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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
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The Middle(ware) Child - The Daily WTF
Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but—for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness—they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back. Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.
Another One Rides the Bus - The Daily WTF
"Toledo is on Earth, Adrian must be on Venus," remarks Russell M. , explaining "This one's from weather.gov. Note that Adrian is 28 million miles away from Toledo. Being raised in Toledo, Michigan did feel like another world sometimes, but this is something else." Even Toledo itself is a good bit distant from Toledo. Definitely a long walk.
The XML Dating Service - The Daily WTF
One of the endless struggles in writing reusable API endpoints is creating useful schemas to describe them. Each new serialization format comes up with new ways to express your constraints, each with their own quirks and footguns and absolute trainwrecks. Maarten has the "pleasure" of consuming an XML-based API, provided by a third party. It comes with an XML schema, for validation. Now, the XML Schema Language has a large number of validators built in. For example, if you want to restrict a field to being a date, you can mark it's type as xsd:date. This will enforce a YYYY-MM-DD format on the data.
Off Color - The Daily WTF
Carolyn inherited a somewhat old project that had been initiated by a "rockstar" developer, and then passed to developer after developer over the years. They burned through rockstars faster than Spinal Tap goes through drummers. The result is gems like this: private void init(){ ResourceHelper rh = new ResourceHelper(); for ( int i = 0; i < 12; i++) { months[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".long"); months_s[i] = rh.getResource("calendar."+monthkeys[i]+".short"); } StaticData data = SomeService.current().getStaticData(); this.bankHolidayList = data.getBankHolidayList(); colors.put("#dddddd", "#dddddd"); colors.put("#cccccc", "#cccccc"); colors.put("#e6e6e6", "#e6e6e6"); colors.put("#ff0000", "#ffcccc"); colors.put("#ffff00", "#ffffcc"); colors.put("#00ff00", "#ccffcc"); colors.put("#5050ff", "#ccccff"); colors.put("#aa0000", "#ff9999"); colors.put("#ff8000", "#ffcc99"); colors.put("#99ff99", "#ccffcc"); colors.put("#ffcc99", "#ffffcc"); colors.put("#ff9966", "#ffcc99"); colors.put("#00c040", "#99cc99"); colors.put("#aadddd", "#ccffff"); colors.put("#e0e040", "#ffff99"); colors.put("#6699ff", "#99ccff"); }
All Locked Up - The Daily WTF
Dan was using a third-party database which provided a PHP API. At one point, Dan was running into an issue where he actually needed locks on the database. Fortunately for him, the vendor documentation told him that there was a method called obtainRowLock. obtainRowLock($table, $where) - Attempt to lock a row, will escalate and lock the table if row locking is not supported, will escalate and lock the database if table locking is not supported; returns true on success, false on failure $table - name of table to lock $where - WHERE clause to define rows, ex: "WHERE id=52". If left empty, function will assume a table lock
Better Nate Than Lever - The Daily WTF
Happy Friday. For those of us in America, today is a political holiday. But let's avoid politics for the moment. Here's a few more wtfs. "Error messages are hard," sums Ben Holzman , mock-replying "Your new puzzle games are fun, LinkedIn, but your error messages need a little work…"
The Last Last Name - The Daily WTF
Sometimes, you see some code which is perfectly harmless, but illustrates an incredibly dangerous person behind them. The code isn't good, but it isn't bad in any meaningful way, but they were written by a cocaine addled pomeranian behind the controls of a bulldozer: it's full of energy, doesn't know exactly what's going on, and at some point, it's going to hit something important. Such is the code which Román sends us.
And Config - The Daily WTF
It's not unusual to store format templates in your application configuration files. I'd argue it's probably a good and wise thing to do. But Phillip inherited a C# application from a developer woh "abandoned" it, and there were some choices in there. <appSettings> <add key="xxxurl" value="[http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx/]http://{1}:7777/pls/xxx/p_pristjek?i_type=MK3000{0}i_ean={3}{0}i_style=http://{2}/Content/{0}i_red=http://{2}/start.aspx"/> </appSettings>
It's Not Wrong to Say We're Equal - The Daily WTF
Aaron was debugging some C# code, and while this wasn't the source of the bug, it annoyed him enough to send it to us. protected override int DoCompare(Item item1, Item item2) { try { DateTime thisDate = ((DateField)item1.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime; DateTime thatDate = ((DateField)item2.Fields["Create Date"]).DateTime; return thatDate.CompareTo(thisDate); } catch (Exception) { return 0; // Sorry, ran out of budget! } }
A Highly Paid Field - The Daily WTF
In ancient times, Rob's employer didn't have its own computer; it rented time on a mid-range computer and ran all its jobs using batch processing in COBOL. And in those ancient times, these stone tools were just fine. But computing got more and more important, and the costs for renting time kept going up and up, so they eventually bought their own AS/400. And that meant someone needed to migrate all of their COBOL to RPG. And management knew what you do for those kinds of conversions: higher a Highly Paid Consultant.
Button, button, who's got the button? - The Daily WTF
Wikipedia describes the (very old) English children's game. I wonder if there's a similar game in Germany. In any case, the Worcester News is definitely confused about how this game is played. Martin I. explains "This is a cookie acceptance dialog. It seems to struggle with labeling the buttons when the user's browser is not set to English ..."
Classic WTF: When it's OK to GOTO - The Daily WTF
Where did you GOTO on your vacation? Nowhere. GOTO is considered harmful. Original --Remy Everybody knows that you should never use "goto" statements. Well, except in one or two rare circumstances that you won't come across anyway. But even when you do come across those situations, they're usually "mirage cases" where there's no need to "goto" anyway. Kinda like today's example, written by Jonathan Rockway's colleague. Of course, the irony here is that the author likely tried to use "continue" as his label, but was forced to abbreviate it to "cont" in order to skirt compiler "reserved words" errors.
Classic WTF: Take the Bus - The Daily WTF
It's summer break time, here at TDWTF, and based on this classic, we shouldn't be traveling by bus. Original --Remy Rachel started working as a web developer for the local bus company. The job made her feel young, since the buses, the IT infrastructure, and most of their back-office code was older than she was. The bus fare-boxes were cash only, and while you could buy a monthly pass, it was just a little cardboard slip that you showed the driver. Their accounting system ran on a mainframe, their garage management software was a 16-bit DOS application. Email ran on an Exchange 5.5 server.
Classic WTF: The Core Launcher - The Daily WTF
As our vacation continues, we might want to maybe play some video games. What could possibly go wrong? Original --Remy “You R haccking files on my computer~!!!” Charles Carmichael read in a newly-submitted support ticket, “this is illigle and I will sue your whoal compiny. But first I will tell every1 nevar to buy youre stupid game agin.” The bizarre spelling and vague threats were par for the course. After all, when you market and sell a game to the general public, you can expect a certain percentage of bizarre and vague customer communications. When that game is a popular MMPORG (no, not that one), that percentage tends to hover around the majority.
Colophony - The Daily WTF
Just a quick note this week: I discovered that many people have been sending in submissions for this column and designating them for CodeSod by mistakes. Consequently, there is an immense backlog of material from which to choose. An abundance of riches! We will be seeing some older items in the future. For today, a collection of colons: Bill NoLastName , giving away clues to his banking security questions online: "If had known there was a limit, I would have changed my daughter's middle name. I've been caught by this before - my dad has only a middle initial (no middle name)."
Using the Old Bean - The Daily WTF
If you write a lot of Java, you're going to end up writing a lot of getters and setters. Without debating the merits of loads of getters and setters versus bare properties, ideally, getters and setters are the easiest code to write. Many IDEs will just generate them for you! How can you screw up getters and setters? Well, Dave found someone who could.
A Second Date - The Daily WTF
Ah, bad date handling. We've all seen it. We all know it. So when Lorenzo sent us this C# function, we almost ignored it: private string GetTimeStamp(DateTime param) { string retDate = param.Year.ToString() + "-"; if (param.Month < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Month.ToString() + "-"; else retDate = retDate + param.Month.ToString() + "-"; if (param.Day < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Day.ToString() + " "; else retDate = retDate + param.Day.ToString() + " "; if (param.Hour < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Hour.ToString() + ":"; else retDate = retDate + param.Hour.ToString() + ":"; if (param.Minute < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Minute.ToString() + ":"; else retDate = retDate + param.Minute.ToString() + ":"; if (param.Second < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Second.ToString() + "."; else retDate = retDate + param.Second.ToString() + "."; if (param.Millisecond < 10) retDate = retDate + "0" + param.Millisecond.ToString(); else retDate = retDate + param.Millisecond.ToString(); return retDate; }
Squaring the Circle - The Daily WTF
Time Lord Jason H. has lost control of his calendar. "This is from my credit card company. A major company you have definitely heard of and depending upon the size of the area you live in, they may even have a bank branch near you. I've reloaded the page and clicked the sort button multiple times to order the rows by date in both ascending and descending order. It always ends up the same. May 17th and 18th happened twice, but not in the expected order." I must say that it is more fun when we know who they are.
Credit Card Sins - The Daily WTF
Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Carmen, embarked on her IT career with an up-and-coming firm that developed and managed eCommerce websites for their clients. After her new boss Russell walked her around the small office and introduced her to a handful of coworkers, he led her back to his desk to discuss her first project. Carmen brought her laptop along and sat down across from Russell, poised to take notes. Russell explained that their newest client, Sharon, taught CPR classes. She wanted her customers to be able to pay and sign up for classes online. She also wanted the ability to charge customers a fee in case they cancelled on her.
Gridding My Teeth - The Daily WTF
Dan's co-workers like passing around TDWTF stories, mostly because seeing code worse than what they're writing makes them feel less bad about how often they end up hacking things together. One day, a co-worker told Dan: "Hey, I think I found something for that website with the bad code stories!"
The Pirate's Code - The Daily WTF
We've talked about ASP .Net WebForms in the past. In this style of development, everything was event driven: click a button, and the browser sends an HTTP request to the server which triggers a series of events, including a "Button Click" event, and renders a new page. When ASP .Net launched, one of the "features" was a lazy repaint in browsers which supported it (aka, Internet Explorer), where you'd click the button, the page would render on the server, download, and then the browser would repaint only the changed areas, making it feel more like a desktop application, albeit a laggy one.
A Real POS Report - The Daily WTF
Eddie's company hired a Highly Paid Consultant to help them retool their systems for a major upgrade. Of course, the HPC needed more and more time, and the project ran later and later and ended up wildly over budget, so the HPC had to be released, and Eddie inherited the code. What followed was a massive crunch to try and hit absolutely hard delivery dates. Management didn't want their team "rewriting" the expensive code they'd already paid for, they just wanted "quick fixes" to get it live. Obviously, the HPC's code must be better than theirs, right?
There's No Place Like - The Daily WTF
... London! This week, we're showcasing some multiple submissions from two regular participants who fell into the theme. Everybody else is just going to have to wait for their turn next week. Frist up it's Daniel D. "I wanted to see events for the dates I would be in London. Is Skiddle (the website in question) telling me I should come to London more often?" They're certainly being very generous with their interpretation of dates.
Integral to a Database Read - The Daily WTF
One of the key points of confusion for people unfamiliar with Java is the distinction between true object types, like Integer, and "primitive" types, like int. This is made worse by the collection types, like ArrayList, which needs to hold a true object type, but can't hold a primitive. A generic ArrayList<Integer> is valid, but ArrayList<int> won't compile. Fortunately for everyone, Java automatically "boxes" types- at least since Java 5, way back in 2004- so integerList.add(5) and int n = integerList.get(0) will both work just fine. Somebody should have told that to Alice's co-worker, who spends a lot of code to do some type gymnastics that they shouldn't have:
Continuous Installation - The Daily WTF
A recent code-review on a new build pipeline got Sandra's attention (previously). The normally responsible and reliable developer responsible for the commit included this in their Jenkinsfile: sh ''' if ! command -v yamllint &> /dev/null; then if command -v apt-get &> /dev/null; then apt-get update && apt-get install -y yamllint elif command -v apk &> /dev/null; then apk add --no-cache yamllint elif command -v pip3 &> /dev/null; then pip3 install --break-system-packages yamllint fi fi find . -name '*.yaml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true find . -name '*.yml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true '''
Making a Pass of Yourself - The Daily WTF
Frederico planned to celebrate the new year with friends at the exotic international tourist haven of Molvania. When visiting the area, one could buy and use a MolvaPass (The Most Passive Way About Town!) for free or discounted access to cultural sites, public transit, and more. MolvaPasses were available for 3, 7, or 365 days, and could be bought in advance and activated later.
Recasting the Team - The Daily WTF
Nina's team has a new developer on the team. They're not a junior developer, though Nina wishes they could replace this developer with a junior. Inexperience is better than whatever this Java code is. Object[] test = (Object[]) options; List<SchedulePlatform> schedulePlatformList = (List<SchedulePlatform>)((Object[])options)[0]; List<TableColumn> visibleTableCols = (List<TableColumn>)((Object[])options)[1];
The Missing Link of Ignorance - The Daily WTF
Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:
Classic WTF: Superhero Wanted - The Daily WTF
It's a holiday in the US today, so we're taking a long weekend. We flip back to a classic story of a company wanting to fill 15 different positions by hiring only one person. It's okay, Martin handles the database. Original - Remy A curious email arrived in Phil's Inbox. "Windows Support Engineer required. Must have experience of the following:" and then a long list of Microsoft products. Phil frowned. The location was convenient; the salary was fine, just the list of software seemed somewhat intimidating. Nevertheless, he replied to the agency saying that he was interested in applying for the position.
A Trying Block - The Daily WTF
Mark sends us a very simple Java function which has the job of parsing an integer from a string. Now, you might say, "But Java has a built in for that, Integer.parseInt," and have I got good news for you: they actually used it. It's just everything else they did wrong. private int makeInteger(String s) { int i=0; try { Integer.parseInt(s); } catch (NumberFormatException e) { i=0; return i; } i=Integer.parseInt(s); return i; }
Buff Reading - The Daily WTF
Frank inherited some code that reads URLs from a file, and puts them into a collection. This is a delightfully simple task. What could go wrong? static String[] readFile(String filename) { String record = null; Vector vURLs = new Vector(); int recCnt = 0; try { FileReader fr = new FileReader(filename); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr); record = new String(); while ((record = br.readLine()) != null) { vURLs.add(new String(record)); //System.out.println(recCnt + ": " + vURLs.get(recCnt)); recCnt++; } } catch (IOException e) { // catch possible io errors from readLine() System.out.println("IOException error reading " + filename + " in readURLs()!\n"); e.printStackTrace(); } System.out.println("Reading URLs ...\n"); int arrCnt = 0; String[] sURLs = new String[vURLs.size()]; Enumeration eURLs = vURLs.elements(); for (Enumeration e = vURLs.elements() ; e.hasMoreElements() ;) { sURLs[arrCnt] = (String)e.nextElement(); System.out.println(arrCnt + ": " + sURLs[arrCnt]); arrCnt++; } if (recCnt != arrCnt++) { System.out.println("WARNING: The number of URLs in the input file does not match the number of URLs in the array!\n\n"); } return sURLs; } // end of readFile()
What the FFFFFFFF - The Daily WTF
Combining Java with lower-level bit manipulations is asking for trouble- not because the language is inadequate to the task, but because so many of the developers who work in Java are so used to working at a high level they might not quite "get" what they need to do. Victor inherited one such project, which used bitmasks and bitwise operations a great deal, based on the network protocol it implemented. Here's how the developers responsible created their bitmasks:
Identifying the Representative - The Daily WTF
Kate inherited a system where Java code generates JavaScript (by good old fashioned string concatenation) and embeds it into an output template. The Java code was written by someone who didn't fully understand Java, but JavaScript was also a language they didn't understand, and the resulting unholy mess was buggy and difficult to maintain. Why trying to debug the JavaScript, Kate had to dig through the generated code, which led to this little representative line: