The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Tern Down Service

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-30

In C, it’s not uncommon to define a macro like this one:

#define MIN(a,b) (a>b?b:a)

36 comments - Last comment @ 2024-07-14

To Be Random Enough

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-28

A long time ago, when I was first learning about databases, one of the points brought up was the difference between a "natural key" and a "surrogate key". A natural key was a unique identifier which already existed in your dataset, and surrogate keys were those you made up- UUIDs or sequences or what have you.

As a best practice, even if you have a viable natural key, you should still use a surrogate key. There are exceptions, but it's usually preferable to employ a database key which you control to provide identity, especially one which has no meaning- because that means it'll never need to change values.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-06

Enumerating Your Failures

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-24

Rick was recently looking at some code from another team at his company. He noticed something odd in the code, so he pinged the team lead, Linda. “Did you spot this?”

“Oh, crap no,” Linda replied. “I should have caught this in code review, but I gotta be honest, Teddy is a bit… well, let’s just say I really should have caught that since I knew it was a Teddy commit.”

24 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-25

A Select System Call

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-22

Way back in the 90s, in an era when Swedish pop bands were getting regular US radio play and CVS was the optimal source control system, Alan worked on a remote-execution service for a “Unix-like” OS. One of his co-workers had just left the company, and Alan needed to track down a bug in a module which the co-worker had more-or-less owned during their tenure.

The specific block of C code in question looked roughly like this:

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-11-10

How Would You Rate Your Experience

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-21

The last time I was traveling, I noticed a little stand just past the security checkpoint, asking me to rate my experience. The five buttons ranged from a red frowny face to a green smiley, giving me the ability to respond with what must be the full range of human emotion. Every time I see one of those kiosks, I have to wonder: who uses those things, and who actually looks at the data?

Perhaps inspired by that kiosk, Peter's company does something similar. There's a Slack bot which messages each employee every two weeks to get them to evaluate, on a scale of 1-5, how good a certain aspect of their job is. That data gets collected up onto a Google Sheets dashboard. And yes, the Google Sheet is both the datastore and the dashboard, which isn't surprising at all.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-24

A Context for Logging

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-17

When logging in Java, especially frameworks like Spring, making sure the logging statement has access to the full context of the operation in flight is important. Instead of spamming piles of logging statements in your business logic, you can use a “mapped diagnostic context” to cache useful bits of information during an operation, such that any logging statement can access it.

One of the tools for this is the “Mapped Data Context”, MDC. Essentially, it’s very much like a great big hash map that happens to be thread-local and is meant to be used by the logging framework. It’s a global-ish variable, but without the worst side effects of being global.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-18

The Replacements

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-16

Nobody wants to have a Bobby Tables moment in their database. So we need to to sanitize our inputs. Ted C noticed a bunch of stored procedures which contained lines like this:

  @scrubbed = fn_ScrubInput(fn_ScrubInput(@input))

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-22

Cast Away

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-15

The accountants at Gary's company had a problem: sometimes, when they wanted to check the price to ship a carton of product, that price was zero. No one had, as of yet, actually shipped product for free, but they needed to understand why certain cartons were showing up as having zero cost.

The table which tracks this, CartonFee, has three fields: ID, Carton, and Cost. Carton names are unique, and things like 12x3x6, or Box1, or even Large box. So, given a carton name, it should be pretty easy to update the cost, yes? The stored procedure which does this, spQuickBooks_UpdateCartonCost should be pretty simple.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-22

I See What Happened

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-14

Graham picked up a ticket regarding their password system. It seemed that several users had tried to put in a perfectly valid password, according to the rules, but it was rejected.

Graham's first step was to attempt to replicate on his own, but couldn't do it. So he followed up with one of the end users, and got them to reveal the password they had tried to use. That allowed him to trigger the bug, so he dug into the debugger to find the root cause.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-23

Parse, Parse Again

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-10

Sometimes, a block of terrible code exists for a good reason. Usually, it exists because someone was lazy or incompetent, which while not a good reason, at least makes sense. Sometimes, it exists for a stupid reason.

Janet’s company recently bought another company, and now the new company had to be integrated into their IT operations. One of the little, tiny, minuscule known-issues in the new company’s system was that their logging was mis-configured. Instead of putting a new-line after each logging message, it put only a single space.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-18

Driven to Substraction

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2019-10-09

Deon (previously) has some good news. His contract at Initrode is over, and he’s on his way out the door. But before he goes, he wants to share more of his pain with us.

You may remember that the StringManager class had a bunch of data type conversions to numbers and dates. Well guess what, there’s also a DateManager class, which is another 1600 lines of methods to handle dates.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-18

Compiled Correctly

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-08

Properly used, version history can easily help you track down and identify the source of a bug. Improperly used, it still can. As previously established, the chief architect Dana works with has some issues with source control.

Dana works on a large, complex embedded system. “Suddenly”, her team started to spot huge piles of memory corruption problems. Something was misbehaving, but it was hard to see exactly what.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-03

Generically Bad

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-07

The first two major releases of the .NET Framework, 1.0 and 1.1 were… not good. It's so long ago now that they're easily forgotten, but it's important to remember that a lot of core language features weren't in the framework until .NET 2.0.

Like generics. Generics haven't always been part of the language, but they've been in the language since 2006. The hope would be that, in the course of 13 years, developers would learn to use this feature.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-11

The Windows Update

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-10-03

Every change breaks someones workflow.

A few years ago, Ian started at one of the many investment banks based out of London. This particular bank was quite proud of how they integrated “the latest technology” into all their processes, “favoring the bleeding edge,” and “are always focusing on Agile methods, and cross-functional collaboration.”

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-15

An Updated Version

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-10-02

Some folks were perplexed by the fact that Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10. The urban legend is that so many old applications checked which version of Windows was running by doing something like version.startsWith("Windows 9") to see if they were on 95 or 98, that Microsoft risked breaking otherwise working code if they released Windows 9.

But gone are those days of doing string munging to check which version of an OS we’re running on. We’ve got much better ways to check what features and functionality are available without having to parse strings out, right?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-15