Remy Porter

Remy is a veteran developer who writes software for space probes.

He's often on stage, doing improv comedy, but insists that he isn't doing comedy- it's deadly serious. You're laughing at him, not with him. That, by the way, is usually true- you're laughing at him, not with him.

Halfway to a Date

by in CodeSOD on

Roger took on a contract to fix up a PHP website. During the negotiations, he asked some questions about the design, like, "Is it object-oriented or more procedural?" "No, it's PHP," said the developer.

Which about sums it up, I suppose. Have some date handling code:


Brushing Up

by in CodeSOD on

Keige inherited some code which seems to be part of a drawing application. It can load brush textures from image files- at least, sometimes it can.

static public Brush GetImageBrush(string serviceCode, string imageName, string language)
{
	Brush BorderChannelGroupBrush;
	BitmapImage image = null;

	int point = imageName.LastIndexOf('.');
	string languageImagename = imageName.Substring(0, point) + "-" + language + imageName.Substring(point);

	try
	{
		image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, languageImagename);
	}
	catch { }

	if (image == null)
	{
		try
		{
			image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, imageName);
		}
		catch { }
	}

	if (image != null)
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = new ImageBrush(image);
	}
	else
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = Brushes.White;
	}
	return BorderChannelGroupBrush;
}

The Whole Thing

by in Representative Line on

David was integrating a new extension into their ecommerce solution, and found this un-representative line:

$this->model_sale_manageorder->exportOrder(substr($selectid,0,strlen($selectid)-1));

Irritants Make Perls

by in CodeSOD on

Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.

It didn't go great.


Crossly Joined

by in CodeSOD on

Antonio's team hired some very expensive contractors and consultants to help them build a Java based application. These contractors were very demure, very mindful, about how using ORMs could kill performance.

So they implemented a tool that would let them know any time the Hibernate query generator attempted to perform a cross join.


My Identification

by in CodeSOD on

Bejamin's team needed to generate a unique session ID value that can't easily be guessed. The traditional way of doing this would be to generate cryptographically secure random bytes. Most languages, including PHP, have a solution for doing that.

But you could also do this:


Generate JSON

by in Representative Line on

Today's anonymous submission is a delightfully simple line of JavaScript which really is an archetype of a representative line.

$json = "{";

Mr Number

by in CodeSOD on

Ted's company hired a contract team to build an application. The budget eventually ran out without a finished application, so the code the contract team had produced was handed off to Ted's team to finish.

This is an example of the Ruby code Ted inherited:


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