employee with a strange issue — the screen's output kept coming out of the printer. Some time later, Andrew got another call from the same hotel employee, this time it was print jobs being output to the screen.

100 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-10

Elegant Syntax Error

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2008-01-25

At some point, you've probably thought to yourself "I'd love to write some code, but the keywords in my language of choice are just so pedestrian." Your vocabulary is more embiggoned than that of your colleagues. While they're content with DROPping a database object, you'd prefer to efface it. A contractor that Charles I.'s worked with was one of these elite.

His first order of business? Get rid of those (ugh) "while" loops that his mouth-breathing coworkers used. With the belief that elegant code should embody every aspect of the word "elegant," he wrote all of his "while" loops as "whilst" loops.

165 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-19

Disowned by Driver

by Jake Vinson in Error'd on 2008-01-24

Ron sent in this screen grab from what I can only assume is a soap opera intended for robots.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-20

Right Under your Nose

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2008-01-23

There are a lot of reasons to reinvent software. Maybe you don't trust the person who wrote it in the first place. Maybe you wrote it back when you didn't know what you were doing, but this time you'll get it right. Or maybe you didn't know that the solution was built already, right under your nose the whole time.

H. Y.'s colleague, as far as he could tell, fell into that third camp. He had a problem — he needed to read a value from web.config (an XML file that holds common settings for .NET applications, like authentication, authorization, connection strings, etc.) — and skipped past the research phase directly to solution engineering.

95 comments - Last comment @ 2024-07-06

Translation Not Available!

by Jake Vinson in Error'd on 2008-01-22

How many "Translation Not Available!"s can you find?

(submitted by Greg I.)

55 comments - Last comment @ 2009-06-30

OnClick Does What?!

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2008-01-21

When Doug D. was asked to investigate a data truncation issue, he figured it'd be pretty easy. He clicked through the application to test it out, and discovered that validation was only handled client side. After turning JavaScript off, he could submit text boxes with more text than would fit in the database column.

There was just one problem; he didn't see the client-side validation code next to the other functions defined on the page. He scrolled down to the submit button to see what it did in its OnClick.

91 comments - Last comment @ 2008-11-19

The Horrible and Stupid System

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-01-17

Jared L. was feeling good. After a nightmarish stint at Initrode Global (That's One Way to Secure It), he joined the staff at CollaboSmart. His days of waking up to an ever-present sense of dread were over. And he could hardly believe that it had ended a mere two months ago.

After he left, Jared kept in touch with his friend Stephen, who still worked at Initrode. Eager to catch up on how each other were doing, they met for lunch.

144 comments - Last comment @ 2008-01-31

We're not a software company

by Jake Vinson in Best of the Sidebar on 2008-01-16

Today's Best-of-the-Sidebar was originally posted by "aikimark."

When I asked the tech from the bone density scanner company about the poor performace of their software, they replied with "we're not a software company." I'm glad we were listening on a speaker phone, because I have witnesses to that statement. What refreshing honesty! Of course, I didn't disagree.

64 comments - Last comment @ 2008-10-17

Infinitely Recursive Accessibility

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-01-10

The Section 508 amendment to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act updated and extended the act beyond its original 1973 text, which simply allowed individuals with disabilities to participate in federally funded disco dancing competitions. Section 508 specifically applies to technology and electronic communication to minimize or eliminate barriers to people with disabilities. And as is wise to do with all federal mandates, Clive S. took this one seriously.

After developing a web site and presentation about how to be safe with online banking for a government web site, Clive got to work adding accessibility features. He made sure that images had descriptive ALT tags, he summarized every chart with text, and ensured that all video presentations were captioned.

93 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-08

Access Abomination

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-01-08

In his college years, budding developer Troels L. wanted to get a leg up over his fellow students. He figured a job to supplement his studies would serve him well, so he looked for employment at IT firms, banks and insurance companies, but no one was hiring students. The companies only had positions available to candidates with degrees.

Finally, Troels found a large non-IT company in his area that was looking for college students for a planned project. He read and re-read the job post to assess whether he had the skills called for in the project -- specifically in the area of database integration using a trio of technologies: Access, VB and Encarta.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2008-03-01

One User at a Time, Please

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-01-02

"Wait, why do you need to shut the SQL Server down?" Henry O. didn't like where this conversation was going. "We've got a lot of people using the database right now. I'd really like to do this upgrade without shutting it down."

"Well, we have to shut it down," Tom, the vendor, reiterated. "Because... because."

43 comments - Last comment @ 2008-01-31