The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Future Documentation

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-11-05

Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!

He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-06

Undefined Tasks

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-11-04

Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.

The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-07

Solve a Captcha to Continue

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-11-03

The first time Z hit the captcha on his company's site, he didn't think much of it. And to be honest, the second time he wasn't paying that much attention. So it wasn't until the third time that he realized that the captcha had showed him the same image every single time- a "5" with lines scribbled all over it.

That led Z to dig out the source and see how the captcha was implemneted.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-04

A Basic Mistake

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-29

Way back in 1964, people were starting to recgonize that computers were going to have a large impact on the world. There was not, at the time, very much prepackaged software, which meant if you were going to use a computer to do work, you were likely going to have to write your own programs. The tools to do that weren't friendly to non-mathematicians.

Thus, in 1964, was BASIC created, a language derived from experiments with languages like DOPE (The Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). The goal was to be something easy, something that anyone could use.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-04

A Truly Bad Comparison

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-28

For C programmers of a certain age (antique), booleans represent a frustrating challenge. But with the addition of stdbool.h, we exited the world of needing to work hard to interact with boolean values. While some gotchas are still in there, your boolean code has the opportunity to be simple.

Mark's predecessor saw how simple it made things, and decided that wouldn't do. So that person went and wrote their own special way of comparing boolean values. It starts with an enum:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-09

A Government Data Center

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2025-10-27

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).

I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2025-11-03

This Is Really Empty

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-23

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

function IsReallyEmpty($subject)
{
        $trimmed = trim(preg_replace("/&.*;/", "", $subject));
        return strlen($trimmed) != 0;
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-24

Forward Not Found

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-10-22

Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um… probably shouldn't have been found.

function show_404($page = '') {
        $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        error_log("Caught 404: $uri");
        $redirect_url = "";
       
        switch($uri){
                case "/SOMEURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEURL";
                        break;
                case "/SOMEOTHERURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEOTHERURL";
                        break;
                case "/YETANOTHERURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/YETANOTHERURL";
                        break;
                // ... THERE ARE 300 of these ...
                case "/MOREURLS":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/MOREURLS";
                        break;
                case "/EVENMOREURLS":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/EVENMOREURLS";
                        break;
        }

        if ($redirect_url){
                Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
                Header( "Location: $redirect_url" );
        } else {
                parent::show_404($page);
        }
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-24