The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Gaming the System

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-06-22

Our summer break continues. For some people, summer means outdoor fun. If, like me, you hate sun and temperatures above "chilly", it can instead mean air-conditioned indoor fun. And it's all fun and games until someone loses their job. Original. -- Remy

Frank slammed his axe into his co-worker's skull. Ernest grunted and raised his double-barreled shotgun in reply. "Merry Christmas!" he shouted as he fired both barrels. Frank exploded into several gore-colored polygons.

"Jerk," Frank grumbled as he waited for his respawn. It was late Decemeber, 1997, an era of before thumb-drives and when Quake was the best deathmatch money could buy. Normally, such lunch-time and break-time violence was frowned upon, but it was the holidays. When most of the office is on vacation, and the people that aren't just need to keep the lights on and not make trouble, you can get away with those sorts of things, so long as you uninstall it after the New Year. They Quaked away through the holidays.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-23

Filter Your Kwargs

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-17

Mark's team needed someone to write a pretty straight-forward report for their Python application. It would take a set of keyword arguments, turn those into a filter, apply the filter, and get the results back.

This was implemented in two methods. First:

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-21

World Class Contracting

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-16

The time and effort needed to complete a project and the amount of time available rarely line up well. Wayne M's company found themselves in a position where what they needed to deliver and what they could deliver by the deadline simply didn't match up.

The requirements were well specified, so they bundled up a bunch of requirements for search-related functionality, and handed them off to a self-described "world class" developer working on contract.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-17

A Date With Yourself

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-15

Once upon a time, someone wanted to add a banner to a web page. They also wanted the banner to only appear after a certain date. Jack stumbled across their implementation when trying to understand why the banner would vanish for two weeks at the start of every month.

// get date
var MyDate = new Date();
var MyDateString;

MyDate.setDate(MyDate.getDate());

MyDateString = ('0' + MyDate.getDate()).slice(-2) + '-' + ('0' + (MyDate.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2) + '-' + MyDate.getFullYear();

if (MyDateString > '13-04-2014') {
    // do stuff...
}

30 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-20

Experience is Integral

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-14

Behind every code WTF is a process WTF. For example, Charles W was recently tasked with updating some file-handling code to match changes in the underlying file-format it parses. This is the C code which parses an integer:

		if ((*p == '-' || ('0' <= *p && '9' >= *p)) && retCode == -256)
		{
			retCode = 0;
			p = _tcsrev(p);
			if (*p == ' ')
				p++;
			for (i = 0; '0' <= *p && '9' >= *p; i++)
			{
				retCode += (int)pow(10, (double)i) * ((int)*p - 0x30);
				p++;
			}
			if (*p == '-')
				retCode *= -1;
		}

36 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-18

Quite the Event

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-10

A few years back, Alvin was in college, and took his first formal summer job as a programmer. It was supposed to be just some HTML layout work, and the designer handed him a few sample pages. "Just do it like this."

The "sample pages" were a mishmash of random indentation, huge swathes of commented out code, and all those other little traits of "someone's just coding in production, aren't they?" that crop up in files. Still, it was just some HTML layout work, so how hard could it be?

25 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-21

Getting Overloaded With Details

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-09

Operator overloading is one of those "dangerous" features. Like multi-parent inheritance, it can potentially create some really expressive, easy to read code, or it can create a disaster of incomprehensible nonsense.

In C++, many core classes use operator overloading, most notably the I/O classes, which reuse (or abuse) the bitshift operators into stream operators. So, for example, one possible way of converting a string into an integer might be to do something like this:

17 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-13

Contractor Management System

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-06-08

Maximillion was hired to maintain a PHP CMS. His new employer, up to this point, had just been contracting out work, but as time went on, contracting rates got higher, the amount of time required to add basic features kept going up. It was time to go ta a full time employee.

"The system's pretty simple," the hiring manager explained during the interview, "as I understand it, it's basically just one PHP file."

33 comments - Last comment @ 2021-06-12