The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Keeping Up Appearances

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-30

Just because a tool is available doesn't mean people will use it correctly. People have abused booleans, dates, enums, databases, Go-To's, PHP, reinventing the wheel and even Excel to the point that this forum will never run out of material!

Bug and issue trackers are Good Things™. They let you keep track of multiple projects, feature requests, and open and closed problems. They let you classify the issues by severity/urgency. They let you specify which items are going into which release. They even let you track who did the work, as well as all sorts of additional information.

An optical illusion in which two squares that are actually the same color appear to be different colors

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-07

Leaky Fun For the Whole Family

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-20

Those of us that had the luxury of learning to program in C or other non-auto-gc'd langauges, learned early on the habit of writing the allocation and deallocation of a block of memory at the same time, and only then filling in the code in between afterward. This prevented those nasty I-forgot-to-free-it memory leaks.

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that memory can't ever leak; it just eliminates the more obvious sources of leakage.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2023-05-27

A Shell Game

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-08-14

When the big banks and brokerages on Wall Street first got the idea that UNIX systems could replace mainframes, one of them decided to take the plunge - Big Bang style. They had hundreds of programmers cranking out as much of the mainframe functionality as they could. Copy-paste was all the rage; anything to save time. It could be fixed later.

Senior management decreed that the plan was to get all the software as ready as it could be by the deadline, then turn off and remove the mainframe terminals on Friday night, swap in the pre-configured UNIX boxes over the weekend, and turn it all on for Monday morning. Everyone was to be there 24 hours a day from Friday forward, for as long as it took. Air mattresses, munchies, etc. were brought in for when people would inevitably need to crash.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-04