The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Latest Price

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-25

Relational Database are a great way to structure data, but they have their warts. Certain kinds of structures don’t model well relationally, some are difficult to tune for performance, and some queries are just expensive no matter what. Still, with some smart design choices, some indexes, and some tuning of the execution plan, you can make things work.

Hambai approached a tuning problem with that perspective. The database had a huge pile of financial information- stock transactions, commodity valuations, and currency exchange rates. When it was new, queries were fast, but now, years on, performance ground to a halt. One query that drew his attention was one for accessing the latest exchange rate for four different currencies. It was run frequently, and each access took up to thirty seconds.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-02

Data Date Access

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-23

Perhaps the greatest evil Microsoft ever perpetrated on the world was putting a full-featured IDE on every end user’s desktop: Microsoft Office. Its macro system is a stripped down version of Visual Basic, complete with a UI-building tool, and when used in conjunction with Access, allows anyone to build a database-driven application. Anyone that’s spent enough time in an “enterprise” has probably inherited at least one Access application that was developed but somebody out at a manufacturing plant that magically became “mission critical”. Still, we can’t blame the end users for that.

There’s a special subset of developer though, that when trying to come up with an application that’s easy deploy, chooses Access as their development environment. “It’s already on all the users’ machines,” they say. “We can just put the MDB on a shared drive,” they say. And that’s how Ben gets handed an Access database and told, “figure out why this is so slow?”

34 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-07

Errord in Time and Space

by Remy Porter in Error'd on 2016-05-20

Anonymous went to configure some settings and found his options were a little constrained.

A prompt that warns you to choose any value between 8 and 8

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-21

A Spiritual Journey

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2016-05-19

Hold your souls tightly, for today, we pierce the veil into the great beyond. We shall examine existential questions and commune with spirits. We shall learn what eternity holds for us all.

First, we must bring ourselves to the edge of death, into a liminal state where time does not pass, where the conscious mind takes a back-seat to the spiritual realm. Mark found this C# code to do the job:

37 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-08

Unstandard Lib

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-17

One of the hallmarks of “bad code” is when someone reinvents the wheel. In many Code SODs, we show code that could be replaced with a one-line call to a built in, standard library.

That’s one of the the advantages to a high-level language operating on modern hardware. Andrew doesn’t live in high-level land. He does embedded systems programming, often on platforms that don’t have conveniences like “standard libraries”, and so they end up reinventing the wheel from time to time.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-03

The Difficulties of Choice

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-12

It’s no easy task combing through the submissions and choosing the right code sample.

Ulysses knows my pain. He recently inherited a Python codebase with plenty of global variables, no convention around capitalizing identifiers, inconsistent levels of indentation, and an AngularJS front end.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-06

Finding a Path

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2016-05-10

Readers of TDWTF know all too well that dates are hard. Strings are also hard. You know what else is hard? File paths.

Like dates, and strings, most languages these days have libraries to simplify parsing filepaths. For example, in Python, you can use the os.path module to parse out the directory structure, the file, and its extension without too much effort.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-06

Congraubullations

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-05-04

“Java and C# are kind of the same thing, right?”

Josh was a Java developer, but his company was doing a big upgrade of some .NET applications written years earlier by a developer named Ray. Ray had left the company the previous year, and somebody needed to help port his .NET 2.5 code to .NET 4.0 and a new version of IIS. Josh was a team player, and also knew that newer versions of .NET were almost always backwards compatible, so he didn’t expect it to create that much work for him.

43 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-15

An Ant Pushes a Perl

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-03

It’s an old joke that Perl is a “write only language”. Despite some of its issues, back in the early 2000s, Perl was one of the best options out there for scripting languages and rapid-development automation.

Speaking of automation, build automation is really important. Back in the early 2000s, before Maven really caught on, your build automation tool for Java was Ant. Ant, like everything invented in the early 2000s, was driven by an XML scripting tool. Since it was tuned specifically for Java, it had some high-level operations to streamline tasks like generating proxy classes for calling web services based on a supplied WSDL file.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-05