The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Midaslocator.com Zip Codddde Validation

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2012-07-31

Recently, Marc came upon a dilemma that all car owners can relate to - his next oil change was due soon.

Hoping to take advantage of Midas' online appointment scheduler, he found his nearest Midas garage at http://midaslocator.com/ and started entering his information. Unfortunately, when it came time enter his address information, Marc noticed something peculiar - the form validation wouldn't accept his zip code, or any zip code for that matter.

98 comments - Last comment @ 2012-08-13

Fruity Loop

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-07-30

They might have been chipping their code out of the living mountain with stone tools and classic ASP, but they weren't primitive. Colt's development team still required code reviews of all of the classic ASP code before it went to production. Sure, most of the time, an ASP code review ended with, "ARGH WHY WHY MY EYES THE PAIN!", but the code still got reviewed.

During one review, Colt noticed something odd about his co-worker's file-upload module. The module was meant to handle pretty small CSV files, and even had a check to ensure they weren't larger than expected. That wasn't the odd part.

107 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-22

A Heated Situation

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2012-07-25

Recently, some new people transferred into Evi's group after being swallowed up as part of a intercompany shuffle. After everybody got nestled into their new pocket of the cubicle farm, the topic of bringing over their server hardware came up.

The department's server room was the obvious choice for where to put the equipment, because well, that's where everything else was already.

51 comments - Last comment @ 2012-08-07

Does Not Compute: Rodents, Dendro-computing, and More

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-07-19

I guess it's been quite a while since I did the last Does Not Compute, but here goes another round! Please do send in your own stories, and who knows, in a few years we may see another .

Rodents (from Milo)
A while ago I was working as IT support for several research stations. One day we got a strange call.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13

Confessions: The Phone Number

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-07-17

"One morning," wrote Justin Reese, "my client reported that was a strange bug on a certain page in an app I built for them. Where the contact information for a series of offices was being displayed, all the information was correct except for one piece: the phone number. For multiple locations, the phone number displayed was the same: 214-748-3647."

"I ran a quick query against the database to make sure that the phone number records were indeed correct, and in fact they were. Many of the phone numbers were 214-numbers (being that we're in Dallas and all), but there were only a handful of expected duplicates. Not nearly as many as were being displayed. More peculiarly, on my local machine, the phone numbers were displaying just fine. I tried them out on the test site, only to find they were working there as well.

183 comments - Last comment @ 2013-02-28

Just a Warm-Up

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-07-10

Brian worked for the American government. Specifically, he worked for a small branch on a very small project with a budget so small that it was governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. To cut costs, the pointy-haired, grey-suited bureaucrats that ran the office found all sorts of inventive ways to save money, most of which were just minor nuisances that could generally be ignored.

One particularly annoying technique, however, was that they set the thermostats at 55ºF, then locked them in plastic cages so that those pesky and expensive developers wouldn't waste precious government funds on wasteful things like "heat", "comfort" and "having fingers that aren't blue at the tips". In a state like Hawaii, that might not have been a problem, but these poor developers lived in the other non-contiguous state in the Union, in a place where the average summer temperature was a hair shy of 60ºF.

241 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-25

For Whom the BEL Tolls

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-07-02

Photo Credit: dklimke @ flickr Although Martin had been a programmer at the company for several years, he was never was able to escape his second-rate status. And how could he? With two rockstar programmers at the helm, he was lucky that their brilliance didn't outshine him to a third- or even forth-rate status. Heck, he was just lucky to be in their presence.

The rockstars were known for a lot of things, and one of those things was always developing their own version of the wheel. Usually, with a rotary engine built inside. If a project called for a car, it was an okay fit. When it called for an airplane… well, they'd just build a carplane. A boat? Try a carboat. A beverage cooler? You don't even want to know.

112 comments - Last comment @ 2012-07-16

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