The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Unstructions: The Factory Reset, Irrational Installation, and Installs the Manual

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-06-30

Irrational Installation (from Mike T)
My company recently shelled out $8,000 for a mobile TV conference endpoint that allows us to do a two-way video conference from the field using a fairly small device (about the size of a large digital camera). It's a pretty cool idea, but we're finding that the hardware and software design are just not quite Enterprisey enough for our liking.

As an example, here is the official company reply on their support forum explaining how to reset the device to factory default settings:

149 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-16

The Key to a Good Schema

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-28

*ding* Customer Process Manager Error - Unable to Close Order Line 255731

Rick ignored the error. The Customer Process Manager was a rickety ASP web floating on an Oracle DB designed by a drunken sailor. It was more likely to produce errors than the desired result. The users, who had been using the application for a decade before Rick was tasked with keeping it hobbling along, were used to its odd behavior and knew when to expect errors.

230 comments - Last comment @ 2011-10-14

The Quine Programmer

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-06-23

The Quine – i.e., a program that produces its own source code as output – lives in the esoteric realm of computing and computer science. It’s almost entirely useless, but usually pretty fun. The Quine Programmer, on the other hand, is among the pantheon of programming gods, sitting between The Great Abstractor and The PHP God.

The Quine Programmer has the uncanny gifts of being infinitely good at programming and infinitely insightful, thus allowing him to write a program to replace himself and all other programmers. The output of The Quine Programmer is system that’s fully configurable by the end-user; should the end-user want something changed, she can simply change it herself.

127 comments - Last comment @ 2011-07-03

Not So Smart Card

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2011-06-21

A few years ago, Sebastian was working as a security consultant for a relatively big software security company that was working on a credential management project for "Her Majesty's Telecom" or simply, HMT.

His group was high-spirits all around counting down the days remaining in the final month of the year-long project, well, that is presumably except for Simon. Up until 48 hours prior, he was the consulting company's corporate liaison who had decided to unexpectedly exit from the project. His departure left Sebastian, a former corporate IT drop-out himself, the project's only possible option to fill his shoes two days before an all-manager status meeting. 

107 comments - Last comment @ 2012-02-05

Sponsor Appreciation: Windows Azure with a Free TDWTF Mug!

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-06-17

Today's sponsor appreciation post is especially exciting. As I'm sure you know, our sponsors help pay the bills (and as such, you should definitely check out what they do)... but this time, our friends at Microsoft took it one step further: they've agreed to buy you one of the elusive The Daily WTF mugs.

160 comments - Last comment @ 2011-08-15

Wild Card

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-14

Photo credit: jepoirrier@flickr "Today, with all the usual pomp and circumstance, pride and prejudice," rumbled the university president, "we unveil our new, multi-million dollar investment: a chip-card system for student payments. Now students will have an easy and convenient way to purchase books and other items from our campus stores and vending machines and manage the balances on their student accounts."

Patrick didn't really pay much attention to the round of announcements about the new system. Judging from the way the school was giving sessions and tutorials about the system, you'd imagine it required an advanced degree to use. In reality, it was little different from a standard debit card. The most cumbersome element was that you had to use a cashier at one of the campus stores to add money to the card.

160 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-12

Twenty-Four Bits Per Intern

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-09

It's tough to find good uses for interns. They don't have the experience to do any heavy lifting, and management gets annoyed if you only use them to fetch you coffee. Usually, they get to re-organize the supply closet or maybe help sanitize some DB records in test, if anyone trusts them near a computer.

Matthew thought he had found some good work for Timmy, his fresh-faced intern. "This is hopefully pretty straight-forward, but please, let me know if you have any questions," Matthew said. He pointed to a screen-mockup. "We want this little round swatch to display the user's currently selected color. When the user clicks the round swatch, they should see this text-box and they can enter in a new hex-code. When they hit 'save', the hex-code gets saved to the DB, and the swatch displays the new color."

186 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13

Recent Feature Articles