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The Daily WTF | Curious Perversions in Information Technology - Cheezy
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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()
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:
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:
A Jammed Up Session - The Daily WTF
Andre has inherited a rather antique ASP .Net WebForms application. It's a large one, with many pages in it, but they all follow a certain pattern. Let's see if you can spot it. protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { ArrayList paramsRel = new ArrayList(); paramsRel["Name"] = txtNome.Text; paramsRel["Date"] = txtDate.Text; Session["paramsRel"] = paramsRel; List<Client> clients = Controller.FindClients(); //Some other code }
Exactly a Date - The Daily WTF
Alexandar sends us some C# date handling code. The best thing one can say is that they didn't reinvent any wheels, but that might be worse, because they used the existing wheels to drive right off a cliff. try { var date = DateTime.ParseExact(member.PubDate.ToString(), "M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt", null); objCustomResult.PublishedDate = date; } catch (Exception datEx) { }
itouhhh… - The Daily WTF
Frequently in programming, we can make a tradeoff: use less (or more) CPU in exchange for using more (or less) memory. Lookup tables are a great example: use a big pile of memory to turn complicated calculations into O(1) operations. So, for example, implementing itoa, the C library function for turning an integer into a character array (aka, a string), you could maybe make it more efficient using a lookup table.
Would a Function by Any Other Name Still be WTF? - The Daily WTF
"Don't use exception handling for normal flow control," is generally good advice. But Andy's lead had a PhD in computer science, and with that kind of education, wasn't about to let good advice or best practices tell them what to do. That's why, when they needed to validate inputs, they wrote code C# like this: public static bool IsDecimal(string theValue) { try { Convert.ToDouble(theValue); return true; } catch { return false; } }
Cuts Like a Knife - The Daily WTF
Mike V. shares a personal experience with the broadest version of Poe's Law: "Slashdot articles generally have a humorous quote at the bottom of their articles, but I can't tell if this displayed usage information for the fortune command, which provides humorous quotes, is a joke or a bug." To which I respond with the sharpest version of Hanlon's Razor: never ascribe to intent that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Leap to the Past - The Daily WTF
Early in my career, I had the misfortune of doing a lot of Crystal Reports work. Crystal Reports is another one of those tools that lets non-developer, non-database savvy folks craft reports. Which, like so often happens, means that the users dig themselves incredible holes and need professional help to get back out, because at the end of the day, when the root problem is actually complicated, all the helpful GUI tools in the world can't solve it for you. Michael was in a similar position as I was, but for Michael, there was a five alarm fire. It was the end of the month, and a bunch of monthly sales reports needed to be calculated. One of the big things management expected to see was a year-over-year delta on sales, and they got real cranky if the line didn't go up. If they couldn't even see the line, they went into a full on panic and assumed the sales team was floundering and the company was on the verge of collapse.
AI: The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly - The Daily WTF
…the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right? - Mark Zuckerberg, presumably to one of his three friends Since even the President of the United States is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework and make bonkers social media posts these days, we need to have a talk about AI.
The Big Pictures - The Daily WTF
Loading times for web pages is one of the key metrics we like to tune. Users will put up with a lot if they feel like they application is responsive. So when Caivs was handed 20MB of PHP and told, "one of the key pages takes like 30-45 seconds to load. Figure out why," it was at least a clear goal. Combing through that gigantic pile of code to try and understand what was happening was an uphill battle. Eventually, Caivs just decided to check the traffic logs while running the application. That highlighted a huge spike in traffic every time the page loaded, and that helped Caivs narrow down exactly where the problem was.
Pulling at the Start of a Thread - The Daily WTF
For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic. Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.
Find the First Function to Cut - The Daily WTF
Sebastian is now maintaining a huge framework which, in his words, "could easily be reduced in size by 50%", especially because many of the methods in it are reinvented wheels that are already provided by .NET and specifically LINQ. For example, if you want the first item in a collection, LINQ lets you call First() or FirstOrDefault() on any collection. The latter option makes handling empty collections easier. But someone decided to reinvent that wheel, and like so many reinvented wheels, it's worse.
The Wrong Kind of Character - The Daily WTF
Today's code, at first, just looks like using literals instead of constants. Austin sends us this C#, from an older Windows Forms application: if (e.KeyChar == (char)4) { // is it a ^D? e.Handled = true; DoStuff(); } else if (e.KeyChar == (char)7) { // is it a ^g? e.Handled = true; DoOtherStuff(); } else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.Home) { e.Handled = true; SpecialGoToStart(); } else if (e.KeyChar == (char)Keys.End) { e.Handled = true; SpecialGoToEnd(); }
Que Sera, Sera - The Daily WTF
It's just the same refrain, over and over. "Time Travel! Again?" exclaimed David B. "I knew that Alaska is a good airline. Now I get to return at the start of a century. And not this century. The one before air flight began." To be fair, David, there never is just one first time for time travel. It's always again, isn't it?
Dating in Another Language - The Daily WTF
It takes a lot of time and effort to build a code base that exceeds 100kloc. Rome wasn't built in a day; it just burned down in one. Liza was working in a Python shop. They had a mildly successful product that ran on Linux. The sales team wanted better sales software to help them out, and instead of buying something off the shelf, they hired a C# developer to make something entirely custom.
XJSOML - The Daily WTF
When Steve's employer went hunting for a new customer relationship management system (CRM), they had some requirements. A lot of them were around the kind of vendor support they'd get. Their sales team weren't the most technical people, and the company wanted to push as much routine support off to the vendor as possible. But they also needed a system that was extensible. Steve's company had many custom workflows they wanted to be able to execute, and automated marketing messages they wanted to construct, and so wanted a CRM that had an easy to use API.
Hot Dog - The Daily WTF
Faithful Peter G. took a trip. "So I wanted to top up my bus ticket online. After asking for credit card details, PINs, passwords, a blood sample, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow, they also sent a notification to my phone which I had to authorise with a fingerprint, and then verify that all the details were correct (because you can never be too careful when paying for a bus ticket). So yes, it's me, but the details definitely are not correct." Which part is wrong, the currency? Any idea what the exchange rate is between NZD and the euro right now?
Conventional Events - The Daily WTF
Now, I would argue that the event-driven lifecycle of ASP .Net WebForms is a bad way to design web applications. And it's telling that the model is basically dead; it seems my take is at best lukewarm, if not downright cold. Pete inherited code from Bob, and Bob wrote an ASP .Net WebForm many many ages ago, and it's still the company's main application. Bob may not be with the company, but his presence lingers, both in the code he wrote and the fact that he commented frequently with // bob was here
Message Oriented Database - The Daily WTF
Mark was debugging some database querying code, and got a bit confused about what it was actually doing. Specifically, it generated a query block like this: $statement="declare @status int declare @msg varchar(30) exec @status=sp_doSomething 'arg1', ... select @msg=convert(varchar(10),@status) print @msg "; $result = sybase_query ($statement, $this->connection);
A Single Mortgage - The Daily WTF
We talked about singletons a bit last week. That reminded John of a story from the long ago dark ages where we didn't have always accessible mobile Internet access. At the time, John worked for a bank. The bank, as all banks do, wanted to sell mortgages. This often meant sending an agent out to meet with customers face to face, and those agents needed to show the customer what their future would look like with that mortgage- payment calculations, and pretty little graphs about equity and interest.