The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Monkeys

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-01-03

Happy 2025 to all our readers. I can already tell this year's columns are going to be filled with my (least) favorite form of WTF, the impossible endless gauntlet of flaming password hurdles to jump over or crawl under. Please comment if you know why this week's column has this title and why it doesn't have the title Swordfish.

Peter G. starts off our new year of password maladies with a complaint that is almost poetic.
"Between desire and reality.
Between fact and breakfast.
Between 8 and -6:00.
Madness lies, lies, lies..."

9 comments - Last comment @ 04:57

intint

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-02

Ash's company outsourced to an offshore vendor.

This is an example of what they got back:

8 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-03

Y2K25

by Remy Porter in Editor's Soapbox on 2025-01-01

Twenty five years ago today, the world breathed a collective sight of relief when nothing particularly interesting happened. Many days begin with not much interesting happening, but January 1st, 2000 was notable for not being the end of the world.

I'm of course discussing the infamous Y2K bug. We all know the story: many legacy systems were storing dates with two digits- 80 not 1980, and thus were going to fail dramatically when handling 00- is that 1900 or 2000?

35 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-03

Best of 2024: Lowering the Rent Floor

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2024-12-31

Businesses always want to save money. But boy, they can sometimes come up with some hare-brained ways of doing it. Original --Remy

Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish surrounded by much larger fish, and the larger fish were hungry.

Gordon was their primary IT person. He managed a farm of VAXes and other minicomputers, which geologists used to do complicated models to predict where oil might be found. In terms of utilization, the computer room was arguably the most efficient space in the company: those computers may have been expensive, but they were burning 24/7 to find more oil to extract.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-01

Best of 2024: Check Your Email

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2024-12-30

As we recap some of the best moments of the year, make sure you check this report, which is very important, so important the entire company has to stop what it's doing. Original. --Remy

Branon's boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency.

"Did we change anything this weekend?"

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-03

Killing Time

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-12-27

The Hatter was framed! He didn't even do it! Nil Corpus Delecti, et cetera.

Yet Yitz O. , up to some kind of skullduggery, observed a spacetime oddity. "When trying to compare some results from a GetOrders call via the ebay api, I noticed something weird was happening with the DateTimes in the response. The attached is 3 calls to get the same order, made in quick succession. The millisecond part of all the DateTimes matched the millisecond part of the *current* time (which you can see in the TimeStamp field. I assume it's because they rolled their own DateTime functionality and are Getting a UTC time by subtracting the difference between the local time and the UTC time, and one of those values doesn't have the millisecond value in it, but it's the ebay api so who knows." Undoubtedly a bug that nobody ever noticed because they probably just ignore the millis altogether.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-02

Best of 2024: A Bit About the HP3000

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2024-12-26

As we enter that little gap between Christmas and New Year's, we explore some of the highlights of 2024. We start with this historical computing story. And unlike the subject, this shipped ready to read (and reprint). --Remy

Today's anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn't the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we'll get to the code, but there's so much more to the story.

Our submitter, let's call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. "Mini", of course, meant "refrigerator sized".

11 comments - Last comment @ 2024-12-28

Christmas in the Server Room 2: A New Batch

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2024-12-25

Last year, we spent our Christmas looking at some Christmas movies and specials, and rated them based on the accuracy of their portrayal of the IT industry. We're going to continue with that this year. Just like last year, we'll rate things based on a number of floppy disks- 💾💾💾💾💾 means it's as accurate as Office Space, whereas 💾 puts it someplace down around Superman III.

Gremlins

Technology has conquered the world, but none of it actually works. As Mr. Futterman (played by the classic character actor Dick Miller) points out: they've all got gremlins in them. Except, thanks to a goofy dad's last minute Christmas gift and some careless 80s teens, the gremlins aren't just taking over technology, but the entire town with their goofy violence.

8 comments - Last comment @ 2024-12-27

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