The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

CMD: Completely Malicious Data

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-10-30

What? Friday already!? Not quite, but close! We have something really good coming up tomorrow for Halloween, so here's your weekly dose of Error'd a day early. Enjoy!

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39 comments - Last comment @ 2014-11-04

Advanced Time Management

by Mark Bowytz in Representative Line on 2014-10-28

Whenever a computer wants to sync its internal clock, usually right around reboot, it'll check in with a time server. This is built-in functionality that spans across every modern OS.

Now, in some cases you might have a reason to disable the time check - and that's fine.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-28

Undefined Favorites

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-10-24

"It's great I can ship my favorites to Europe, I just wish I knew what they were," writes Nick.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-27

Is It Safer to Use Numbers?

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-10-21

Mac didn't know anything about how the JavaScript on the search page worked, and he wasn't that great at CSS styling, but that didn't matter. He had his orders. As part of the latest round of enhancements, the front-end developer had added another search parameter which would be passed via the regular search URL, and the back end needed to be adjusted to accomodate. (You know... instead of 'http://initrode.com/search?a=xxx&b=yyy' it now was 'http://initrode.com/search?a=xxx&b=yyy&c=zzz'.)

No problem. Mac made his tweak in the code and ran a quick test...which failed instantly in a spectacular way. "WTF? It's a parameter. Must be already used..." he thought, but nope.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-23

Sorry, but You Can't Do the Math

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-10-17

"I guess that Intuit might have reasons for not allowing me to say Math was my least favorite subject in school," writes Alan R.

62 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-27

Do the Math

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-10-10

"These car shades I found at Walmart were made especially for the American market," Bryan W. writes, "I mean just look - they work much better in Fahrenheit than in Celsius."

62 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-13

IP Address Denial

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-10-09

While trying to assign an address from his framed /29 route to the internal side of his Linksys AM300 router, Phillip S. received an unexpected "Local IP Address is not valid" error.

Being a web script error, Phillip correctly figured that he could dig into what condition would make the address come up as invalid. Turns out, his problem was that the router considers any IP address starting with 115 to be invalid, but Phillip found that there were a few other instances of hard coding and magic number abuse. On a positive note, at least it's not device-side code.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-17

The Post Office is Wrong

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-10-03

Mark H. wrote, "Despite being a company that specializes in shipping orders, I guess Tiger Direct has no idea which zip codes are in which cities."

47 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-06

Ternary Operator Nesting Syndrome

by Mark Bowytz in Representative Line on 2014-10-02

Back in July, I wrote about my disdain for ternary operators citing a monster representative line as being a great example of an attempt at cleverness gone too far.

Well, an anonymous submitter sent our way another ternary operator disaster but with a twist - nested within the call to "payRecordsList.Add", almost every parameter passed has its own ternary operator added.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-07

Best of Email - Greatest Pitch EVER!

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2014-10-01

Trying to advance yourself in your career is really tough. Usually, if you want things to go your way, either you have to work really hard at it or pray that you know someone who might be willing to assist on your behalf.

Well, if the email that Dhruv received is any indication, you can forget about all that stuff. Yep, here's proof that, sometimes, opportunities just fall out of the sky.

100 comments - Last comment @ 2024-04-21