Recent Feature Articles

Jun 2008

The Detention Wizard

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Thanks to a generous anonymous donation, Hudson High (as we'll call it) was finally able to trebuchet themselves into the 21st century. In addition to buying new computers for the teachers and staff, they found a contractor that would build them the ultimate system to maintain every function in the school, top to bottom. After a few months the system was built and deployed.

As one of the school's sysadmins, part of Jason L.'s job was to support the software. And it didn't take long for his eagerness to learn the software to turn into confusion, and it didn't take long after that for his confusion to turn into horror.

214 comments - Last comment @ 2008-08-12

Lyle Can Do Anything Better Than You

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Lyle was displeased. Despite all he had going for him — being the most handsome guy in the office, the smartest guy on the team, having the best all-terrain tires throughout the whole department, and trouncing the competition in a recent laser tag game, his team didn't seem to work well together.

Clearly, Lyle wasn't the problem. He was the best manager, the best leader, hell, the best human being there had ever been. And it was up to him to make his team happy. The laser tag game could have been a good first step if James W. hadn't ruined everything by exposing Lyle as a cheater. To his team's delight, Lyle sent out an email that he'd be at the regional office for a few days on management training. Lyle must have been doing something right, because as soon as he left the office got more productive.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2009-04-17

The Stalled Server Room

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A few months back, Jen Frickell's company was given some bad news. When their lease ended, they'd have to move out of their second-floor suite. The good news, however, was that a suite would be available on the first floor. All they'd need to do was pack up and move downstairs.

It was a fairly reasonable request, so the company's executives signed a new lease and prepared to move. There was, however, just one, small hitch. The nice little server room they built in the back of their office - equipped with air conditioning units, ventilation, dedicated power, backup power, and so on - could not be relocated. Not only would it cost too much, but there was simply no room for it. The server room would just have to remain upstairs.

193 comments - Last comment @ 2009-12-30

Announcement: Alex Sells Out!

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As you may have noticed, there are now advertisements on The Daily WTF. Well, technically, I've been running ads here since October of 2004… but I just realized that I never bothered announcing it. So, there you have it dear readers: I have officially sold out.

Normally, the Sell Out announcement goes something like this. I really hate ads. I know you do, too. But my blog takes soooo much time and cost sooo much money, I have no choice but to put up ads. Besides, everyone else is doing it. So technically, it’s them selling out, not me. Please don’t hate me.

204 comments - Last comment @ 2025-07-31

Application Lifecycle Mismanagement

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If there's one thing that the new development manager has, it's tenacity. Joshua has been maintaining his company's overly complex software for a while now, and found Dave's eagerness and dedication to learn admirable.

Dave's training was fast and brutal. On his first day he was thrust into a task that only the QA lead had done before — deploying the latest software to the build server. He had to learn it, as he'd function as the backup when the QA lead was out (and, coincidentally, he was out on Dave's first day).

162 comments - Last comment @ 2014-09-06

The Source Control Shingle

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The year was 1999 and the dot-com boom was going full-throttle. Companies everywhere were focused on building revolutionary applications using nothing but top-shelf hardware and state-of-the-art software tools. Developers everywhere were trying to figure out if they should play more foosball, more air hockey, or sit back down on their Aeron and write more code. Everywhere, that is, except Boise, Idaho. Or at least, Dave's small corner of it.

At Dave's company, developers worked at a solid pace, using reliable tools, for a stable industry. They were sub-sub-contractors on a giant project commissioned by the U.S. Navy to condense naval vessel documentation. Generally speaking, the complete documentation required for a modern warship-from the GPS calibration instructions to the giant 130-millimeter cannon repair guide-is measured in tons. By condensing the documentation into the electronic equivalent, they could not only save tremendous physical space, but they could make it much easier to navigate.

138 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-14

Firefox Deletes Printers, and More Support Stories

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Firefox Deletes Printers! from Arthur

Back when I did tech support, one of my customers was a master of BSing. Well, more an apprentice — he has all the words down, but couldn't quite string them together into anything coherent. He's told me to "double delete the TCP stack" more than once. Also, he claims to program operating systems in his spare time and to be one of the inventors of the internet. Something about his support calls leads me to believe he may be exaggerating...

112 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13

Perfectly Adequate Productivity

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Allen F occasionally feels out of place. As a software developer in a large, scientific research lab, he's one of the few people not running around in a lab coat, mumbling about things like how to stabilize the latest batch of tretonin, or how only an idiot would name it isoprovalyn instead of hydrozapam. In fact, Allen doesn't even get to wear a lab coat.

Despite not being one of the PhD'd researchers, Allen's work is pretty important. He's the one that develops simulation programs that the biologists and chemists use to save countless weeks of research time. Of course, just as Allen is unsure of exactly how the researches use the data his programs generate, the researchers really have no idea what it takes to write the programs.

124 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-21

A Bit More Dire

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As a junior-level sysadmin at his university, Alcari had gotten used to frantic, middle-of-the-night support calls. Whether it was a mail proxy server freezing up, a replication process getting out of sync, or some application deadlocking, Alcari's solution was almost always the same: reboot the problem server. On a recent 4:00AM emergency call, however, the situation was a bit more dire.

"Ummm," the student working the graveyard shift at the helpdesk started, "I think the network is down. I'm getting calls from everyone, everywhere. Can you, like, check into this. Now?"

136 comments - Last comment @ 2011-05-01

Do You Believe In Magic... Online

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Originally posted in the Sidebar, "AlpineR" shares this interesting story about Wizards of the Coast's Magic Online 3.0...

You may have heard of a collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering.  It's sold in packs of 15 cards for $4.  Each card represents a creature, artifact, magic spell, or resource.  You choose sixty cards from your collection to build a deck and duel with another player, drawing from your deck to summon creatures and attack your opponent.

83 comments - Last comment @ 2008-07-29

Announcement: Get the Mug

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Good news, everyone. The official The Daily WTF mugs have finally arrived! Well, technically, the mugs have been sitting here in my office for months, but the intern who will mail them out has finally arrived! Either way, now's the time to get your own.

182 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-10

Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate… or Duplicate

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By the 1970's, computers were practically everywhere. They starred on TV, were the brains behind Cold War Doomsday devices, and had even reached “cliché” status in many science fiction circles. Of course, being that they cost upwards of $1,000 – per hour – the computers themselves weren’t everywhere, only their ominous presence. And nothing said “welcome to the computer era” quite like the ubiquitous punch card.

Although punch cards had been used since the 1890’s to store and tabulate data, the 1960’s brought a new, creative use of the medium. The punch card itself – as in, its physical form and its transference from one person to another – became an integral part of the information system process. Since each card could store 80 bytes of data, and writing that data required nothing more than a simple punch machine, “computerized data” could originate anywhere and transfer to whomever, all without the need for an expensive computer.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

Deploy! Deploy! Deploy!

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It was the calm before the storm. Brokers were sitting at their desks in silence, watching the clock. The market was going to open in minutes, and huge volume orders would start pouring in. The developers working for the firm – a mid-size proprietary trading outfit on Wall Street – were already busy; an order from the previous day should’ve expired automatically, but didn’t. It was manually fixed moments after it was discovered.

“Huh,” Daniil shrugged, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the latest release.” They’d just rolled out a minor update to their proprietary trading system. Daniil had overheard his boss barking at a junior developer that they needed the feature in two days – testing, review, standard processes be damned. “Done” had a higher priority than “working.” Any objections raised by the developers were met with the same reaction you’d get from a dog after explaining the Pythagorean Theorem – blank, drooling faces.

158 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-19
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