The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Nuclear Option

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-26

About a decade ago, Gerald worked at a European nuclear plant. There was a “minor” issue where a controller connected to a high-voltage power supply would start missing out on status messages. “Minor”, because it didn’t really pose a risk to life and limb- but still, any malfunction with a controller attached to a high-voltage power supply in a nuclear power plant needs to be addressed.

So Gerald went off and got the code. It was on a file share, in a file called final.zip. Or, wait, was it in the file called real-final.zip? Or installed.zip? Or, finalnew.zip?

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

This or That

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-24

Processing financial transactions is not the kind of software you want to make mistakes in. If something is supposed to happen, it is definitely supposed to happen. Not partially happen. Not maybe happen.

Thus, a company like Charles R’s uses a vendor-supplied accounting package. That vendor has a professional services team, so when the behavior needs to be customized, Charles’s company outsources that development to the vendor.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

A Pre-Packaged Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-19

Microsoft’s SQL Server Integration Services is an ETL tool that attempts to mix visual programming (for designing data flows) with the reality that at some point, you’re just going to need to write some code. Your typical SSIS package starts as a straightforward process that quickly turns into a sprawling mix of spaghetti-fied .NET code, T-SQL stored procedures, and developer tears.

TJ L. inherited an SSIS package. This particular package contained a step where a C# sub-module needed to pass a date (but not a date-time) to the database. Now, this could be done easily by using C#’s date-handling objects, or even in the database by simply using the DATE type, instead of the DATETIME type.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-10

Impersonated Programming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-17

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I got contracted to show a government office how to build and deliver applications… in Microsoft Access. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. As horrifying and awful as it is, Access is actually built with some mechanisms to actually support that- you can break the UI and behavior off into one file, while keeping the data in another, and you can actually construct linked tables that connect to a real database, if you don’t mind gluing a UI made out of evil and sin to your “real” database.

Which brings us to poor Alex Rao. Alex has an application built in Access. This application uses linked tables, which he wants to convert to local tables. The VBA API exposed by Access doesn’t give him any way to do this, so he came up with this solution…

36 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-16

Changing Requirements

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-13

Requirements change all the time. A lot of the ideology and holy wars that happen in the Git processes camps arise from different ideas about how source control should be used to represent these changes. Which commit changed which line of code, and to what end? But what if your source control history is messy, unclear, or… you’re just not using source control?

For example, let’s say you’re our Anonymous submitter, and find the following block of code. Once upon a time, this block of code enforced some mildly complicated rules about what dates were valid to pick for a dashboard display.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-16

Questioning Existence

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-11

Michael got a customer call, from a PHP system his company had put together four years ago. He pulled up the code, which thankfully was actually up to date in source control, and tried to get a grasp of what the system does.

There, he discovered a… unique way to define functions in PHP:

19 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-12

Swap the Workaround

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-07-05

Blane D is responsible for loading data into a Vertica 8.1 database for analysis. Vertica is a distributed, column-oriented store, for data-warehousing applications, and its driver has certain quirks.

For example, a common task that you might need to perform is swapping storage partitions around between tables to facilitate bulk data-loading. Thus, there is a SWAP_PARTITIONS_BETWEEN_TABLES() stored procedure. Unfortunately, if you call this function from within a prepared statement, one of two things will happen: the individual node handling the request will crash, or the entire cluster will crash.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-08

Classic WTF: When the Query String is Just Not Enough

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2017-07-03

It's a holiday weekend in the US, as as we prepare for the 4th of July, we have some query strings that are worth understanding. (original)--Remy

As Stephen A.'s client was walking him through their ASP.NET site, Stephen noticed a rather odd URL scheme. Instead of using the standard Query String -- i.e., http://their.site/Products/?ID=2 -- theirs used some form of URL-rewriting utilizing the "@" symbol in the request name: http://their.site/Products/@ID=2.aspx. Not being an expert on Search Engine Optimization, Stephan had just assumed it had something to do with that.

A few weeks later, when Stephan finally had a chance to take a look at the code, he noticed something rather different...

15 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-04

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