The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Biggest Boon-Dongle in the World

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-01-31

Telecommunications manufacturing is a cut-throat business. Features, functionality and hardware need to be added and continuously improved at a frenetic pace in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. Engineers must constantly increase their skills to leverage the latest advances in technology to design and build the best product possible at the lowest cost. Slip up just a little, and it can be a death knell for your company.

To save costs, Dog and Bone Corporation (DNB) had eased up on their latest-and-greatest push. Budgets shrank. Progress on adding new features slowed. Hardware upgrades failed to happen. Meetings to justify every little thing began to become the main task in everyone's day. Competitors leapfrogged. Interest waned. Unfortunately, this caused their flagship private telephone exchange (DBX) product to start to stagnate and made some of the engineers begin to feel that their skills were getting to be a little out of date. Engineering-eyes began to wander.

77 comments - Last comment @ 2013-12-27

Scheming Schema

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-01-29

Adam worked for a moving company. When he joined up, it was a regional enterprise with several locations and a surprisingly large fleet of trucks. One day, he came to work to learn that he now worked for a much larger, national company, called ConHugeCo. Nobody was getting fired, but now Adam had to get their data integrated with ConHugeCo’s.

ConHugeCo had a fat middleware tier built in WebSphere MQ. Like any true enterprise solution, everything was glued together by XML, and that meant Adam built many small programs that pulled data from legacy systems and spreadsheets and mashed it into XML files, which were then shipped off to the MQ system. Adam had the HR and insurance data synced within a few days, but when it came time to sync their loadouts for moving large items, things started to get weird.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2013-02-08

The Sysadmin's PC

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-01-24

“Hey, can you give me a hand? This computer I built won’t boot.”

Alexander sighed, and went to see what Nicholas had done now.

118 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-03

Website WTF - Asus Transformer Book

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2013-01-21

Creating websites so that they display the same on all browsers and platforms for all vendors is tough business. Designers aim for "One size fits all" but sometimes, even with the best of incantations, "One size fits most" is the end result.

Case in point, Eric's simple goal: learn more about Asus' Transformer Book. All that he wanted to do was to pull up http://transformerbook.asus.com/ on his Ubuntu laptop and marvel at the dynamic animations and glitzy transitions between product features but instead all he got was a screenful of ugly. No text styling, a couple of images, but mostly just blah-looking plain text.

83 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-25

I.S.O. is for L.O.S.E.R.S.

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-01-16

Map "You ever seen one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's speeches?" Alan's new supervisor Tessa asked as she led him to his new office at BigTelCo.

"Can't say I have," Alan replied.

83 comments - Last comment @ 2023-09-13

The Curse of the Night of the Ticket That Wouldn't Die

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2013-01-14

“232632, in the flesh. I’ve waited a long time.”

Matt started at the voice over his shoulder. He turned to find a college-age girl at the threshold of his borrowed cubicle, with an intense and nearly crazed look in her bloodshot, bag-laden eyes. Matt had no idea who she was. That was true of most of the people in this office. He was a roving consultant, who had arrived earlier that morning on one of his semi-annual onsite visits for software training and support.

103 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-20

Who Needs Connectivity? I Have Service!

by Kirby F. in Feature Articles on 2013-01-10

Jim worked in the IT department of a university and one of his many jobs was maintaining the dial-up system.

Yes, that's right. Dial-up.

129 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-15

Color Me Stupid

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-01-08

Andy's company develops solutions for "Industrial" handheld devices. To make deployment and updates easier, they each run a thin client so only the server is different from project to project. This client was written by a long-gone employee in the early nineties, and had barely changed since because it "just worked". Updating it was discouraged for fear of breaking backward-compatibility.

Andy's new project was the first chance he'd had to use it, so he asked a colleague if there was some code that could be used to interface with it. What Andy received was essentially a giant method which responded to the client by cycling through a switch-statement to decide what to paint next based on the current state of the client. Andy took the initiative to create a library for making servers for these things a bit less spaghetti-like, and to encourage this new-fangled concept of code-reuse.

106 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-21

Check the Check Printer

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-01-02

There was nothing unusual about an unusual ticket. Matt worked helldesk at an assembly plant, and not a week went by without some confusing brain-bender from his users. He didn’t blink when he received this ticket:

We’re having an issue with our check-printer. Every time a user logs on, it prints out an inventory of electrical parts dated from 1984. On our checks. This is causing some accounting issues.

111 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-09

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