The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

More or Less Random

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-03-31

My personal fave 2600 game, hands down. Chris J's manager had just returned from a meeting with The Admirals and called for an impromptu debriefing with the team. As everyone gathered, they noticed he wasn't wearing his we finally sign-off face.

"Overall," the manager said in a serious tone, "the Navy is very pleased with the application. There weren't any data problems on their side, and they were satisfied with the quantity and quality of documentation. Even the number of manhours we spent on the project was well within their acceptable limits."

142 comments - Last comment @ 2009-04-14

I Wish I Worked for PEDANT

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-03-26

Photo Credit: 'Steve Parker' @ Flickr When Steven saw that there was an opening in the Plant & Enterprise Dashboard Activity New Technology group, he jumped at submitting his application and, much to his delight, was accepted. PEDANT was an elite group within the IT organization that was responsible for the system that ran the large plasma status screens spread throughout the plant and corporate offices. At a glance, one could see everything from the number of new orders entered for the day, the thoroughput of the shipping department, the current stock trading price, employee-related news, and even the five-day forecast.

In recent years, the system was updated to support RSS feeds so that, say, Hank in accounting could see everything from the internal pressure of Liquid Nitrogen Tank #4 to news that Barb in HR was getting married in June, all from the comfort of his desk. Being responsible to an application visible to everybody from the CEO to the night janitor granted the PEDANT folks a kind of celebrity status. As a result of this, and the fact that the system was so very much appreciated, project funding flowed in. While the rank-and-file was used to 1970's lime green chairs, the PEDANT developers were racing around in Aeron chairs between private, windowed offices. And best of all for them, every day was free-donuts-in-the-breakroom day.

111 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-31

Just a Small Change to the Invoice

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2009-03-25

When Yaniv started at his new job, he was replacing a developer who had quickly left for undisclosed "personal" reasons. Bypassing any training, his first assignment was meant to be an easy hands-on task where all he needed to do was to adjust the comments on the company's invoice over just a little bit so that it didn't spill over the edge of the paper.

"None of our customers have ever really complained about it, but we do get the occasional call where the CSR has to read the notes section of their order to confirm what we entered," said Yaniv's manager, "I figure that you'll just open the template for the invoice, change the field width, and be done!"

107 comments - Last comment @ 2009-05-12

Hairdress Replication

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-03-19

MonsterCharge! Credit card companies push around gobs and gobs of data every single day, and MonsterCharge (where Mike worked) was no different. However, the one thing that set MonsterCharge apart from many other credit card companies was the sheer volume of data that they worked with on a daily basis. The production environment had tiers, the test environment had tiers, heck, the tiers even had sub-tiers!

Nearly a year after the new system was deployed, the total size of all managed data stored on their Oracle databases had swelled to nearly 40 terabytes, and with good reason. Close to 3,200 concurrent users generated a continuous 1,200 transactions per second and sometimes spiking close to more than 2,000 on some days. The "Mission Accomplished" banner had been long ago hung on the wall and all the project managers received cushy bonuses and some even got promotions.

Our Dog Food Tastes Best (unless someone else makes it)

131 comments - Last comment @ 2021-11-09

Using Design Patterns...or not...

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2009-03-11

Recently, the anonymous submitter of the following code had been mentoring novice developers in the use of design patterns. I'm sure one of the things he stressed was creating a reusable template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many many situations. All good stuff.

Well, the submitter took a peek at the work of one of the developers and felt that the author of the below code may need some coaching on what "reuse" means.

case SOME_CONST1:

        _panelInstance  = DetailPanelFactory.getInstance(type);

        _panelInstance.parseXML(panelList);

        // add the new panelItem to the panelCollection

        _panelCollection.addItem(_panelInstance);

break;

case SOME_CONST2:

        _panelInstance  = DetailPanelFactory.getInstance(type);

        _panelInstance.parseXML(panelList);

        // add the new panelItem to the panelCollection

        _panelCollection.addItem(_panelInstance);

break;

case SOME_CONST3:

        _panelInstance  = DetailPanelFactory.getInstance(type);

        _panelInstance.parseXML(panelList);

        // add the new panelItem to the panelCollection

        _panelCollection.addItem(_panelInstance);

break;

case SOME_CONST4:

        _panelInstance  = DetailPanelFactory.getInstance(type);

        _panelInstance.parseXML(panelList);

        // add the new panelItem to the panelCollection

        _panelCollection.addItem(_panelInstance);

break;

98 comments - Last comment @ 2013-03-01

The Prisoner's Dilemma

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-03-10

Photo Credit: 'Jay Erickson' @ Flickr After a hard day of writing code at the Department of Justice, Sabbo settled into his favorite chair to watch the evening news. But instead of his usual glass of iced tea, that night it was a tumbler-full of Johnnie Walker Black on rocks.

Though it was a pretty normal day at work, the ride home was anything but normal. In the middle of his evening commute, Sabbo's boss rang his cell phone to let him know that "something big" would be on the evening news. Apparently, the Shame On You! "investigative" reporting team from the local news ambushed the Department director with question after question about Inmate #88172, Inmate #88172's family, and, most importantly, why Inmate #88172 wasn't getting the money the Department owed him. The director could say little more than "I don't know", which was exactly the sound bite Shame On You! wanted.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-22

Formatting a Phone Number - The Long Version

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2009-03-09

Dear Daily WTF Readers,

Please, take a moment of your time to consider the plight of the poor 'for' loop and its sister 'case' in the below code which has chosen to remain anonymous as per its submitter.

241 comments - Last comment @ 2009-06-06

Cutting in Line

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2009-03-03

Photo Credit: 'gadl' @ Flickr McGillicutty Power and Light was a small utilities company with a big problem: Their customer base was growing by leaps and bounds but the supposed-to-be simple task of printing a batch of invoices was taking a glacial age to complete. Things got to be so bad in fact that each of the accounting clerks needed two PC's – one dedicated to everyday tasks like email and spreadsheets and the other for printing invoices.

It wasn't as if the printing workstation was maxed-out on resources, it's just that generating customer invoices was a delicate process. If one were to, say, compose an email while printing invoices, then the printer would be full of email print-outs instead of invoices, meaning that the batch print would need to be run from scratch. Hired on as one of the "big guns" to help address the grim situation, John Reese was not surprised when he saw how the company's business "logic" was being executed.

117 comments - Last comment @ 2009-03-07