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Let's say you were given the requirement "ensure that all five lines of a shipping address contains valid characters." How do you suppose you would go about implementing such a requirement? Let's hope your solution would be far, far away from Buri's coworker's implementation which not only has a separate function for each address but manages to have an astonishingly unique method of testing for bad characters ...
"While saving a new password, I sometimes get this message. It takes a lot of faith in assuming all is well and to just click 'OK'," writes Justin Stolle.
Christian’s first day at his new job started out just like many others in the professional IT world.
“Welcome aboard!” exclaimed Brian with an outstretched hand, “Great to see you again, c’mon in and we’ll get you all set up.”
Nearly six years ago, Brian J gave up being a software developer to start a career in law enforcement. He specifically avoided the world of high-tech cyber crime, and wanted to start life anew as your everyday suburban cop. Of course, with a computer engineering degree and several years of IT experience, technology challenges tend to follow him wherever he goes.
For being a suburb, Brian’s department is pretty big and has a wide variety of posts that range from patrol to accident investigation. In addition, certain officers are trained to do certain things, and others have a preference... especially against the few horrible posts – such as manning the speed trap – that just suck the life out of most people for eight hours. As a result, shifts and schedules change from night to night.
It's Christmas Eve here and, oh my, everywhere so we're taking the day off. Our hearts at TDWTF go out to you poor schmoes (all 5 of you) who are stuck having to work today.
A few kilometers left on Ruta Nacional 128, a brief stop at a control policial, a short trip down the unpaved Calle 33, and just like that, Sergio was at his destination. It was a top-secret Argentinean Government Facility.
Stefan Sundin got this dialog while using Google Music.
After about six months of learning the ropes, and then actually getting good at the ropes, SJ decided that his job was pretty decent as far as tech support went.
Instead of just being some phone-drone for Initech support, SJ was the first line of defense. He spent his days filtering out the easy problems, passing the hard ones off to the system and network admins, and generally making sure Initech's customers (often sysadmins and developers themselves) got the solutions they needed. It was easy but meaningful work.
C is a double edged sword. On one hand, it's simple and powerful enough that, given enough effort, you can accomplish just about anything you want. However, this power is limited insomuch that you don't have many of the friendly helper-functions that exist in higher level languages, such as string manipulation for example, unless you go ahead and create them yourself.
Case in point - consider the below function used to trim trailing spaces. Submitted by Victor, this code apparently runs in a system that processes financial transactions in real time. For the sake of the system and its users, I hope that there isn't a lot of whitespace.
Hey you - do you live in or around Pittsburgh? Wanna meet TDWTF staffers? If you answered yes and yes (or maybe) then forget about what you were going to do tonight and head on down to the Diamond Market Grill in Market Square tonight for TDWTF Pittsburgh Meetup - Part 2. Things kick off at 6pm...stop by and say "hi"!
And now, on with today's Error'd.
You Wore a T-Shirt?! (from John)
Years ago, I applied for a challenging job that sounded really great – it asked for a mixture of Linux and Windows experience, some database work, some light experience with Solaris, and a lot of Cisco and networking – all areas that, believe it or not, I had extensive backgrounds in.
Alan's supervisor forwarded him a curious ticket - a recently hired employee was training on how to use the customer profile web page and the new user felt that that the countdown timer on the page wasn't behaving quite right.
What made the issue so curious? The 6 year old, internally produced site was used by tons of people day in and day out to support the business - heck, even Alan had used it briefly during his testing.
Alli writes, "I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I'm glad to see that it got cleared up before it got too specific for SMS alerts."
It was supposed to be simple. The plan was that Alex would temporarily inherit support an old VB e-commerce website for a week while a colleague was out on vacation. With the web being out there for years and years, Alex assumed that most of the old bugs had been squashed leaving him with a nice and quiet week on his hands. As it turned out, Alex had assumed incorrectly.
Shortly after taking temporary ownership, an issue arrived where small discounts were being hugely exaggerated on the invoices. Naturally, this resulted in the issue being made into Alex's top priority.
Nov 12
