The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Recent Feature Articles

Locally Variable

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-10-24

Henrik H was hired by a customer to fix some bugs in their application. The main one was that their C# web app didn't properly track the user's culture settings. Henrik spoke with their internal developer, who originally wrote the application, and was told: "Sometimes the culture name and LCID is out of sync. I don't understand why?"

Well, from that description, Henrik didn't understand either. Why was there a separate name and what the heck was LCID? Why were two variables getting synced? The only answer would be in the code, so Henrik dug in.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-02

Modular Dependencies

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2023-10-04

Many years ago, Valts and his spouse both worked for the same company. The company had an ERP system that started its life as a product back when ERP systems were novel and new. It was written in Delphi, and it was huge- so huge that the company needed to hack the Delphi linker to handle its size.

Well, their company got swallowed up by Initech, and after the buyout, things changed. Valts left, and a few years later so did his spouse. But they kept in touch with their colleagues, so it was over dinner that former co-worker Viktorija related the recent disaster she had stumbled across.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2023-12-02