The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

My Tales

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2008-07-30

After sharing so many of your interview stories, I thought it was finally time that I’d share a couple of my own…

Finally!

Back in the .NET 1.0 days, I interviewed for a contract position at a certain large insurance company around here. It was a technical interview with two senior-level developers. After I finished answering a softball question about how Try-Catch blocks work, one of the interviewers followed up with a question about Finally blocks.

209 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-16

The Investment Experts

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2008-07-28

"I received this letter from Wachovia, my company's 401K provider," an anonymous reader wrote in. "It was supposed to convince me to sign up with AdviceTrack, and give them another half-percent of my retirement funds so that they could manage my investments for me."

"The chart, however, isn't very convincing. If I continue to manage my funds myself, I end up with $76,564 a year. If I let their experts manage my funds for me, I get a whopping $67,619 - or, $9,000 less. Glad I'm not an expert."

81 comments - Last comment @ 2008-08-01

A Bit of Closure

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2008-07-28

"After our UI developer left," Danny writes, "I was tasked with figuring out why one of our admin pages would get stuck in the middle of the loading screen."

"I know creating named functions for every callback can be a pain, but this a little ridiculous...

58 comments - Last comment @ 2008-09-10

Dummy text goes here.

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2008-07-25

LRY shares this informative caption from the July 6th edition of The San Francisco Chronicle.

92 comments - Last comment @ 2011-01-14

Sophisticated Cooling Apparatus

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-07-24

If you've ever wondered what's behind those "Technical Difficulties... Please Stand By" messages that TV stations run all too often, an anonymous reader shares with us one reason: someone moved the fan.

112 comments - Last comment @ 2017-08-04

tblTimesheet

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2008-07-23

Not too long ago, Erik was hired to do extend and maintain a timesheet application for an employment agency. It was an ASP/VBScript web-app with data that lived in the Everything Database: a single SQL Server database filled with random tables from all sorts of various applications.

After paging through the tables, Erik found a few that seemed to be for the timesheet application. The first one he opened up was tblTimesheet.

127 comments - Last comment @ 2014-05-04

Designed For Reliability

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-07-22

Tandem Computers were all the rage in the mid-1980s, especially in the banking industry and other high-transaction environments. "While most computer systems have failure rates on the order of a few days," Tandem salespeople would often say, "our NonStop line of computers is designed to fail hundreds of times less. We measure our uptime in years." And they were right: Tandem delivered hardware solutions with virtually no downtime.

This was accomplished through Tandem's engineers' meticulous attention to detail: There was no single point of failure. Each NonStop server had at least two CPUs. Each one had its own memory, its own I/O bus and two connections-in case one failed-to an equally redundant multi-CPU bus that had its own redundant shared memory. Even the OS was specially crafted to allow in-memory changes without the need for a reboot. And naturally, the whole server was powered by two redundant power supplies-just in case. Sure, it was expensive, but it worked-Tandem managed to exceed the coveted Five Nines (99.999 percent) of uptime.

160 comments - Last comment @ 2010-10-24

The Windstream Disconnect

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2008-07-21

Some companies spare no expense to make sure they get all of their money. Apparently, Windstream Communications is no exception as, a few months back, Aaron's company received this stern disconnection notice via Certified Mail...

131 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

I'm Dave, Oh Yeah!

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2008-07-21

Originally posted in the sidebar, "Throgdor the Bold" was having a few JavaScript issues on Houston Chronicle's site and took a peek at the source code. At the bottom of their utils.js, he noticed this...

setTimeout(check4Dave,2000);
function check4Dave() {
  if (document.cookie.match('ImDaveOhYeah')) {
    s=document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script'));
    s.id='fs';
    s.language='javascript';
    s.src='http://www.chron.com/apps/emdjcs/specialDave.js';
  }
}

93 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-13

Meet The LAN Form

by Alex Papadimoulis in Best of the Sidebar on 2008-07-18

This story was originally posted to The Sidebar by "citking".

Like many large organizations, the University of Initrode-Extension has a LAN Form. This all-encompassing form is responsible for authorizing everything from creating a new user to moving a network connection.

84 comments - Last comment @ 2009-11-09

Which Internet?

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2008-07-18

"I was asked this question when signing up for a bank account," wrote James. "I was going to answer 'The', but was surprised to find this rather limited selection... "

277 comments - Last comment @ 06:56

Yes, the Table is Still There

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2008-07-16

"Having recently upgraded my forum software," Kinta wrote, "I noticed that my site had been running incredibly slow."

"Upon further investigation, I found that that the following code was being run once for each and every comment on a page, whenever ever a forum thread was opened.

66 comments - Last comment @ 2008-08-05

Hot Water Costs Money

by Alex Papadimoulis in Best of the Sidebar on 2008-07-14

Originally posted to The Sidebar by "ObiWayneKenobi"...

Last year, I took a position as the “Director of IT Services” for a tiny, six-person e-commerce company. The fact that I wouldn’t be managing anyone should have been a red flag, but I hoped that I could get approval down the road to build a real IT department.

99 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-26

The Free Bird Database

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-07-09

Back in 1919, Proffitt’s opened their first department store in downtown Maryville, TN. While it didn’t quite have the prestige of a big city department store like Saks Fifth Avenue, it certainly had the technology of one.

As customers entered the Proffitt’s store, an electronic switch on the door would send a signal to the management office, advancing a counter for real-time traffic numbers. Browsing through the various departments of goods, perceptive customers would have noticed that the over-sized price tags were actually Hollerith Cards, to be fed into tabulating machines for summarizing the day’s sales. Purchasing goods was snap, requiring nothing more than a few taps on the electronic cash register or simply a telephone call to the credit department through the intercom telephone system. And certainly, no one could miss the pneumatic tubes, zipping around documents from department to department.

131 comments - Last comment @ 2013-03-15

Document Dis & Naked in the CIA?

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2008-07-07

Document Dis (from Lawrence)

When I was working at my first job, we had gotten the display code worked on by one of our subcontractors. When perusing the codebase, I came across one small source file which had the following near the top of the file:

56 comments - Last comment @ 2008-07-11

Hypothetical Question & Tales From The Dump

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2008-07-02

Hypothetical Question from Simon

I’m usually pretty good with interview questions, but this one threw me for a bit of a loop.

213 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-07

A Y2K Holdover

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2008-07-02

"After close consideration," writes Nick, "I've decided that my mayo really expired on Feb 19, 2008, not 1908. Apparently, Y2K bugs never seem to expire...

95 comments - Last comment @ 2014-05-11