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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
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An Argument With QA - The Daily WTF
Markus does QA, and this means writing automated tests which wrap around the code written by developers. Mostly this is a "black box" situation, where Markus doesn't look at the code, and instead goes by the interface and the requirements. Sometimes, though, he does look at the code, and wishes he hadn't. Today's snippet comes from a program which is meant to generate PDF files and then, optionally, email them. There are a few methods we're going to look at, because they invested a surprising amount of code into doing this the wrong way.
Wrap Up Your Date - The Daily WTF
Today, we look at a simple bit of bad code. The badness is not that they're using Oracle, though that's always bad. But it's how they're writing this PL/SQL stored function: FUNCTION CONVERT_STRING_TO_DATE --Public (p_date_string IN Varchar2, p_date_format IN Varchar2 DEFAULT c_date_format) Return Date AS BEGIN If p_date_string Is Null Then Return Null; Else Return To_Date(p_date_string, p_date_format); End If; END; -- FUNCTION CONVERT_STRING_DATE
The Sales Target - The Daily WTF
The end of the quarter was approaching, and dark clouds were gathering in the C-suite. While they were trying to be tight lipped about it, the scuttlebutt was flowing freely. Initech had missed major sales targets, and not just by a few percentage points, but by an order of magnitude. Heads were going to roll.
An Alerting Validation - The Daily WTF
There are things which are true. Regular expressions frequently perform badly. They're hard to read. Email addresses are not actually regular languages, and thus can't truly be validated (in all their many possible forms) by a pure regex. These are true. It's also true that a simple regex can get you most of the way there.
Well Done - The Daily WTF
The title of this week's column is making me hungry. To start off our WTFreitag, Reinier B. complains "I did not specify my gender since it's completely irrelevant when ordering a skateboard for my daughter. That does not mean it is correct to address me as Dear Not specified." I wonder (sincerely) if there is a common German-language personal letter greeting for "Dear somebody of unknown gender". I don't think there is one for English. "To Whom It May Concern" is probably the best we can do.
Allowed Savings - The Daily WTF
The CEO of Delia's company retired. They were an old hand in the industry, the kind of person who worked their way up and had an engineering background, and while the staff loved them, the shareholders were less than pleased, because the company was profitable, but not obscenely so. So the next CEO was a McKinsey-approved MBA who had one mission: cut costs. Out went the senior devs, and much of the managers. Anyone who was product or customer focused followed quickly behind. What remained were a few managers handpicked by the new CEO and a slew of junior engineers- and Pierre.
Uniquely Expressed - The Daily WTF
Most of us, when generating a UUID, will reach for a library to do it. Even a UUIDv4, which is just a random number, presents challenges: doing randomness correctly is hard, and certain bits within the UUID are reserved for metadata about what kind of UUID we're generating. But Gretchen's co-worker didn't reach for a library. What they did reach for was… regular expressions?
What a Character - The Daily WTF
Python's "batteries included" approach means that a lot of common tasks have high-level convenience functions for them. For example, if you want to read all the lines from a file into an array (list, in Python), you could do something like: with open(filename) as f: lines = f.readlines()
Dash It All - The Daily WTF
Because we still have the NWS, I learned that "A winter storm will continue to bring areas of heavy snow and ice from the Great Lakes through New England today into tonight." I'm staying put, and apparently so is Dave L.'s delivery driver. Dave L. imagines the thoughts of this driver who clearly turned around and headed straight home. "Oh, d'ya mean I've got to take these parcels somewhere!? in this weather!? I can't just bring them back?"
Double Checking - The Daily WTF
Abdoullah sends us this little blob of C#, which maybe isn't a full-on WTF, but certainly made me chuckle. if (file!= null) { if (file.name.StartsWith(userName)) { if (file.name.StartsWith(userName)) { url = string.Format(FILE_LINK, file.itemId, file.name); break; } } }
Walking the DOGE - The Daily WTF
One thing I've learned by going through our reader submissions over the years is that WTFs never start with just one mistake. They're a compounding sequence of systemic failures. When we have a "bad boss" story, where an incompetent bully puts an equally incompetent sycophant in charge of a project, it's never just about the bad boss- it's about the system that put the bad boss in that position. For every "Brillant" programmer, there's a whole slew of checkpoints which should have stopped them before they went too far. With all that in mind, today we're doing a news roundup about the worst boss of them all, the avatar of Dunning-Kruger, Elon Musk. Because over the past month, a lot has happened, and there are enough software and IT related WTFs that I need to talk about them.
On Deep Background - The Daily WTF
Andrew worked with Stuart. Stuart was one of those developers who didn't talk to anyone except to complain about how stupid management was, or how stupid the other developers were. Stuart was also the kind of person who would suddenly go on a tear, write three thousand lines of code in an evening, and then submit an pull request. He wouldn't respond to PR comments, however, and just wait until management needed the feature merged badly enough that someone said, "just approve it so we can move on." .comment {border: none;} int iDisplayFlags = objectProps.DisplayInfo.BackgroundPrintFlags; bool bForceBackgroundOn = false; bool bForceBackgroundOff = false; // Can't use _displayTypeID because it will always be 21 since text displays as image if (_fileTypeID == 11) // TEXT { if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1008) != 0) // Text Background is required { bForceBackgroundOn = true; } else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1001) != 0) // Text Background is not available { bForceBackgroundOff = true; } } else if (_displayTypeID == 21) // IMAGE { if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1200) != 0) // Image Background is required { bForceBackgroundOn = true; } else if ((iDisplayFlags & 0x1040) != 0) // Image Background is not available { bForceBackgroundOff = true; } } bool useBackground = bForceBackgroundOn; // If an object does not have an Background and we try to use it, bad things happen. // So we check to see if we really have an Background, if not we don't want to try and use it if (!useBackground && objectProps.DisplayInfo.Background) { useBackground = Convert.ToBoolean(BackgroundShown); } if (bForceBackgroundOff) { useBackground = false; }
No Limits on Repetition - The Daily WTF
Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company. Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.
Not Exactly Gems - The Daily WTF
Sammy's company "jumped on the Ruby on Rails bandwagon since there was one on which to jump", and are still very much a Rails shop. The company has been around for thirty years, and in that time has seen plenty of ups and downs. During one of those "ups", management decided they needed to scale up, both in terms of staffing and in terms of client base- so they hired an offshore team to promote international business and add to their staffing. A "down" followed not long after, and the offshore team was disbanded. So Sammy inherited the code.
Artificial Average Intelligence - The Daily WTF
I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of AI WTFerry at this site for a while, and fewer stupid online sales copy booboos. For today, here we go: Jet-setter Stewart wants to sell a pound, but he's going to have to cover some ground first. "Looks like Google are trying very hard to encourage me to stop using their search engine. Perhaps they want me to use chatGPT? I just can't fathom how it got this so wrong."
Whitespace: A Frontier - The Daily WTF
Tim has been working on a large C++ project which has been around for many, many years. It's a tool built for, in Tim's words, "an esoteric field", and most of the developers over the past 30 years have been PhD students. This particular representative line is present with its original whitespace, and the original variable names. It has been in the code base since 2010.
Retry Fail - The Daily WTF
Decreasingly hungry thrillseeker Weaponized Fun has second thoughts about the risk to which they're willing to expose their palate. "In addition to Budget Bytes mailing list not knowing who I am, I'm not sure they know what they're making. I'm having a hard time telling whether 'New Recipe 1' sounds more enticing than 'New Recipe 3.' I sure hope they remembered the ingredients."
Does This Spec Turn You On? - The Daily WTF
I'm a JSON curmudgeon, in that I think that its type-system, inherited from JavaScript, is bad. It's a limited vocabulary of types, and it forces developers to play odd games of convention. For example, because it lacks any sort of date type, you either have to explode your date out as a sub-dictionary (arguably, the "right" approach) or do what most people do- use an ISO formatted string as your date. The latter version requires you to attempt to parse the sting to validate the data, but validating JSON is a whole thing anyway. But, enough about me being old and cranky. Do you know one type JSON supports? Boolean values.
The Big Refactoring Update - The Daily WTF
Today's anonymous submitter spent a few weeks feeling pretty good about themselves. You see, they'd inherited a gigantic and complex pile of code, an application spread out across 15 backend servers, theoretically organized into "modules" and "microservices" but in reality was a big ball of mud. And after a long and arduous process, they'd dug through that ball of mud and managed to delete 190 files, totaling 30,000 lines of code. That was fully 2/3rds of the total codebase, gone- and yet the tests continued to pass, the application continued to run, and everyone was just much happier with it. Two weeks later, a new ticket comes in: users are getting a 403 error when trying to access the "User Update" screen. Our submitter has seen a lot of these tickets, and it almost always means that the user's permissions are misconfigured. It's an easy fix, and not a code problem.
Contains Bad Choices - The Daily WTF
Paul's co-worker needed to manage some data in a tree. To do that, they wrote this Java function: private static boolean existsFather(ArrayList<Integer> fatherFolder, Integer fatherId) { for (Integer father : fatherFolder) { if (father.equals(fatherId)) return true; } return false; }
Identified the Problem - The Daily WTF
Denise's company formed a new team. They had a lot of low-quality legacy code, and it had gotten where it was, in terms of quality, because the company had no real policy or procedures which encouraged good code. "If it works, it ships," was basically the motto. They wanted to change that, and the first step was creating a new software team to kick of green-field projects with an eye towards software craftsmanship. Enter Jack. Jack was the technical lead, and Jack had a vision of good software. This started with banning ORM-generated database models. But it also didn't involve writing raw SQL either- Jack hand-forged their tables with the Visual Table Designer feature of SQL Server Management Studio.
Stripped of Magic - The Daily WTF
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.
Ticking Toks and Expertise - The Daily WTF
Knowing the kinds of readers we have here, I strongly suspect that if you drew a Venn diagram of "TDWTF Readers" and "TikTok Users" those circles wouldn't overlap at all. But TikTok is in the news, and because my partner uses TikTok, I'm getting second hand smoke of all of this, I think there's some interesting things to talk about here. If you've been avoiding this news, good for you. For a long recap, Ars can bring up up to date.. But as a quick recap: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is based in China, and subject to Chinese laws. TikTok, like every other social media company, is basically spyware, tracking your behavior to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Over the past few years, all three branches of the US government have decided that the "Chinese ownership" is the problem here (not so much the spying), and passed a law to ban it unless a US company buys it. The whole thing has turned into an idiotic political football, with Biden saying that his waning days of the Presidency wouldn't enforce the ban anyway, and then the whole thing turns into a Trumpist political football as the incoming President is playing Calvinball and making decrees that he did not (at the time) have any authority to make in the first place.
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.
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)."
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:
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.