The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Flux Capacitor

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-10-29

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After two weeks of vacation, it’s easy to forget the little things. Chad left his ID badge at home. That’s inconvenient in any office, but when you work at a US Naval Base, they take security more seriously. Without his ID badge, the door wasn’t supposed to open.

Chad was a Marine veteran who had become a civilian IT contractor. The enlisted men had a name for this sort of security: “Private Proof ”. A Marine Private might be stymied, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together could bypass it. Chad and his co-workers kept a large “year-planning” calendar on the insecure side. Chad pulled it down off the wall and slid it beneath the door. Waving the calendar around triggered the motion-sensor on the secure side, opening the door.

91 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-12

Decode("&#13;")

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2013-10-22

A quick and easy way to generate WTF code is to find some deceptively simple problem that’s been well solved, and reimplement a naive solution to the problem.

Ryan found this attempt to handle HTML encoding of key characters. This code is VB.NET, which is important to keep in mind, since the Framework provides a variety of methods to do this correctly.

82 comments - Last comment @ 2024-01-18

The Senior Format

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2013-10-09

Alex W. used to work with a “senior” C# developer. This “senior” developer’s resume proudly proclaimed that he had 15 years of experience developing in C#.

That “senior” developer has long-since moved on to more senior pastures , but he left behind code like this:

102 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-13

Remy Porter

The Flux Capacitor

Decode("&amp;#13;")

The Senior Format

Decode("")