The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Hard SQL Error

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-06-25

Padma was the new guy on the team, and that sucked. When you're the new guy, but you're not new to the field, there's this maddening combination of factors that can make onboarding rough: a combination of not knowing the product well enough to be efficient, but knowing your craft well enough to expect efficiency. After all, if you're a new intern, you can throw back general-purpose tutorials and feel like you're learning new things at least. When you're a senior trying to make sense of your new company's dizzying array of under-documented products? The only way to get that knowledge is by dragging people who are already efficient away from what they're doing to ask.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-28

Wait Low Down

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-06-21

As mentioned previously I’ve been doing a bit of coding for microcontrollers lately. Coming from the world of desktop and web programming, it’s downright revelatory. With no other code running, and no operating system, I can use every cycle on a 16MHz chip, which suddenly seems blazing fast. You might have to worry about hardware interrupts- in fact I had to swap serial connection libraries out because the one we were using misused interrupts and threw of the timing of my process.

And boy, timing is amazing when you’re the only thing running on the CPU. I was controlling some LEDs and if I just went in a smooth ramp from one brightness level to the other, the output would be ugly steps instead of a smooth fade. I had to use a technique called temporal dithering, which is a fancy way of saying “flicker really quickly” and in this case depended on accurate, sub-microsecond timing. This is all new to me.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-15

The Wizard Algorithm

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-20

Password requirements can be complicated. Some minimum and maximum number of characters, alpha and numeric characters, special characters, upper and lower case, change frequency, uniqueness over the last n passwords and different rules for different systems. It's enough to make you revert to a PostIt in your desk drawer to keep track of it all. Some companies have brillant employees who feel that they can do better, and so they create a way to figure out the password for any given computer - so you need to neither remember nor even know it.

Kendall Mfg. Co. (estab. 1827) (3092720143)

History does not show who created the wizard algorithm, or when, or what they were smoking at the time.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-24

The New Guy (Part II): Database Boogaloo

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2018-06-14

When we last left our hero Jesse, he was wading through a quagmire of undocumented bad systems while trying to solve an FTP issue. Several months later, Jesse had things figured out a little better and was starting to feel comfortable in his "System Admin" role. He helped the company join the rest of the world by dumping Windows NT 4.0 and XP. The users whose DNS settings he bungled were now happily utilizing Windows 10 workstations. His web servers were running Windows Server 2016, and the SQL boxes were up to SQL 2016. Plus his nemesis Ralph had since retired. Or died. Nobody knew for sure. But things were good.

Despite all these efforts, there were still several systems that relied on Access 97 haunting him every day. Jesse spent tens of dollars of his own money on well-worn Access 97 programming books to help plug holes in the leaky dike. The A97 Finance system in particular was a complete mess to deal with. There were no clear naming guidelines and table locations were haphazard at best. Stored procedures and functions were scattered between the A97 VBS and the SQL DB. Many views/functions were nested with some going as far as eight layers while others would form temporary tables in A97 then continue to nest.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-25

The Manager Who Knew Everything

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-13

Have you ever worked for/with a manager that knows everything about everything? You know the sort; no matter what the issue, they stubbornly have an answer. It might be wrong, but they have an answer, and no amount of reason, intelligent thought, common sense or hand puppets will make them understand. For those occasions, you need to resort to a metaphorical clue-bat.

A few decades ago, I worked for a place that had a chief security officer who knew everything there was to know about securing their systems. Nothing could get past the policies she had put in place. Nobody could ever come up with any mechanism that could bypass her concrete walls, blockades and insurmountable defenses.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-11

Improv for Programmers: The Internet of Really Bad Things

by Scot Devera in Feature Articles on 2018-06-07

Things might get a little dark in the season (series?) finale of Improv for Programmers, brought to you by Raygun. Remy, Erin, Ciarán and Josh are back, and not only is everything you're about to hear entirely made up on the spot: everything you hear will be a plot point in the next season of Mr. Robot.

Raygun provides a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications.

11 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-08

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