The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Plugin Acrobatics

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-20

Once upon a time, web browsers weren't the one-stop-shop for all kinds of possible content that they are today. Aside from the most basic media types, your browser depended on content plugins to display different media types. Yes, there was an era where, if you wanted to watch a video in a web browser, you may need to have QuickTime or… (shudder) Real Player installed.

As a web developer, you'd need to write code to check which plugins were installed. If they don't have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, there's no point in serving them up a PDF file- you'll need instead to give them an install link.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-20

Recursive Search

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-19

Sometimes, there's code so bad you simply know it's unused and never called. Bernard sends us one such method, in Java:

  /**
   * Finds a <code>GroupEntity</code> by group number.
   *
   * @param  group the group number.
   * @return the <code>GroupEntity</code> object.
   */
  public static GroupEntity find(String group) {
    return GroupEntity.find(group);
  }

7 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-19

Objectified

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-18

Simon recently found himself working alongside a "very senior" developer- who had a whopping 5 years of experience. This developer was also aggrieved that in recent years, Object Oriented programming had developed a bad reputation. "Functional this, functional that, people really just don't understand how clean and clear objects make your code."

For example, here are a few Java objects which they wrote to power a web scraping tool:

21 comments - Last comment @ 00:20

Secondary Waits

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-14

ArSo works at a small company. It's the kind of place that has one software developer, and ArSo isn't it. But ArSo is curious about programming, and has enough of a technical background that small tasks should be achievable. After some conversations with management, an arrangement was made: Kurt, their developer, would identify a few tasks that were suitable for a beginner, and would then take some time to mentor ArSo through completing them.

It sounded great, especially because Kurt was going to provide sample code which would give ArSo a head start on getting things done. What better way to learn than by watching a professional at work?

22 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-17

The First 10,000

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-13

Alicia recently inherited a whole suite of home-grown enterprise applications. Like a lot of these kinds of systems, it needs to do batch processing. She went tracking down a mysterious IllegalStateException only to find this query causing the problem:

select * from data_import where id > 10000

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-19

How is an Array like a Banana?

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-11-12

Some time ago, poor Keith found himself working on an antique Classic ASP codebase. Classic ASP uses VBScript, which is like VisualBasic 6.0, but worse in most ways. That's not to say that VBScript code is automatically bad, but the language certainly doesn't help you write clean code.

In any case, the previous developer needed to make an 8 element array to store some data. Traditionally, in VBScript, you might declare it like so:

27 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-13

Pay for this Later

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-11-11

Ross needed to write software to integrate with a credit card payment gateway. The one his company chose was relatively small, and only served a handful of countries- but it covered the markets they cared about and the transaction fees were cheap. They used XML for data interchange, and while they had no published schema document, they did have some handy-dandy sample code which let you parse their XML messages.

$response = curl_exec($ch);
$authecode = fetch_data($response, '<authCode>', '</authCode>');
$responsecode = fetch_data($response, '<responsecode>', '</responsecode>');
$retrunamount = fetch_data($response, '<returnamount>', '</returnamount>');
$trxnnumber = fetch_data($response, '<trxnnumber>', '</trxnnumber>');
$trxnstatus = fetch_data($response, '<trxnstatus>', '</trxnstatus>');
$trxnresponsemessage = fetch_data($response, '<trxnresponsemessage>', '</trxnresponsemessage>');

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-13

One More Parameter, Bro

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-11-07

Matt needed to add a new field to a form. This simple task was made complicated by the method used to save changes back to the database. Let's see if you can spot what the challenge was:

public int saveQualif(String docClass, String transcomId, String cptyCod, String tradeId, String originalDealId, String codeEvent, String multiDeal,
            String foNumber, String codeInstrfamily, String terminationDate, String premiumAmount, String premiumCurrency, String notionalAmount,
            String codeCurrency, String notionalAmount2, String codeCurrency2, String fixedRate, String payout, String maType, String maDate,
            String isdaZoneCode, String tradeDate, String externalReference, String entityCode, String investigationFileReference,
            String investigationFileStartDate, String productType, String effectiveDate, String expiryDate, String paymentDate, String settInstrucTyp,
            String opDirection, String pdfPassword, String extlSysCod, String extlDeaId, String agrDt) throws TechnicalException, DfException

32 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-14