Alex Papadimoulis

Founder, The Daily WTF

Feb 2009

Sponsor Thanks, ASSorted Out-of-placeness, & More

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And now, a quick break from our sponsors. If there are any companies that you think would make a good sponsor, let me know. Otherwise, if you haven't done so already, please show your support by taking a look at what our sponsors have to offer.

 

Software Verification   Software Verification - software engineering tools for memory leak detection, code coverage, performance profiling, thread lock contention analysis and thread deadlock detection, flow tracing and application replay on the Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 and NT platforms.
Mosso   Mosso - massively scalable hosting for .NET (2,3,3.5) PHP, Ruby, etc., with unlimited sites & mailboxes, simple online provisioning, and an enterprise clustered platform that's supported by real people.
SlickEdit   SlickEdit - makers of that very-impressive code editor and some pretty neat Eclipse and VisualStudio.NET tools and add-ins, some of which (Gadgets) are free. Check out this short video highlighting just one of SlickEdit's Visual Studio integration features.
SoftLayer   SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all)
WTF   The Non-WTF Job Board - Powered by HiddenNetwork, it features some great job opportunities like:
128 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-05

The Docile Monster

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credit: gwen @ flickr Although The University billed itself as “a leader on the forefront of Information Technology,” it was neither a leader nor anywhere near the forefront. At least, not any more. Its “next generation” hardware – graciously donated by a company known as Big Green – had slowly devolved to “last generation.” And then to “several generations old.” And then, finally, to ancestral. By that point, many students’ laptops rivaled that of the once great, Big Green hardware.

Fortunately, The Professor had excellent connections at Big Green. And Big Green, not exactly a non-profit organization saw the potential in educating students on their platforms. So after much negotiation, Big Green finally agreed to provide The University – free of charge – with some rather expensive and quite interesting hardware. The media dutifully published the relevant press releases and the students began dreaming of virtual environments, sandboxes, compiler farms, databases and everything else that nerds would want.

182 comments - Last comment @ 2011-07-29

A Little Out of Place

by in Error'd on

"Hmmm," Tracy McKibben wrote, "something seems out of place in Amazon's 'Classic Horror Titles' deals."

103 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-05

Dividing by Zero for Fun and Profit

by in CodeSOD on

When the Web Applications Group and the Distributed Applications Group were merged into one, it should have been a joyous day for Greg Beech. After all, Greg would finally get the chance to see first hand the "Enterprise CMS" system that the Distributed group had been bragging about for so many years. It was built by a team of elite consultants and billed "the quintessential collection of best practices."

After downloading the source code, following the seventy-two steps required to install the Enterprise CMS on a development workstation, and spending an entire afternoon fiddling around with his computer's settings, Greg finally had the software running. But when he fired it up in up in debug mode through Visual Studio, he noticed something strange: a preposterous number of exceptions were being thrown, many of which were of type DivideByZeroException.

94 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-03

The Son of ITAPPMONROBOT

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It’s always been my goal that the stories shared here on The Daily WTF provide a “certain” kind of inspiration. Perhaps the kind of inspiration leads towards better code instead of the disasters featured here. Or maybe the inspiration to gently nudge that “certain” programmer into a career of, say, accounting. Or even just pure inspiration which reminds us that, while sometimes boring, our jobs aren’t completely meaningless.

That said, it’s been a bit surprising to see that one particular article – ITAPPMONROBOT – has provided the inspiration for other IT professionals to build to their own "robot". Not once (see: Open Sesame), but now twice. Felix explains...

104 comments - Last comment @ 2009-12-28

Opener Beware

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"We received a new Canon imageRUNNER, and it included 10 licenses for imageWARE Document Manager Personal," wrote Chris LeBlanc, "We'd love to install it, but it looks like opening the envelope to install the software will void the warranty."

125 comments - Last comment @ 2011-12-23

Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To

by in Alex's Soapbox on

Programming is not fun. It’s boring, it’s tedious, and it’s certainly not challenging. And no matter how much you stretch it, programming is most definitely not sexy.

I know what you’re thinking. Anyone who says that – let alone blogs it – should immediately be stripped of his software development license, have his keyboard taken away, and be permitted to only use only to CP/M on 8" floppies with a 1200 baud modem.

281 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-07

Does Not Compute: Crunchies, Virtual Returns, & More

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It’s easy to take for granted a lot of the words that have entered our high-tech lexicon. Many of the words – from Amazon to the Web – have real-world meanings that, oftentimes, are very far removed from “our” meanings. Here are a few stories from readers that serve as a fun reminder to all this.

Crunchies (from Romjin)
Recently, one of our customers called in with some problems he was having with his computer.

143 comments - Last comment @ 2010-02-18

Somewhat Obsolete

by in Error'd on

"I'd hate to be the one to break it to BDT," wrote Nathan Dunn, "but I'm pretty sure that position isn't needed anymore."

89 comments - Last comment @ 2011-03-26

Stupid Coding Tricks: A Batch of Pi

by in CodeSOD on

It's high time for the second installment of stupid coding tricks! As we learned from the T-SQL Mandelbrot, a stupid coding trick isn't really about obfuscation per se... just, well, stupid awesomeness. Kinda like a quine, except even more useless.

Don Cross was gracious enough to provide today's example, which teeters on the edge of what many consider "code". It's a Win32 batch file. Unlike the analogous *nix shell script, batch "programming" comes with an incredibly limited syntax and a miniscule number of commands. While one can certainly do far more in batch than ever should be done, the technology works well foa shortcut for typing in a bunch of commands.

105 comments - Last comment @ 2022-11-14

Hard Coded Rubbish

by in Error'd on

"Little did I realize that a trip to the local recycling centre would provide the material for a WTF submission," Simon D wrote, "for the record, 'Actual Rate' was hand written as 61%"

36 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-20

The Expert System

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As a highly paid consultant, Bruce didn't make a whole lot of friends with the "locals." Whenever his New York City-based systems-integration firm placed him at a client site, the in-house developers tended to resent him for one of two reasons: They'd either believe that he didn't bring nearly enough innovation to justify his company's three-figure hourly bill rate ("We could have thought of that, too"), or they'd feel that he was far too much of an outsider to provide any valuable contributions to their team ("We already know what's best").

Victor was no exception. Almost immediately, it was obvious that Victor had come to the conclusion that bringing in any outside consultants would just delay things further.

121 comments - Last comment @ 2009-02-17

The Littering ATM

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"When I saw this on my way to lunch," J.R. Raith writes, "I remember thinking, for crying out loud people, there's a freakin' garbage can right there!"

98 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-06
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