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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
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Consultant Conversions - The Daily WTF
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.
Halfway to a Date - The Daily WTF
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:
Secret Horror - The Daily WTF
Casanova Matt swings for the fences. "OKCupid (they don't capitalize the K, but I do, for propriety) must have migrated their match questions through Excel during a recent site revamp. These answers should obviously be 1-2 and 3-4, but maybe I could have 2 with Jan and 4 with Margaret (Mar to friends)."
Brushing Up - The Daily WTF
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; }
Irritants Make Perls - The Daily WTF
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.
Not Impossible - The Daily WTF
Someone online said we run a Mickey Mouse outfit. Angered beyond words, we consulted legal@disney.com and they threatened to find that guy and sue him. So to anyone else who thinks this column is Goofy, you should know that the world's definitive authorities insist that it absolutely is not. But these guys? This website actually is kind of goofy, according to resolutioner Adam R. who crowed "Someone forgot to localize some text for the new year!"
Crossly Joined - The Daily WTF
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.
My Identification - The Daily WTF
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:
Monkeys - The Daily WTF
Happy 2025 to all our readers. I can already tell this year's columns are going to be filled with my (least) favorite form of WTF, the impossible endless gauntlet of flaming password hurdles to jump over or crawl under. Please comment if you know why this week's column has this title and why it doesn't have the title Swordfish. Peter G. starts off our new year of password maladies with a complaint that is almost poetic. "Between desire and reality. Between fact and breakfast. Between 8 and -6:00. Madness lies, lies, lies..."
Y2K25 - The Daily WTF
Twenty five years ago today, the world breathed a collective sight of relief when nothing particularly interesting happened. Many days begin with not much interesting happening, but January 1st, 2000 was notable for not being the end of the world. I'm of course discussing the infamous Y2K bug. We all know the story: many legacy systems were storing dates with two digits- 80 not 1980, and thus were going to fail dramatically when handling 00- is that 1900 or 2000?
Best of 2024: Lowering the Rent Floor - The Daily WTF
Businesses always want to save money. But boy, they can sometimes come up with some hare-brained ways of doing it. Original --Remy Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish surrounded by much larger fish, and the larger fish were hungry. Gordon was their primary IT person. He managed a farm of VAXes and other minicomputers, which geologists used to do complicated models to predict where oil might be found. In terms of utilization, the computer room was arguably the most efficient space in the company: those computers may have been expensive, but they were burning 24/7 to find more oil to extract.
Best of 2024: Check Your Email - The Daily WTF
As we recap some of the best moments of the year, make sure you check this report, which is very important, so important the entire company has to stop what it's doing. Original. --Remy Branon's boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency. "Did we change anything this weekend?"
Best of 2024: A Bit About the HP3000 - The Daily WTF
As we enter that little gap between Christmas and New Year's, we explore some of the highlights of 2024. We start with this historical computing story. And unlike the subject, this shipped ready to read (and reprint). --Remy Today's anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn't the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we'll get to the code, but there's so much more to the story. Our submitter, let's call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. "Mini", of course, meant "refrigerator sized".
Killing Time - The Daily WTF
The Hatter was framed! He didn't even do it! Nil Corpus Delecti, et cetera. Yet Yitz O. , up to some kind of skullduggery, observed a spacetime oddity. "When trying to compare some results from a GetOrders call via the ebay api, I noticed something weird was happening with the DateTimes in the response. The attached is 3 calls to get the same order, made in quick succession. The millisecond part of all the DateTimes matched the millisecond part of the *current* time (which you can see in the TimeStamp field. I assume it's because they rolled their own DateTime functionality and are Getting a UTC time by subtracting the difference between the local time and the UTC time, and one of those values doesn't have the millisecond value in it, but it's the ebay api so who knows." Undoubtedly a bug that nobody ever noticed because they probably just ignore the millis altogether.
Christmas in the Server Room 2: A New Batch - The Daily WTF
Last year, we spent our Christmas looking at some Christmas movies and specials, and rated them based on the accuracy of their portrayal of the IT industry. We're going to continue with that this year. Just like last year, we'll rate things based on a number of floppy disks- 💾💾💾💾💾 means it's as accurate as Office Space, whereas 💾 puts it someplace down around Superman III. Gremlins Technology has conquered the world, but none of it actually works. As Mr. Futterman (played by the classic character actor Dick Miller) points out: they've all got gremlins in them. Except, thanks to a goofy dad's last minute Christmas gift and some careless 80s teens, the gremlins aren't just taking over technology, but the entire town with their goofy violence.
Tracking Time - The Daily WTF
Mihail was excited when, many years ago, he was invited to work for a local company. At the time, he was in college, so getting real-world experience (and a real-world paycheck) sounded great. It was a small company, with only a handful of developers. The excitement didn't last long, as Mihail quickly learned what the project was: parsing commit messages in source control and generating a report of how many hours a developer worked on any given task. It was a timesheet tracking application, but built on commit messages.
Empty Reasoning - The Daily WTF
Rachel worked on a system which collected data about children, provided by parents and medical professionals. There was one bug that drew a lot of fire: no one could report the age of a child as less than one. That was a problem, as for most of their users, child ages are zero-indexed. One of the devs picked up the bug, made a change, and went on to the next bug. This was the fix:
Zero Competence - The Daily WTF
Michael had a co-worker who was new to the team. As such, there was definitely an expected ramp-up time. But this new developer got that ramp up time, and still wasn't performing. Worse, they ended up dragging down the entire team, as they'd go off, write a bunch of code, end up in a situation that they couldn't understand why nothing was working, and then beg for help. For example, this dev was tasked with adding timestamps to a set of logging messages. The logs had started as simple "print" debugging messages, but had grown in complexity and it was time to treat them like real logging.
One Month - The Daily WTF
Joseph sends us a tried and true classic: bad date handling code, in JavaScript. We've all seen so much bad date handling code that it takes something special to make me do the "confused dog" head tilt. var months=new Array(13); months[1]='January'; months[2]='February'; months[3]='March'; months[4]='April'; months[5]='May'; months[6]='June'; months[7]='July'; months[8]='August'; months[9]='September'; months[10]='October'; months[11]='November'; months[12]='December'; var time=new Date(); var lmonth=months[time.getMonth() + 1]; var date=time.getDate(); var year=time.getFullYear(); document.write(lmonth + ' '); document.write(date + ', ' + year);
A Little Extra Padding - The Daily WTF
Today's anonymous submitter supplies us with a classic antipattern: padding via switch: string TransactionOrder = (string)dr["TransactionOrder"].ToString().Trim(); switch (TransactionOrder.Length) { case 1: TransactionOrder = "000" + TransactionOrder; break; case 2: TransactionOrder = "00" + TransactionOrder; break; case 3: TransactionOrder = "0" + TransactionOrder; break; default: TransactionOrder = TransactionOrder; break; }
Ready Xor Not - The Daily WTF
Phil's company hired a contractor. It was the typical overseas arrangement: bundle up a pile of work, send it off to another timezone, receive back terrible code, push back during code review, then the whole thing blows up when the contracting company pushes back about how while the code review is in the contract if you're going to be such sticklers about it, they'll never deliver, and then management steps in and says, "Just keep the code review to style comments," and then it ends up not mattering anyway because the contractor assigned to the contract leaves for another contracting company, and management opts to use the remaining billable hours for a new feature instead of finishing the inflight work, so you inherit a half-finished pile of trash and somehow have to make it work. Like I said, pretty standard stuff.
While This Works - The Daily WTF
Rob's co-worker needed to write a loop that iterated across every element in an array. This very common problem, and you'd imagine that a developer would use one of the many common solutions to this problem. The language, in this case, is JavaScript, which has many possible options for iterating across an array. Perhaps that buffet of possible options was too daunting. Perhaps the developer thought to themselves, "a for each loop is easy mode, I'm a 10x programmer, and I want a 10x solution!" Or perhaps they just didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Enterprise Code Coverage - The Daily WTF
Alice has the dubious pleasure of working with SalesForce. Management wants to make sure that any code is well tested, so they've set a requirement that all deployed code needs 75% code coverage. Unfortunately, properly configuring a code coverage tool is too hard, so someone came up with a delightful solution: just count how many lines are in your tests and how many lines are in your code, and make sure that your tests make up 75% of the total codebase. Given those metrics, someone added this test:
Doubled Daniel - The Daily WTF
This week, a double dose of Daniel D. First he shared a lesson he titled "Offer you can't refuse a.k.a. Falsehood programmers believe about prices" explaining "Some programmers believe that new prices per month (when paid annually) are always better then the old ones (when paid monthly). Only this time they have forgotten their long-time clients on legacy packages."
On VVVacation - The Daily WTF
As often happens, Luka started some work but didn't get it across the finish line before a scheduled vacation. No problem: just hand it off to another experienced developer. Luka went off for a nice holiday, the other developer hammered away at code, and when Luka came back, there was this lovely method already merged to production, sitting and waiting:
Layered Like Spaghetti - The Daily WTF
"We use a three tier architecture," said the tech lead on Cristian's new team. "It helps us keep concerns separated." This statement, as it turned out, was half true. They did divide the application into three tiers- a "database layer", a "business layer", and a "presentation layer". The "database layer" was a bunch of Java classes. The "business layer" was a collection of Servlets. And the "presentation layer" was a pile of JSP files.
A Pair of Loops - The Daily WTF
Alexandra inherited a codebase that, if we're being kind, could be called "verbose". Individual functions routinely cross into multiple thousands of lines, with the longest single function hitting 4,000 lines of code. Very little of this is because the problems being solved are complicated, and much more of it is because people don't understand how anything works.
It Figures - The Daily WTF
...or actually, it doesn't. A few fans found figures that just didn't add up. Here they are. Steven J Pemberton deserves full credit for this finding. "My bank helpfully reminds me when it's time to pay my bill, and normally has no problem getting it right. But this month, the message sent Today 08:02, telling me I had to pay by tomorrow 21-Nov was sent on... 21-Nov. The amount I owed was missing the decimal point. They then apologised for freaking me out, but got that wrong too, by not replacing the placeholder for the amount I really needed to pay. "
Classic WTF: Documentation by Sticky Note - The Daily WTF
Today is holiday in the US, where we celebrate a cosplay version of history with big meals and getting frustrated with our family. It's also a day where we are thankful- usually to not be at work, but also, thankful to not work with Brad. Original --Remy Anita parked outside the converted garage, the printed graphic reading Global Entertainment Strategies (GES) above it. When the owner, an old man named Brad, had offered her a position after spotting her in a student computer lab, she thought he was crazy, but a background check confirmed everything he said. Now she wondered if her first intuition was correct. “Anita, welcome!” Brad seemed to bounce like a toddler as he showed Anita inside. The walls of the converted garage were bare drywall; the wall-mounted AC unit rattled and spat in the corner. In three corners of the office sat discount computer desks. Walls partitioned off Brad’s office in the fourth corner.
What a More And - The Daily WTF
Today, we're going to start with the comment before the method. /** * The topology type of primitives to render. (optional)<br> * Default: 4<br> * Valid values: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] * * @param mode The mode to set * @throws IllegalArgumentException If the given value does not meet * the given constraints * */
Hall of Mirrors - The Daily WTF
Robert was diagnosing a problem in a reporting module. The application code ran a fairly simple query- SELECT field1, field2, field3 FROM report_table- so he foolishly assumed that it would be easy to understand the problem. Of course, the "table" driving the report wasn't actually a table, it was a view in the database. Most of our readers are familiar with how views work, but for those who have had been corrupted by NoSQL databases: database views are great- take a query you run often, and create it as an object in the database: