The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Hot Notifications

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-26

The field of dentistry is more than x-rays and implements of torture. Half the job of any office is simply dragging patients in for cleanings and check-ups. That’s where technology comes into play.

Henrik’s employer made patient management software for dentist offices. Selling IT solutions to businesses with no IT staff was challenging, but Henrik’s software had a “nag bomb” feature. It could call, text, and email patients, reminding them of upcoming visits as well as strongly encouraging them to make appointments on a regular basis. Once dentists saw the number of missed appointments drop and the number of scheduled appointments rise, they fell in love with the software. Coupled with a centralized web gateway which allowed patients to “self-service” their appointments, you had a winning product.

I think I need a root canal. I definitely need a long, slow root canal.
One morning, Henrik arrived to the office a bit early, and was finishing a cigarette when Otto, the service desk manager, ran from the building like his head was on fire. “We’ve been hacked! We’ve been hacked! God help us, we’ve been hacked!”

29 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-27

The System

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-06-24

One of J.W.'s clients called him in to help diagnose and fix some reliability problems with the deployment system. The client was a small shop of about ten developers, one dual-role QA/manager, one SA who controlled the QA and production machines, and the requisite bean counters.

Upon arrival, J.W. was proudly shown the home-grown system that the manager had cobbled together. The developers would fill out a wiki page template for each release. The template had a section for:

71 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-26

Write Universe to Disk

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2014-06-19

Mike knew he had a problem. His shareware planetarium software, Kepler, was flying off the shelves at software stores across the US. It was in such demand that he had to buy a second Amiga just to write more installation floppies. However, Kepler came with a glaring hole in functionality: no one could take screenshots.

"I just wish AmigaOS shipped with a screenshot API," Mike complained to his business partner, Seamus. "Every developer I know wants to grab screenshots. Every user I talk to says the same thing. How many teachers have written us, saying how they want to copy a star chart onto some floppies for their students?"

106 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-19

The Five Alarm Meeting

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-17

Leigh didn’t have anything to do with automating operations at their NOC, although he was mostly glad it had been done. The system was a bit of a mess, with home-grown programs and scripts sitting atop purchased monitoring packages and a CMDB. It was cumbersome, sometimes spit out incomprehensible and nonsense errors, but it mostly worked, and it saved them a huge amount of time.

It was also critical to their operations. Without these tools, without the scripts and the custom database back end, without the intermediary applications and the nice little stop-light dashboard that the managers could see if they hit refresh five times, nothing could get done. Unfortunately, this utopia covered up a dark underbelly.

We’re going to need a meeting
The operations team were the end users of the software, but they mostly relied on the development team to build it and maintain it. The development team relied on the database team. Once, Leigh needed them to expand the size of a single text field in the database from 25 characters to 50 characters. The development team had no problem updating their applications, but the database team wasn’t ready to start changing column sizes right away. Burt, the head of the database team had to start with a 1-hour meeting with his entire team to discuss the implications. Then he had to have another meeting with the development and operations managers. Then Leigh needed to sit down with the DBAs and justify the extra 25 characters (“That’s a 100% increase in the size of the field!” Burt proclaimed). After 200 man hours, the field was changed.

100 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-04

Just Call It Faberge

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2014-06-12

In the early part of this century, it was quite common for small companies to stray into the infrastructure business and run their own servers. The company where Tatiana's dad worked was no exception. The infrastructure in this case was mainly a couple of old Linux boxes, one acting as the Web server and the other as the email server. To be fair, the email server was 'newer', in that an older one had recently been replaced. Imagine for a moment what the specs for an 'old' server in 2000 that was too slow to support an email server must have looked like. I imagine a 186 chip and 8K of RAM with a cassette tape for persistence, but that could just be me.

A waste of an egg. At the time, Tatiana was a university student with a working knowledge of Unix. Where, in this case, 'working' is defined as the level of UNIX learned while completing university-level computer courses. Still, when the system administrator at her dad's company left and her dad asked if she would be willing to help out if an emergency arose, Tatiana agreed.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-21

Manual Automation

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2014-06-10

Aikh was the new hire on the local bank’s data warehousing/business intelligence team. His manager threw him right into the hurricane: a project with the neediest, whiniest and most demanding business unit. Said business hated their unreliable batch process for archiving reports, and the manual slog of connect > find/create directory > upload > pray. They hoped the DW team would code to the rescue.

Eager to impress, Aikh sketched out a simple, automated client/server solution. The business quickly approved his design and estimates. To mentor and keep the project on-track, Aikh’s manager assigned Dean, a more senior developer, to help out.

What do you mean, “steam powered hammer?”
“I could really use a good library to transfer files via secure shell,” Aikh told Dean during their initial meeting.

90 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-20

Boned

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2014-06-05

Being the consummate IT professional, John took pride in his ability to automate the more regular and mundane aspects of his job. While not everything bent to his scripting will, with the appropriate cmdlets, plug-ins and modules, there were few areas that were beyond his (automated) reach.

But even then, there were still some regularly executed processes that had not yet been touched. Following the crucial "if it's not broke, don't fix it" mantra, John was willing to let these pieces of antiquity continue to have their day until necessity demanded a change. The key being, naturally, if it's "not broke".

72 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-12

Half Credit

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-03

“I didn’t buy ten cylinders of CO₂! Why is PCard telling me I did?”

There were a pile of tickets in Adam’s queue, slightly larger than the proverbial molehill, but nowhere near mountain status either. Several employees saw incorrect charges on their purchasing cards, including one of the VPs. The first suspicion was fraud, but these charges looked legitimate: plane tickets to cities where the company had plants, raw materials purchases from vendors the plants usually did business with, etc. Since a VP was impacted, this confusion needed to be resolved ASAP, which meant Adam was pulling long hours to fix it.
Jean Luc PCard
“PCard” was the name for the purchasing card application. The purpose of the tool was to allow managers and executives validate the purchases made on the purchasing cards, and determine if they really belonged there or should have had a purhase order. It was one of Adam’s nuisance products, simply because it mostly worked fine- but minor issues were viewed as “my hair’s on fire” class emergencies. The only silver lining was that the application was considered “mature”, which meant that in three months, support would move to a much cheaper offshore team.

98 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-22

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