The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Things Go Hilariously Wrong at Nuremberg

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2013-04-26

"The History Channel has a different interpretation of the events following the end of WWII than I was led to believe," writes Joe H.

87 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-06

Coin Toss of Doom

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2013-04-25

The ticket at the top of Brian's queue seemed strange, but not entirely unheard of. A user had entered in a bit of data in a text box on the company's flagship internal web app, clicked Submit and - boom - immediately redirected to a 404 error page. The next ticket was for the same app, same page, same text box and data, but, to make things interesting, the user reached instead a Java exception page.

The rest of the tickets landing rapid-fire into Brian's inbox were more of the same...and using the user's input, Brian could reproduce both results at will. So. Much. Fun.

103 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-02

Got Any Spare Error'd Change?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2013-04-19

"It seems Wolfram|Alpha thinks that $13.02 should be paid with three coins," wrote Christopher.

92 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-06

My Computer is to the Limit

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2013-04-12

"I'm not sure what AVG does to get this sort of boot speed, but I want it for my new laptop," writes Allan.

124 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-24

Mini-GUID

by Mark Bowytz in Representative Line on 2013-04-11

Let's say, hypothetically, that you need a bit of code to create a unique key in a database table that starts with an "N" and it MUST fit within the limits defined by a varchar(20) column.

You might think that transforming a database sequence ID might be a good way to go, but no, your project manager demands something more...robust. More unique. What to do? Well, Jay sent in the obvious answer: Use a GUID!

93 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-20

Battle of the Stock Wizards

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2013-04-05

"Apparently Yahoo's ad chooser has decided that I'm VERY vulnerable to the opinions of mentally disturbed stock wizards. I wonder if they both picked the same stocks?" wrote Matt, "Anyway, it isn't that hard to make good predictions for 2012.

84 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-17