The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Symbol of Bad Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-12

As developers, when we send data over the network, we can usually safely ignore the physical implementation of that network. At some level, though, the bits you’re sending become physical effects in your transmission medium, whether it’s radio waves or electrical signals.

You can’t just send raw bits over the wire. Those bits have to be converted into a symbol suitable for the transmission medium. Symbols could be the dots-and-dashes of morse code, tones transmitted over a phone line, or changing duty cycles on a pulse-width-modulated signal. The number of symbols per second is the baud rate of the channel. What this means for digital transmission is that even if your channel has a potential bit rate of one gigabit per second, the actual baud rate may be different- either much larger or much smaller. For example, modems might send 4-bits per symbol, meaning a 2,400 baud modem actually can transmit 9,600 bits per second. GPS, on the other hand, can transmit 50 bits/s, but over one million symbols per second thanks to spread spectrum broadcast.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-14

Is the Table Empty?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-10

Sean has a lucrative career as a consultant/contractor. As such, he spends a great deal of time in other people’s code bases, and finds things like a method with this signature:

public boolean isTableEmpty()

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-20

To Read or Parse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-05

When JSON started to displace XML as the default data format for the web, my initial reaction was, "Oh, thank goodness." Time passed, and people reinvented schemas for JSON and RPC APIs in JSON and wrote tools which turn JSON schemas into UIs and built databases which store BSON, which is JSON with extra steps, and… it makes you wonder what it was all for.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-13

An Eventful Career Continues

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-02

You may remember Sandra from her rather inglorious start at Initrovent. She didn't intend to continue working for Karl for very long, but she also didn't run out the door screaming. Perhaps she should have, but if she had- we wouldn't have this code.

Initrovent was an event-planning company, and thus needed to manage events, shows, and spaces. They wrote their own exotic suite of software to manage that task.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-05

Foggy about Security

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-28

Maverick StClare’s company recently adopted a new, SaaS solution for resource planning. Like most such solutions, it was pushed from above without regard to how people actually worked, and thus required the users to enter highly structured data into free-form, validation-free, text fields. That was dumb, so someone asked Maverick: “Hey, could you maybe write a program to enter the data for us?”

Well, you’ll be shocked to learn that there was no API, but the web pages themselves all looked pretty simple and the design implied they hadn’t changed since IE4, so Maverick decided to take a crack at writing a scraper. Step one: log in. Easy, right? Maverick fired up a trace on the HTTPS traffic and sniffed the requests. He was happy to see that his password wasn’t sent in plain text. He was less happy to see that it wasn’t sent using any of the standard HTTP authentication mechanisms, and it certainly wasn’t hashed using any algorithm he recognized. He dug into the code, and found this:

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-05

Got Your Number

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2018-06-27

You have a string. It contains numbers. You want to turn those numbers into all “0”s, presumably to anonymize them. You’re also an utter incompetent. What do you do?

You already know what they do. Jane’s co-worker encountered this solution, and she tells us that the language was “Visual BASIC, Profanity”.

69 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-29

External SQL

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-06-26

"Externalize your strings" is generally good advice. Maybe you pull them up into constants, maybe you move them into a resource file, but putting a barrier between your code and the strings you output makes everything more flexible.

But what about strings that aren't output? Things like, oh… database queries? We want to be cautious about embedding SQL directly into our application code, but our SQL code often is our business logic, so it makes sense to inline it. Most data access layers end up trying to abstract the details of SQL behind method calls, whether it's just a simple repository or an advanced ORM approach.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-29

Wait Low Down

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-06-21

As mentioned previously I’ve been doing a bit of coding for microcontrollers lately. Coming from the world of desktop and web programming, it’s downright revelatory. With no other code running, and no operating system, I can use every cycle on a 16MHz chip, which suddenly seems blazing fast. You might have to worry about hardware interrupts- in fact I had to swap serial connection libraries out because the one we were using misused interrupts and threw of the timing of my process.

And boy, timing is amazing when you’re the only thing running on the CPU. I was controlling some LEDs and if I just went in a smooth ramp from one brightness level to the other, the output would be ugly steps instead of a smooth fade. I had to use a technique called temporal dithering, which is a fancy way of saying “flicker really quickly” and in this case depended on accurate, sub-microsecond timing. This is all new to me.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-15