The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Stripped of Magic

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-23

A Representative Line is a short snippet that makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code." A CodeSOD is a longer snippet, which also frequently makes you think, "wow, I'd hate to see the rest of the code," but also is bad in ways that require you to look at the relationship between the lines in the code.

I bring that up, because today's code sample is a long section, but really, it's just a collection of representative lines. Each line in this just makes me die a little on the inside.

15 comments - Last comment @ 12:28

The 5-Digit Session Identifier

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-22

Sawyer was talking with a co-worker about how their unique session IDs got created. The concern was that they were only five characters long, which meant there could easily be collisions.

They started by looking at the random number generation function.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-23

Consultant Conversions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-20

Janet's company had a glut of work, and thus didn't have the staffing required to do it all. It didn't make sense to hire on any new full-time employees, so they went the route of bringing on a few highly paid consultants, specifically ones who specialized in one specific problem: talking to a piece of hardware purchased from a vendor.

The hardware in question was a scientific which communicated over a serial line. This device provided a lot of data that represented decimal values, but that data was not encoded as an IEEE float. Instead, they used two integers- one for the data, and one representing the number of decimal places.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-21

Halfway to a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-16

Roger took on a contract to fix up a PHP website. During the negotiations, he asked some questions about the design, like, "Is it object-oriented or more procedural?" "No, it's PHP," said the developer.

Which about sums it up, I suppose. Have some date handling code:

35 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-21

Brushing Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-15

Keige inherited some code which seems to be part of a drawing application. It can load brush textures from image files- at least, sometimes it can.

static public Brush GetImageBrush(string serviceCode, string imageName, string language)
{
	Brush BorderChannelGroupBrush;
	BitmapImage image = null;

	int point = imageName.LastIndexOf('.');
	string languageImagename = imageName.Substring(0, point) + "-" + language + imageName.Substring(point);

	try
	{
		image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, languageImagename);
	}
	catch { }

	if (image == null)
	{
		try
		{
			image = FrameWork.ServicePageImageUrlOnContentServer(serviceCode, imageName);
		}
		catch { }
	}

	if (image != null)
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = new ImageBrush(image);
	}
	else
	{
		BorderChannelGroupBrush = Brushes.White;
	}
	return BorderChannelGroupBrush;
}

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-20

Irritants Make Perls

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-13

Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.

It didn't go great.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-22

Crossly Joined

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-09

Antonio's team hired some very expensive contractors and consultants to help them build a Java based application. These contractors were very demure, very mindful, about how using ORMs could kill performance.

So they implemented a tool that would let them know any time the Hibernate query generator attempted to perform a cross join.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-14

My Identification

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-08

Bejamin's team needed to generate a unique session ID value that can't easily be guessed. The traditional way of doing this would be to generate cryptographically secure random bytes. Most languages, including PHP, have a solution for doing that.

But you could also do this:

24 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-14

Mr Number

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-06

Ted's company hired a contract team to build an application. The budget eventually ran out without a finished application, so the code the contract team had produced was handed off to Ted's team to finish.

This is an example of the Ruby code Ted inherited:

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-07

intint

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-01-02

Ash's company outsourced to an offshore vendor.

This is an example of what they got back:

10 comments - Last comment @ 2025-01-08

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