The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Idtoic Mistakes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-10

Working at a company where the leadership started as technical people has its advantages, but it can also carry costs. Arthur is in one such environment, and while it means that management and labor have a common vocabulary, the company leadership forgets that they're not in a technical role anymore. So they still like to commit code to the project. And that's how things like this happen:

if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}

12 comments - Last comment @ 09:43

JaphpaScript

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-09

Let's say you have a web application, and you need to transfer some data that exists in your backend, server-side, down to the front-end, client-side. If you're a normal person, you have the client do an HTTP request and return the data in something like a JSON format.

You could certainly do that. Or, you could do what Alicia's predecessor did.

20 comments - Last comment @ 08:57

A Cache Exists

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-08

Ben's web firm took on a new client, and they're using a rather questionable shopping cart system. Like a lot of PHP web plugins, someone decided that they needed to "protect" their code by obfuscating it. Either that, they were obfuscating it out of shame, one or the other.

if(!function_exists("cache_exists")) {
	eval("fu" . "nction cach" . "e_exi" . "sts(\$Data) { echo base" . "64" . "_d" . "eco" . "de(\$" . "Data); }");
}

10 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-09

Try to Catch This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-07

The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary.

For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you may fail to connect, updates some internal status variables to represent that you're in an invalid state, and then pass that exception up the stack.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-08

Library Checkout

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-03

Alexander doesn't usually ask "why are you hiring for this position?" during an interview. But when a small public library is paying your rather high contracting rate, one can't help but wonder. Fortunately, the library offered their reasoning without Alexander asking: "We hired a new staff member, so we need a programmer to add them to our home page."

Alexander assumed that he was dealing with a client who couldn't figure out how to navigate their CMS, and scheduled an afternoon to do the work. It turned out to be a bit more complicated.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-07

Join or Die

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-02

Seuf sends us some old code, which entered production in 2011. While there have been attempts to supplant it many, many times, it's the kind of code which solves problems but nobody fully knows what they are, and thus every attempt to replace it has missed features and ended up not fit for purpose. That the tool is unmaintainable, buggy, and slow? Well, so it goes.

Today's snippet is Perl:

30 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-04

Feeling Free

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-01

Jason started work on a C++ application doing quantitative work. The nature of the program involves allocating all sorts of blocks of memory, doing loads of complicated math, and then freeing them. Which means, there's code which looks like this:

for( i = 0; i < 6; i++ )
{
    if( h->quant4_bias[i] )
        free( h->quant4_bias[i] );
}

33 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-08

Switch How We Do Padding

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-09-30

We've seen so many home-brew string padding functions. And yet, there are still new ways to do this wrong. An endless supply of them. Nate, for example sent us this one.

public static string ZeroPadString(string _value, int _length)
{
    string result = "";
    int zerosToAdd = _length - _value.length;

32 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-09