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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
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Forward Not Found - The Daily WTF
Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um… probably shouldn't have been found. function show_404($page = '') { $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; error_log("Caught 404: $uri"); $redirect_url = ""; switch($uri){ case "/SOMEURL": $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEURL"; break; case "/SOMEOTHERURL": $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEOTHERURL"; break; case "/YETANOTHERURL": $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/YETANOTHERURL"; break; // ... THERE ARE 300 of these ... case "/MOREURLS": $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/MOREURLS"; break; case "/EVENMOREURLS": $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/EVENMOREURLS"; break; } if ($redirect_url){ Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: $redirect_url" ); } else { parent::show_404($page); } }
The Batch Managing Batch File - The Daily WTF
Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux. The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.
A Percentage of Refactoring - The Daily WTF
Joseph was doing a refactoring effort, merging some duplicated functions into one, cleaning up unused Java code that really should have been deleted ages ago, and so on. But buried in that pile of code that needed cleaning up, Joseph found this little bit of code, to validate that an input was a percentage. @Override public Integer validatePercent(final String perc, final int currentPerc){ char[] percProc= perc.toCharArray(); char[] newPerc = new char[perc.length()]; int percent=0; int y=0; if(percProc.length>4){ return -1; } for(int x=0;x<percProc.length;x++){ if(Character.isDigit(percProc[x])){ newPerc[y]=percProc[x]; y++; } } if(y==0){ return -1; } String strPerc=(new String(newPerc)); strPerc=strPerc.trim(); if(strPerc.length()!=0){ percent=Integer.parseInt(strPerc); if(percent<0){ return -1; }else if(percent>100){ return -1; }else if(Integer.parseInt(strPerc)==currentPerc){ return -1; }else{ return Integer.parseInt(strPerc); } }else{ return-1; } }
A Date Next Month - The Daily WTF
We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling. The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."
The Bob Procedure - The Daily WTF
Joe recently worked on a financial system for processing loans. Like many such applications, it started its life many, many years ago. It began as an Oracle Forms application in the 90s. By the late 2000s, Oracle was trying to push people away from forms into their newer tools, like Oracle ApEx (Application Express), but this had the result of pushing people out of Oracle's ecosystem and onto their own web stacks. The application Joe was working on was exactly that. Now, no one was going to migrate off of an Oracle database, especially because 90% of their business logic was wired together out of PL/SQL packages. But they did start using Java for developing their UI, and then at some other point, started using Liquibase for helping them maintain and manage their schema.
The File Transfer - The Daily WTF
SQL Server Information Services is Microsoft's ETL tool. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for describing data flows from sources to sinks, complete with transformations and all sorts of other operations, and is useful for migrating data between databases, linking legacy mainframes into modern databases, or doing what most people seem to need: migrating data into Excel spreadsheets. It's essentially a full-fledged scripting environment, with a focus on data-oriented operations. The various nodes you can drag-and-drop in are database connections, queries, transformations, file system operations, calls to stored procedures, and so on. It even lets you run .NET code inside of SSIS.
A JSON Serializer - The Daily WTF
Carol sends us today's nasty bit of code. It does the thing you should never do: serializes by string munging. public string ToJSON() { double unixTimestamp = ConvertToMillisecondsSinceEpoch(time); string JSONString = "{\"type\":\"" + type + "\",\"data\":{"; foreach (string key in dataDict.Keys) { string value = dataDict[key].ToString(); string valueJSONString; double valueNumber; bool valueBool; if (value.Length > 2 && value[0].Equals('(') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals(')')) //tuples { char[] charArray = value.ToCharArray(); charArray[0] = '['; charArray[charArray.Length - 1] = ']'; if (charArray[charArray.Length - 2].Equals(',')) charArray[charArray.Length - 2] = ' '; valueJSONString = new string(charArray); } else if ((value.Length > 1 && value[0].Equals('{') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals('}')) || (double.TryParse(value, out valueNumber))) //embedded json or numbers { valueJSONString = value; } else if (bool.TryParse(value, out valueBool)) //bools { valueJSONString = value.ToLower(); } else //everything else is a string { valueJSONString = "\"" + value + "\""; } JSONString = JSONString + "\"" + key + "\":" + valueJSONString + ","; } if (dataDict.Count > 0) JSONString = JSONString.Substring(0, JSONString.Length - 1); JSONString = JSONString + "},\"time\":" + unixTimestamp.ToString() + "}"; return JSONString; }
Yes We Have No Bananas - The Daily WTF
There is fire sale on "Test In Production" incidents this week. (Ok, truth is that some of them are a little crusty and stale so we just mark them way down and push them all out at a loss). To be completely fair, testing in production is vitally important. If you didn't do that, the only way you'd know if something is broken is when one of your paying customers finds out. I call that testing in production the expensive way. The only WTFy thing about these is that when you test in production, your customers shouldn't stumble across the messes. "We don't often test, but when we do it's always in production" snarked Brad W. unfairly. "My phone gave its default alert noise mixed with... some sound that made it seem like the phone was damaged. This was the alert that appeared. "
A Unique Mistake - The Daily WTF
Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database. The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.
A Monthly Addition - The Daily WTF
In the ancient times of the late 90s, Bert worked for a software solutions company. It was the kind of company that other companies hired to do software for them, releasing custom applications for each client. Well, "each" client implies more than one client, but in this company's case, they only had one reliable client. One day, the client said, "Hey, we have an application we built to handle scheduling helpdesk workers. Can you take a look at it and fix some problems we've got?" Bert's employer said, "Sure, no problem."
Neither Here nor There - The Daily WTF
... or maybe I should have said both here and there? The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system. "Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."
Tic Tac Whoa - The Daily WTF
Usually, when we have a "Tales from the Interview" we're focused on bad interviewing practices. Today, we're mixing up a "Tales" with a CodeSOD. Today's Anonymous submitter does tech screens at their company. Like most companies do, they give the candidate a simple toy problem, and ask them to solve it. The goal here is not to get the greatest code, but as our submitter puts it, "weed out the jokers".
A Date with Gregory - The Daily WTF
Calendars today may be controlled by a standards body, but that's hardly an inherent fact of timekeeping. Dates and times are arbitrary and we structure them to our convenience. If we rewind to ancient Rome, you had the role of Pontifex Maximus. This was the religious leader of Rome, and since honoring the correct feasts and festivals at the right time was part of the job, it was also the standards body which kept the calendar. It was, ostensibly, not a political position, but there was also no rule that an aspiring politician couldn't hold both that post and a political post, like consul. This was a loophole Julius Caesar ruthlessly exploited; if his political opposition wanted to have an important meeting on a given day, whoops! The signs and portents tell us that we need to have a festival and no work should be done!
Property Flippers - The Daily WTF
Kleyguerth was having a hard time tracking down a bug. A _hasPicked flag was "magically" toggling itself to on. It was a bug introduced in a recent commit, but the commit in question was thousands of lines, and had the helpful comment "Fixed some stuff during the tests". In several places, the TypeScript code checks a property like so:
Contracting Space - The Daily WTF
A ticket came in marked urgent. When users were entering data in the header field, the spaces they were putting in kept getting mangled. This was in production, and had been in production for sometime. Mike P picked up the ticket, and was able to track down the problem to a file called Strings.java. Yes, at some point, someone wrote a bunch of string helper functions and jammed them into a package. Of course, many of the functions were re-implementations of existing functions: reinvented wheels, now available in square.
Pickup Sticklers - The Daily WTF
An Anonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted "As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure. But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"? Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."
Across the 4th Dimension - The Daily WTF
We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling: C_DATE($1) C_STRING(7;$0) C_STRING(3;$currentMonth) C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear) C_INTEGER($month) $currentDay:=String(Day of($1)) $currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay)) $month:=Month of($1) Case of : ($month=1) $currentMonth:="JAN" : ($month=2) $currentMonth:="FEB" : ($month=3) $currentMonth:="MAR" : ($month=4) $currentMonth:="APR" : ($month=5) $currentMonth:="MAY" : ($month=6) $currentMonth:="JUN" : ($month=7) $currentMonth:="JUL" : ($month=8) $currentMonth:="AUG" : ($month=9) $currentMonth:="SEP" : ($month=10) $currentMonth:="OCT" : ($month=11) $currentMonth:="NOV" : ($month=12) $currentMonth:="DEC" End case $currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2) $0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear
High Strung - The Daily WTF
Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers. We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:
One Last ID - The Daily WTF
Chris's company has an unusual deployment. They had a MySQL database hosted on Cloud Provider A. They hired a web development company, which wanted to host their website on Cloud Provider B. Someone said, "Yeah, this makes sense," and wrote the web dev company a sizable check. They app was built, tested, and released, and everyone was happy. Everyone was happy until the first bills came in. They expected the data load for the entire month to be in the gigabytes range, based on their userbase and expected workloads. But for some reason, the data transfer was many terabytes, blowing up their operational budget for the year in a single month.
Identify a Nap - The Daily WTF
Guy picked up a bug ticket. There was a Hiesenbug; sometimes, saving a new entry in the application resulted in a duplicate primary key error, which should never happen. The error was in the message-bus implementation someone else at the company had inner-platformed together, and it didn't take long to understand why it failed.
An Echo In Here in here - The Daily WTF
Tobbi sends us a true confession: they wrote this code. The code we're about to look at is the kind of code that mixes JavaScript and PHP together, using PHP to generate JavaScript code. That's already a terrible anti-pattern, but Tobbi adds another layer to the whole thing.
Brace Yourself - The Daily WTF
Today's representative line is almost too short to be a full line. But I haven't got a category for representative characters, so we'll roll with it. First, though, we need the setup. Brody inherited a massive project for a government organization. It was the kind of code base that had thousands of lines per file, and frequently thousands of lines per function. Almost none of those lines were comments. Almost.
Reduced to a Union - The Daily WTF
The code Clemens M supported worked just fine for ages. And then one day, it broke. It didn't break after a deployment, which implied some other sort of bug. So Clemens dug in, playing the game of "what specific data rows are breaking the UI, and why?" One of the organizational elements of their system was the idea of "zones". I don't know the specifics of the application as a whole, but we can broadly describe it thus:
Functionally, a Date - The Daily WTF
Dates are messy things, full of complicated edge cases and surprising ways for our assumptions to fail. They lack the pure mathematical beauty of other data types, like integers. But that absence doesn't mean we can't apply the beautiful, concise, and simple tools of functional programming to handling dates. I mean, you or I could. J Banana's co-worker seems to struggle a bit with it.
Myopic Focus - The Daily WTF
Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain. Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."
Pretty Little State Machine - The Daily WTF
State machines are a powerful way to organize code. They are, after all, one of the fundamental models of computation. That's pretty good. A well designed state machine can make a complicated problem clear, and easy to understand. Chris, on the other hand, found this one.
Adding to the Argument - The Daily WTF
David G saw a pull request with a surprisingly long thread of comments on it. What was weirder was that the associated ticket was all about adding a single parameter to an existing method. What could be generating that much discussion? How could adding an argument add to an argument?
The Modern Job Hunt: Part 1 - The Daily WTF
Ellis knew she needed a walk after she hurried off of Zoom at the end of the meeting to avoid sobbing in front of the group. She'd just been attending a free online seminar regarding safe job hunting on the Internet. Having been searching since the end of January, Ellis had already picked up plenty of first-hand experience with the modern job market, one rejection at a time. She thought she'd attend the seminar just to see if there were any additional things she wasn't aware of. The seminar had gone well, good information presented in a clear and engaging way. But by the end of it, Ellis was feeling bleak. Goodness gracious, she'd already been slogging through months of this. Hundreds of job applications with nothing to show for it. All of the scams out there, all of the bad actors preying on people desperate for their and their loved ones' survival!
Classic WTF: We Are Not Meatbots! - The Daily WTF
Today's Labor Day in the US, a day where we celebrate workers. Well, some of us. This story from the archives is one of the exceptions. Original. --Remy Sales, as everyone knows, is the mortal enemy of Development. Their goals are opposite, their people are opposite, their tactics are opposite. Even their credos - developers "Make a good product" but sales will "Do anything to get that money" - are at complete odds.
Springs are Optional - The Daily WTF
Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not. This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.