The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Ternt Up GUID

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-01-16

UUIDs and GUIDs aren’t as hard as dates, but boy, do they get hard, don’t they. Just look at how many times they come up. It’s hard to generate a value that’s guaranteed to be unique. And there’s a lot of ways to do it- depending on your needs, there are some UUIDs that can be sorted sequentially, some which can be fully random, some which rely on hash algorithms, and so on.

Of course, that means, for example, your UUIDs aren’t sequential. Even with time-based, they’re not in sequence. They’re just sortable.

12 comments - Last comment @ 11:00

Switch the Dropdown

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-01-15

Bogdan Olteanu picked up a simple-sounding bug. There was a drop-down list in the application which was missing a few entries. Since this section of the app wasn't data-driven, that meant someone messed up when hard-coding the entries into the dropdown.

Bogdan was correct. Someone messed up, alright.

20 comments - Last comment @ 05:54

Certifiable Success

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-01-10

“Hey, apparently, the SSL cert on our web-service expired… in 2013.”

Laura’s company had a web-service that provided most of their business logic, and managed a suite of clients for interacting with that service. Those clients definitely used SSL to make calls to that web-service. And Laura knew that there were a bunch of calls to ValidateServerCertificate as part of the handshaking process, so they were definitely validating it, right?

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-14

It Only Crashes When It Works

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-01-09

We already know that Kara’s office has a problem with strings. Kara’s back again, with more string related troubles.

These troubles are a bit worse, once we add in some history. You see, some of their software does machine control. That is to say, it sends commands to some bit of machinery, which then moves or extrudes or does whatever the machine does. Kara wasn’t specific, only granted that this machine was neither large enough or mean enough to kill someone. Minor cuts, burns, scrapes, bruises and damage to the equipment itself is still possible, but nobody will die.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-11

Without Compare

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-01-07

Operator overloading is a messy prospect. In theory, it means that you can naturally extend a language so that you can operate on objects naturally. An introductory CS class might have students implement a Ratio or Fraction class, then overload arithmetic operators so you can (a + b).reduce().

In practice, it means you use the bitshift operator also as the stream insertion operator. Thanks C++.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-10

Is Num? I'm Numb

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-01-03

"The hurrider I go, the behinder I get," is one of the phrases I like to trot out any time a project schedule slips and a PHB or PM decides the solution is either crunch or throwing more bodies at the project.

Karl had one of those bosses, and ended up in the deep end of crunch. Of course, when that happens, mistakes happen, and everything gets further behind, or you're left with a mountain of technical debt because you forgot that Integer.TryParse was a function in C#.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-10

Innumerable Enum

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2019-01-02

Ah, the enumerated type. At its core, it's really just a compile-time check to ensure that this constant containing 1 isn't getting confused with this other constant, also containing 1.

We usually ignore the actual numbers in our enums, though not always. Perhaps, though, we should just pay more attention to them in general, that way we don't end up with code like Andrew found.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-11

2018: JavaScript Centipede

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2018-12-26

As we wind up for the new year, it's time to take stock and look back at some of our best articles for the year. We start with this horrid bit of code, which hopefully has devoured itself since we posted it. --Remy

Starting with the film Saw, in 2004, the “torture porn” genre started to seep into the horror market. Very quickly, filmmakers in that genre learned that they could abandon plot, tension, and common sense, so long as they produced the most disgusting concepts they could think of. The game of one-downsmanship arguably reached its nadir with the conclusion of The Human Centipede trilogy. Yes, they made three of those movies.

This aside into film critique is because Greg found the case of a “JavaScript Centipede”: the refuse from one block of code becomes the input to the next block.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-07