The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Some Crazy Reason

by Jake Vinson in CodeSOD on 2016-05-30

It's Memorial Day in the US, which is a holiday remembering those who have died in wars, which we celebrate by not going to work and generally grilling something. I leave it to someone smarter than myself to unpack the deeper meaning there. What it means here at TDWTF is that we're digging back into the archives to treat you to a classic WTF. - Remy

One time, out of boredom, I wrote a little utility called BitVerifier. It would loop over a folder and check every bit of each file. If the bit's value wasn't one or zero, it would prompt the user for the correct bit. At least in theory. I somehow never encountered a file with a "two" bit. But I got one key component right – an understanding of the valid range of values.

Rob K.'s colleague didn't even get that far.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-07

The Latest Price

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-25

Relational Database are a great way to structure data, but they have their warts. Certain kinds of structures don’t model well relationally, some are difficult to tune for performance, and some queries are just expensive no matter what. Still, with some smart design choices, some indexes, and some tuning of the execution plan, you can make things work.

Hambai approached a tuning problem with that perspective. The database had a huge pile of financial information- stock transactions, commodity valuations, and currency exchange rates. When it was new, queries were fast, but now, years on, performance ground to a halt. One query that drew his attention was one for accessing the latest exchange rate for four different currencies. It was run frequently, and each access took up to thirty seconds.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-02

Data Date Access

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-23

Perhaps the greatest evil Microsoft ever perpetrated on the world was putting a full-featured IDE on every end user’s desktop: Microsoft Office. Its macro system is a stripped down version of Visual Basic, complete with a UI-building tool, and when used in conjunction with Access, allows anyone to build a database-driven application. Anyone that’s spent enough time in an “enterprise” has probably inherited at least one Access application that was developed but somebody out at a manufacturing plant that magically became “mission critical”. Still, we can’t blame the end users for that.

There’s a special subset of developer though, that when trying to come up with an application that’s easy deploy, chooses Access as their development environment. “It’s already on all the users’ machines,” they say. “We can just put the MDB on a shared drive,” they say. And that’s how Ben gets handed an Access database and told, “figure out why this is so slow?”

34 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-07

Unstandard Lib

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-17

One of the hallmarks of “bad code” is when someone reinvents the wheel. In many Code SODs, we show code that could be replaced with a one-line call to a built in, standard library.

That’s one of the the advantages to a high-level language operating on modern hardware. Andrew doesn’t live in high-level land. He does embedded systems programming, often on platforms that don’t have conveniences like “standard libraries”, and so they end up reinventing the wheel from time to time.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-03

The Difficulties of Choice

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-12

It’s no easy task combing through the submissions and choosing the right code sample.

Ulysses knows my pain. He recently inherited a Python codebase with plenty of global variables, no convention around capitalizing identifiers, inconsistent levels of indentation, and an AngularJS front end.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-06

What A Load

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2016-05-05

In the mid-2000s, Amani was contracted to refactor a legacy codebase. He enjoyed breathing new life into old garbage, until the fateful day he came upon something completely unexpected.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-27

An Ant Pushes a Perl

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2016-05-03

It’s an old joke that Perl is a “write only language”. Despite some of its issues, back in the early 2000s, Perl was one of the best options out there for scripting languages and rapid-development automation.

Speaking of automation, build automation is really important. Back in the early 2000s, before Maven really caught on, your build automation tool for Java was Ant. Ant, like everything invented in the early 2000s, was driven by an XML scripting tool. Since it was tuned specifically for Java, it had some high-level operations to streamline tasks like generating proxy classes for calling web services based on a supplied WSDL file.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-05

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