The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Time Travelling Bus

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-09-28

"I decided to take a try a new bus route. It usually takes me 35 minutes to get home," writes Chris, "I guess I should have been taking this route all along."

119 comments - Last comment @ 2012-10-22

Have you Tried Arrays?

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-09-27

Diego inherited a system from a "senior" developer. The largest challenge in the system was that it had to handle DataSets that could contain up to 700 columns, but could contain less.

Judging by the code, it's easy to see why a task of this complexity could have only been implemented by a senior developer.

100 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-02

Confessions: Every Five Minutes

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2012-09-26

Credit: Psion Workabout Pro "I'm still a student," writes Rob J., "but recently I completed an internship for my Computer Science courses with a manufacturing company nearby. The company's process machines were totally computerized and their IT department consisted of the Network Administrator and the Software Developer (fortunately 2 different people), supporting the entire IT needs of the company of nearly 200 workers."

"As a developer / admin intern, I caused my share of disasters; yes, I managed 'sudo rm -rf /*' on the Linux server that wasn't backed up and I broke another two Windows boxes using SysPrep, all on relatively small servers that weren’t that difficult to rebuild, thank goodness. Overall, despite these disasters, I felt that it was a good experience and I learned more after cleaning up after the systems that I broke."

85 comments - Last comment @ 2012-12-10

Garlic Not Found

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-09-21

"Saw this while I was building my pizza on Domino's website. I wanted to add garlic to the pizza," Cole Johnson wrote, "but I guess that they don't have any."

96 comments - Last comment @ 2012-10-23

Bank of Scotland's Keyboard Trap

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-09-19

When you're designated as your family's official internet support technician, you find that what someone perceives as the biggest web-based WTF often turns out to be something that's relatively easy to dismiss being attributable to poorly designed or misleading UI.

However, once in a while, something truly special crosses your path, much like when Wladimir Palant's father asked him to look into some weirdness on his online banking login page. As it turned out, the Bank of Scotland invented some very creative keyboard input validation:

124 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-05

Trouble With Founders, the Lost Candidate, and More

by Mark Bowytz in Tales from the Interview on 2012-09-18

Trouble with Founders (from Ben C.)
A few of my friends (all CS people) were attending a startup mixer hosted at a little airport near our university. At one point, we all got kind of bored of talking with everyone, so we stepped outside to look at the planes. Soon enough, some business people in suits noticed the nerds talking outside so slowly started approaching.

They started talking with us, trying not to be too obvious about their intents. They asked where we were from and we told them our college. We asked what brought them here, and they said they were starting a company. We asked what it was for and they responded "Data Analytics". At this point, we were a little curious, so we tried to get some more information, and then they gave us their wonderful pitch.

325 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-02

Page Not Found

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-09-14

"I've always wondered if people pay attention to the errors their computers produce," pondered William Walsh, "Empirical evidence would suggest not, though apparently the opposite is true over at The Weather Channel's web site!"

56 comments - Last comment @ 2012-09-21

How to Extract Text from HTML (Experts Only)

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-09-12

If you ever hit upon a scenario where you need to mine meaningful text data out of any set of HTML files, you will likely find yourself facing a potentially hairy situation.

With the ads, silly social media add-ons, sidebars, toolbars, and likely WTF-level web page coding practices, unless you’re looking at a set of pure vanilla, consistently designed pages, it can be a big mess.

92 comments - Last comment @ 2013-12-22

Sponsor Appreciation, 16777216 Bits of Color, and More Error'd

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2012-09-07

TDWTF Sponsors
		New Relic - As a long time sponsor of The Daily WTF, we are honored to have New Relic sponsor our first line of TDWTF t-shirts in years! Deploy their awesome web-application performance monitoring software and receive one of our limited edition tshirts FREE!
		JRebel is a JVM-plugin that makes it possible for Java developers to instantly see any code change made to an app without redeploying. JRebel lets you see code changes instantly, reloading classes and resources individually and updating one at a time instead of as a lump application redeploy. Download your FREE Trial Today!
		Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the free, and easy-to-use, web-based deployment and release management tool. Going far beyond Continuous Integration and into Continuous Delivery, BuildMaster delivers a series of robust features unparalleled by other build-promote-deploy-distribute tools.
		Conduit - increase revenue by creating a custom Community Toolbar. With a toolbar unique to your business, you'll connect and engage with your users, extend your reach, boost traffic to your site, and build brand awareness.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program...

93 comments - Last comment @ 2012-12-17

Pick-a-State

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2012-09-06

If you're a regular reader, you'll recall Rachel's code submission from last week where we saw super fun things like first and last names represented by double variables. Well, if you enjoyed that, you'll probably love today's CodeSOD.

Rachel wrote, "This method was part of the State class. Apparently if you want to know what index NY is, you need to create a copy of the State class and call it's .get_state_index() method."

170 comments - Last comment @ 2013-02-08

The Daily WTF Wants Writers!

by Mark Bowytz in Announcements on 2012-09-04

Can you string words together and form a sentence? Can you string statements together and form a class definition? Can you sometimes be funny? Can you do all three at the same time?

We're looking for people with good writing skills and an IT background who are ready and willing to polish reader submissions into funny, entertaining, and memorable stories. We need you to be able to take true-to-life stories from the IT trenches, spot the most absurd bits of them, and explain the entire thing in a way that makes our readers laugh, or at least kinda grin, a little. You'll be expected to meet deadlines and communicate your availability to us. We're flexible, and we're looking for people who can commit to between 1-4 articles a month.

88 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-25

Mark Bowytz