The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Write Universe to Disk

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2014-06-19

Mike knew he had a problem. His shareware planetarium software, Kepler, was flying off the shelves at software stores across the US. It was in such demand that he had to buy a second Amiga just to write more installation floppies. However, Kepler came with a glaring hole in functionality: no one could take screenshots.

"I just wish AmigaOS shipped with a screenshot API," Mike complained to his business partner, Seamus. "Every developer I know wants to grab screenshots. Every user I talk to says the same thing. How many teachers have written us, saying how they want to copy a star chart onto some floppies for their students?"

106 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-19

Exceptional Exception Logging Logging Logging

by Erik Gern in CodeSOD on 2014-06-09

When Peter was training one of ShellTech's new developers, he didn't think much of a question the greenhorn asked him.

"What happens if there's an error in a catch block?"

97 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-12

Multiple Tables!? Why bother?

by Erik Gern in CodeSOD on 2014-06-04

Guillaume's employer, BastilleCo, believed in an egalitarian workplace. Managers and executives sat at the same desks as other employees, and they often took lunch together. This made BastilleCo an excellent workplace, even in a progressive nation like France.

However, BastilleCo's defect was to treat its data like it treats its employees. There existed the typical messiness of bad legacy code -- single-letter variables, globally-scoped functions, and so on. But not only was there no executive/employee segregation, but there was no data segregation either. In fact, there was a single table, where everything in BastilleCo's flagship application was stored:

107 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-12