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Andreas C stumbled upon what might possibly be the most secure code ever written. At least, according to its original author.
Following is the contents of just one of many similarly coded PHP pages...
"I recently started a new job," writes D.Z., "and one of my tasks is to maintain a $DEITY-forsaken piece of software, written originally in VB.NET, then mutated and mutilated into C#."
"Generally speaking, I don't mind working on badly designed and poorly written applications. In fact, I've found it to be a fun challenge to dive head-first into spaghetti code and straighten it out as best as I can. It's like being an archeologist who tries to extract knowledge from a bunch of incoherent paintings on a cave wall... just without the adventures and, of course, the fedoras.
Originally posted to the sidebar by "snoofle"...
Some time back, I worked for a large company (now defunct). It was your basic IT department of about 150 people organized into groups of ~10, all on a big open cubicle farm on one floor. Every barrel has it's bad apple. Ours would routinely view kiddie porn - during work hours. He would occasionally leave the images up on the screen when he walked away. Finally, someone got offended enough to say something to HR. HR had "the talk" with him. A few weeks later, he did it again. The same person was offended, again, and complained to HR, again. The same person from HR had "the next talk" with him. A few weeks later he did it yet again. The same person made a much more formal complaint to HR. The head of HR told his #1 to sit down with everyone in IT, 5 at a time, with their immediate boss and their boss, and lay down the law.
Today's tale comes from Evan Wade...
I had the unique treat of interviewing for my replacement after accepting a promotion in the state agency for which I worked.
Ben Siemon was pleasantly surprised to find comments in some code he came across...
Originally posted by an anonymous reader...
I work at a smallish startup with about 40 people. It's generally been WTF-free, as the management is usually competent. Unfortunately, things have been sailing towards WTF-land with the arrival of a new CEO a few months ago. He has already built up a steady stream of WTFs, but his latest one just takes the cake.
As you probably have guessed, I spend a whole lot of time running The Daily WTF when going through submissions, writing articles, and sending out free stickers. While I do this primarily for fun and hobby, it does tend to interfere with my day job at Inedo and, as a result, I tend to earn much less than I could otherwise. But I don’t mind. All I have to do is sacrifice a few, small things. Things like a decent lunch.
Normally for me, lunch is all about getting as much nutritional value for the least amount of money possible. This means my lunch-time staples include things like sticks of butter ($0.23/ea), discarded military MREs (free… if you know where to look), and grocery store free-sample binges (free… if you have no dignity). Today, however, I decided to treat myself, so I scrounged up a dollar and headed on over to the Dollar Tree. After an exhaustive search through bins of expired food items, I stumbled across a wonderful treasure: the Chow Mein “Quick Meal”.
"I wonder if it's possible to change the text of the sensibility of the message," pondered Adam, "if the message having sensibility cannot have text... or something like that."
Through the much of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cambridge-based Thinking Machines was ahead of its time. As innovators in parallel computing, they developed a massive, 65,536 processor supercomputer known the Connection Machine. Visually, it made Cray’s distinctive look seem like a piece of outdated furniture, and was even stunning enough to star as the “impressive blinky-light server” in Jurassic Park.
Of course, that’s just about all it was good for. The Connection Machine was an AI researcher’s dream that no AI research lab could afford. Its inability to run FORTRAN – and every other programming language aside from a specialized Lisp dialect – made it pretty much useless for business and scientific purposes. Its baffling inability to even do floating-point operations mostly guaranteed that no one would buy it. But, hey – who needs customers when there’s lots of money from daddy!
"While exploring a rather large PHP codebase at my new job," Anthony C writes, "I kept coming across a rather curious pattern from the previous developers:
Apr 08
src="content.php?NoCache=<?php $random = make_random_code(); echo("$random"); ?>"
"I'm as much a fan of Java Generics as the next guy," writes Jim Bethancourt, "why bother with writing all that type-specific code for common collections (or - gasp - losing type safety) when one can simply go HashMap<String, SomeObject>."
"However, after working on several of my predecessor's projects, I think it's pretty clear that liked generics, too. But I'm gonna go ahead and say that he liked them juuuuuust a bit too much. This was one of way-too-many lines in the variable definition section of some (you guessed it) generic class...
Let's All Reinvent the Wheel... Again (from K.D.)
I was interviewing candidates for a junior web application development position. The candidate had, so far, seemed very knowledgeable and more than met the requirements of the position. I had, in fact, almost made my decision that I would make Joe an offer, but I had to ask just one more question.
"I have this feeling most of the day while I'm on support," writes M, "but I've never thought to try telling people."
"Not too long ago," Jess writes, "I adopted an application that needed 'a rather minor change' to its functionality. Naturally, when I started, the project owner had no idea what file or directory the functionality was in, so he gave me access to the server and sent me off. After wading through a number of oddly named directories trying to find where the site was even located, I finally found the index file I had hoped would set me in the right direction."
"Of course, it didn't. After twenty minutes of jumping from page to page to page, I realized that I'd simply have to grep the entire application: a gig or so of content with tens of thousands of files within hundreds of directories. After nothing turned up, I quickly realized that most of the files had completely meaningless extensions: .html files had lots of PHP, .php4 files had PHP5, and .php files rarely had any PHP.
Originally posted by "DrillSgtK"...
In the late 90’s, I worked for a small, “start-up/spin-off” dot com company. We were originally The University’s distant learning department, but had been re-constituted as a for-profit company, owned by The University to service The University. A year and a half old, the company had grown from six people working out of a trailer on campus to a seventy-five person operation with three offices and large co-location site in a data center. The IT staff, however, remained the same size: three of us.
François captured this brief video of his answering machine bug for our first-ever video Error'd.
(or download as avi)
