The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Crossroads

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-10

I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor.

-Leila

3 comments - Last comment @ 10:01

A More Civilized Age

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-06

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

23 comments - Last comment @ 10:38

Lose Some Padding

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2026-08-03

Flat-file style databases were designed to fit the constraints of the systems they were running on. You specify your schema in terms of "how many characters in a file we use to store this data", meaning something like this: JOHN SMITH 12343rd StAnytown PA12345 is read in my knowing that the first name field is 8 characters wide, the last name field is 8 characters wide, the street number is 4 digits, and so on.

It's also a terrible schema, and woe to anyone with a long name. But many a mainframe had a similar schema.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-04

Recent Feature Articles

The Crossroads

A More Civilized Age

Lose Some Padding