The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Command 696

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-30

Think of all those old applications you’ve had to maintain. You know the type: the ones written by long-forgotten developers in long-lost languages. The ones that, after spending days searching for that one line of code that needs to be changed, you frustratingly decree “this f%*#@ thing needs to be rewritten.” And, naturally, the ones that never are, nor never will be rewritten.

Call it luck or persistence, but after dozens and dozens of maintenance requests over the years, Israel Brewster finally was given the opportunity to rewrite an application. From scratch. And the right way, this time. No shoddy VB6 front-end; no horribly-designed SQL Server 2000 (only) database; and certainly no Microsoft Access-based administration tool.

140 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-06

Masquerading as a Loop

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-25

"While digging through some inherited code," writes Joe "M2tM" Smith, "I encountered a conditional masquerading as a loop."

"Thankfully, the fellow responsible is 'no longer with us', and I suppose this type of code stands as silent testament to why. This interesting loop is only created so the break keyword can be used as an elaborate GOTO."

128 comments - Last comment @ 2010-09-14

Logon-ing Off

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2010-08-20

Andrew Carpenter writes, "I guess this is like turn-oning off a switch?"

164 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-30

Avoiding Magic Constants

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-18

Everyone knows that "Magic Numbers" are bad, Bad, BAD! Take, for example, dividing something into quarters. Because including the literal "4" in your code would be a Magic Number, many developers agree that it's best to define a constant named "FOUR", and then use that constant instead. Makes sense, right?

Wrong! The problem with using "FOUR" is that, like "4", it's a Magic Constant. While not nearly as bad as Magic Numbers, Magic Constants certainly aren't elegant. Fortunately, Allen's colleague has provided us all with a valuable lesson the proper use of Magic and Non-Magic constants. Read it, and learn.

198 comments - Last comment @ 2013-12-20

Role-based Canary

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-16

Role-based security requires, at a minimum, two key elements: users and roles. Roles (such as Administrator, Clerk, and ViewOnlyUser) are defined by the application code and then assigned to users to restrict which functions of the application they may use. It's a pretty simple concept that involves all of two database tables, or one if the user names come from some external source like Active Directory.

In Adam's case, the Role-based security feature served as a coalmine canary in the application he was tasked with reviewing. Although it passed all of the test cases — employees could only do certain things, customers could do other things, etc. — there was one fundamental flaw with the system. See if you can spot it.

161 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-05

Existential Philosophy

by Alex Papadimoulis in Error'd on 2010-08-13

"I got this elegant statement of existential philosophy from Microsoft's Process Monitor utility," Matthew wrote, "It died while trying to start up, so yes indeed, for a few shining moments, the application was."

214 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-30

Boolean Illogic

by Alex Papadimoulis in Representative Line on 2010-08-11

One of the great things about Boolean logic is its simplicity. At the most basic level, there's simply TRUE and FALSE with AND, OR, and NOT. It takes a lot of work to overcomplicate such a simple system, yet "certain" developers seem to find such over-complication second nature. Take E.H.'s colleague, for example.

His impressive use of interesting semantic choices, redundant equality checks, and integer mixing make every line of code seem like a puzzle to solve. Take this line, for example.

159 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-19

Tables Turned

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-08-10

Bert Glanstron, Greg thought to himself, why does that name sound so familiar? Bert… Glanstron… did I work with him? Did he go to my high school?

Saying the name a few more times didn’t help jog Greg’s memory, so he shrugged his shoulders and double-clicked on the résumé. It was the eleventh in a row he had reviewed for a programmer analyst position, and it somehow was even less impressive than the previous.

200 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-24

The Arralphalet

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-09

James sent in today's snippet with virtually no introduction; just six, measly words: "the grass is definitely not greener." Normally, that'd be a bit frustrating, since it's always nice to know a little history or background about the code. But like those six word stories, James told the classic tale of the young and burgeoning software developer who’s always looking to expand his professional purview by seeking out new opportunities to learn and sharpen his skills, only to find his efforts frustrated by a “seemed good on paper” job that leads to nowhere – or worse – towards destitute and despair.

Well, either that, or this code really speaks for itself. Maybe it's the generic Util class which acts as a dump for random methods. Perhaps it's the alphabet array with an extra Z. Or it could be that method for turning letters into numbers.

180 comments - Last comment @ 2013-03-15

Try... Catch-em-all

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-04

"Recently, I inherited an ASP.NET web application that hadn't been touched in many a year," wrote Scott Schottler, "I was pleasantly surprised to see that, not only did it successfully convert from a Visual Studio 2003 project, but that it actually built without errors."

"Of course, my excitement soon waned when I looked into the code. Now we've all seen the Try-Catch-Gulp pattern, but this is ridiculous."

128 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-20

Uncovering Nothing

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2010-08-02

Remi works on one of his country's largest Internet Service Providers, and has the fortune to be on an elite team that focuses on agile development. Or misfortune, depending on how you look at it: at his company, "agile development" actually means "we need that in two weeks".

One of Remi's first assignments was to fix an "emergency" on one of the ATM Addressing systems. Apparently, the application was coming up with incorrect routing data. After a solid day-and-a-half of digging through Visual Basic code that called SQL Server stored procedures which called VB-based COM objects which called more stored procs, Remi found a weird table ("Cal_ATM") that was referenced from an externally-linked database, and the data in that table was completely out of date.

123 comments - Last comment @ 2010-08-21