The Daily WTF

A long time ago, Joey made some extra bucks doing technical support for the neighbors. It was usually easy work, and honestly was more about being a member of the community than anything else.This meant Joey got to spend time with Ernest. Ernest was a retiree with a professorial manner, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest. Ernest volunteered at the local church, was known for his daily walks around the neighborhood, and was a generally beloved older neighbor.Ernest had been working on transfering his music collection- a mix of CDs and records- onto his computer. He had run into a problem, and reached out to Joey for help."Usually," Ernest explained, "I can get one of the kids from the local university to help me out. But with the holiday break and all..."No problem for Joey. He went over to Ernest's, sat down at the computer, and powered it up. The desktop appeared, and in the typical older user fashion, it was covered with icons. What was unusual was the names of the files and folders. Things like titwank. Or cockrot.pl and penis.pl. A few were named as racial slurs.Clearly, the college students Ernest usually hired were having a laugh at the man's expense. That must be it. Joey glanced around the room, trying to think about how to explain this, when he noticed the bookshelf.The first few books were guides on how to program in Perl. Sandwiched between them was Rogers Profanisaurous, a dictionary of profanity. Then a collection of comedy CDs by Kevin Bloody Wilson, the performer of such comedy songs as "I Gave Up Wanking," "The Pubic Hair Song," and "Dick on Her Mind"."Ah, yes," Ernest said, "you'll need to pardon my desktop. Before I retired, I was a linguist, and I think you can guess what my speciality was.""Profanity?""Profanity indeed. Now, I was hoping I could get someone to take a look at swallow.pl for me..."Joey writes:

As the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one's mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn't so cold that it hurts to breathe.Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.A long time ago, Luciano worked for a small company, along with some friends. This was long enough that you didn't rent compute from a cloud provider, but instead ran most of your intranet services off of a private server in your network closet somewhere.This particular server ran mostly everything: private git hosting, VPN, email, and an internal Jabber server for chat. Given that it ran most services in the company, one might think that they were backing it up regularly- and you'd be right. One might also think that they had some sort of failover setup, and that's where you'd be wrong.Late August 12th, the hard drive on their server decided it was time to start its own holiday. The main reason everyone noticed when it happened wasn't due to some alert that got triggered, but as mentioned, Luciano was friends with the team, which meant they used the Jabber server to chat with each other about non-work stuff.Because half the country was already closed for August, getting replacements delivered was a dubious proposition, at best. Especially with the 15th looming, which not only made shipping delays worse, but this particular year was on a Friday, marking a 3-day weekend. Unless they wanted to spend the better part of a week out of commission, they needed to find an alternative.The only silver lining was that "shipping is delayed" is the kind of problem which can be solved by spending money. By the time it was all said and done, they paid more for shipping than they paid for the drive itself, but the drive arrived by the 14th, and by the end of the day, they had the server back up and running, restored from backup.And everything was happy, until August 12th, the following year, when the new hard drive decided to die the exact same way as the previous one, and the entire cycle repeated itself.And on the third year, a hard drive also failed on August 12th. At least, by that point, they were so used to the problem that they kept spare drives in inventory. Eventually, someone upgraded them to a RAID, which at least kept the downtime at a minimum.Luciano has long since moved on to a new job, but the date of August 12th is his own personal holiday: an unpleasant one.[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

Our anonymous submitter was looking for a Microsoft partner to manage his firm's MSDN subscriptions; the pile of licenses and seats and allowed uses was complex enough to want specialists. In hopes of quickly zeroing in on a known and reputable firm, he tracked down the website of a tech consultancy that'd been used by one of his previous employers.When he browsed to their Contact Us page, filled out the contact form, and clicked Submit, the webpage simply refreshed with no signs of actually doing anything. After staring at the screen for a moment, wondering what had gone wrong, Subby noticed the single quotes used within his message were now escaped. Clicking Submit a few more times kept adding escape characters, with no submission ever occurring. So he amended his message to remove every it's, we're, and other such contraction.Without single quotes, the next submission was successful. It's impossible to say what was going on behind the scenes, but this seemed to suggest a SQL injection vulnerability in their form submission code. They were escaping "'" characters because they were building their query through string concatenation. But in addition to escaping the single quotes, it seemed to be rejecting any string which contained them.A stellar first impression, to be sure. In fairness, this firm hadn't designed their own website. The name of the designer they'd contracted with, displayed in the webpage footer, looked more embarrassing than proud in light of his trouble.An email address was listed beside the contact form. Subby sent a separate email alerting them of the bug he'd found. Hopefully, someone would acknowledge and channel it to the proper support contact.A week passed. Subby never received a response or any confirmation that any of his messages had been received. Had that mailbox been abandoned after most, if not all, attempted contacts had mysteriously failed?"I guess no SQL injection if it's never submitted!" Subby joked to himself.He moved on to other prospects.[Advertisement] Plan Your .NET 9 Migration with Confidence

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:

Three blind anonymice are unbothered by the gathering dark as we approach thewinter solstice. Those of you fortunate enough to be approachingthe summer solstice are no doubt gloating. Feel free, we don'tbegrudge it. You'll get yours soon enough. Here we have some suggestionsfrom a motley crew of three or four or maybe more or fewer.Mouse Number Oneis suffering an identity crisis, whimpering "I don't really know who I am anymore and Ireally hoped to have this information after modifying my profile."

We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.Jessica writes:

(Read Part 1 here)By the 10-month mark of her job search, Ellis still lacked full-time employment. But she had accumulated a pile of knowledge and advice that she wished she'd started with. She felt it was important to share, in hopes that even one person might save some time and sanity:

When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:

Betsy writes:

Scared Stanley stammered"I'm afraid of how to explain to the tax authority that I received $NaN."

It feels like ages ago, when document databases like Mongo were all the rage. That isn't to say that they haven't stuck around and don't deliver value, but gone is the faddish "RDBMSes are dead, bro." The "advantage" they offer is that they turn data management problems into serialization problems.And that's where today's anonymous submission takes us. Our submitter has a long list of bugs around managing lists of usernames. These bugs largely exist because the contract developer who wrote the code didn't write anything, and instead "vibe coded too close to the sun", according to our submitter.Here's the offending C# code:

Darren is supporting a Delphi application in the current decade. Which is certainly a situation to be in. He writes:

Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering states "No matter what the requirements document says, what your users really wanted was Excel." This has a corrolary: "Any sufficiently advanced Excel file is indistingushable from software."Given enough time, any Excel file whipped up by any user can transition from "useful" to "mission critical software" before anyone notices. That's why Nemecsek was tasked with taking a pile of Excel spreadsheets and converting them into "real" software, which could be maintained and supported by software engineers.Nemecsek writes:

...matter of fact, it's all dark.Gitter Hubber checks in on the holidays:"This is the spirit of the Black Friday on GitHub. That's because I'musing dark mode. Otherwise, it would have a different name...You know what? Let's just call it Error Friday!"

As we enter into the latter portion of the year, folks are traveling to visit family, logging off of work in hopes that everything can look after itself for a month, and somewhere, someone, is going to make the choice "yes, I can push to prod on Christmas Eve, and it'll totally work out for me!"Over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to get a chance to get some holiday support horrors up on the site, in keeping with the season. Whether it's the absurd challenges of providing family tech support, the last minute pushes to production, the five alarm fires caused by a pointy-haired-bosses's incompetence, we want your tales of holiday IT woe.So hit that submit button on the side bar, and tell us who's on Santa's naughty list this year. [Advertisement] ProGet's got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

In today's Tales from the Interview, our Anonymous submitter relates their experience with an anonymous company:

Today, Reginald approaches us for a confession.He writes:

Part of the "fun" of JavaScript is dealing with code which comes from before sensible features existed. For example, if you wanted to clone an object in JavaScript, circa 2013, that was a wheel you needed to invent for yourself, as this StackOverflow thread highlights.There are now better options, and you'd think that people would use them. However, the only thing more "fun" than dealing with code that hasn't caught up with the times is dealing with developers who haven't, and still insist on writing their own versions of standard methods.

Sometimes, it's hard to know just when you are. This morning, I woke up to a Macbook that thinks it's in Paris, four hours ago. Pining for pain chocolate. A bevy of anonyms have had similar difficulties.First up, an unarabian anonym observes"They say that visiting Oman feels like traveling back in time to before the rapid modernization of the Arab states. I just think their eVisa application system is taking this "time travel" thing a bit too far..."

Someone wanted to make sure that invalid routes logged an error in their Go web application. Artem found this when looking at production code.

Today's representative line comes from Capybara James (most recently previously). It's representative, not just of the code base, but of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Or, "you get what you measure".If, for example, you decide that code coverage metrics are how you're going to judge developers, then your developers are going to ensure that the code coverage looks great. If you measure code coverage, then you will get code coverage- and nothing else.That's how you get tests like this:

One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.A fun side effect of that: the VB6 runtime remains supported. So you can run VB6 software on modern Windows. You just can't modify that software.Greta has inherited an even more antique tech stack. She writes, "I often wonder if I'm the last person on Earth encumbered with this particular stack." She adds, "The IDE is long-deprecated from a vendor that no longer exists- since 2002." Given the project started in the mid 2010s, it may have been a bad choice to use that tech-stack.It's not as bad as it sounds- while the technology and tooling is crumbling ruins, the team culture is healthy and the C-suite has given Greta wide leeway to solve problems. But that doesn't mean that the tooling isn't a cause of anguish, and even worse than the tooling- the code itself."Some things," Greta writes, "are 'typical bad'" and some things "are 'delightfully unique' bad."For example, the IDE has a concept of "designer" files, for the UI, and "code behind" files, for the logic powering the UI. The IDE frequently corrupts its own internal state, and loses the ability to properly update the designer files. When this happens, if you attempt to open, save, or close a designer file, the IDE pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the corruption, with a "Yes" and "No" option. If you click "No", the modal box goes away- and then reappears because you're seeing this message because you're on a broken designer file. If you click "Yes", the IDE "helpfully" deletes pretty much everything in your designer file.Nothing about the error message indicates that this might happen.The language used is a dialect of C++. I say "dialect" because the vendor-supplied compiler implements some cursed feature set between C++98 and C++11 standards, but doesn't fully conform to either. It's only capable of outputting 32-bit x86 code up to a Pentium Pro. Using certain C++ classes, like std::fstream, causes the resulting executable to throw a memory protection fault on exit.Worse, the vendor supplied class library is C++ wrappers on top of an even more antique Pascal library. The "class" library is less an object-oriented wrapper and more a collection of macros and weird syntax hacks. No source for the Pascal library exists, so forget about ever updating that.Because the last release of the IDE was circa 2002, running it on any vaguely modern environment is prone to failures, but it also doesn't play nicely inside of a VM. At this point, the IDE works for one session. If you exit it, reboot your computer, or try to close and re-open the project, it breaks. The only fix is to reinstall it. But the reinstall requires you to know which set of magic options actually lets the install proceed. If you make a mistake and accidentally install, say, CORBA support, attempting to open the project in the IDE leads to a cascade of modal error boxes, including one that simply says, "ABSTRACT ERROR" ("My favourite", writes Greta). And these errors don't limit themselves to the IDE; attempting to run the compiler directly also fails.But, if anything, it's the code that makes the whole thing really challenging to work with. While the UI is made up of many forms, the "main" form is 18,000 lines of code, with absolutely no separation of concerns. Actually, the individual forms don't have a lot of separation of concerns; data is shared between forms via global variables declared in one master file, and then externed into other places. Even better, the various sub-forms are never destroyed, just hidden and shown, which means they remember their state whether you want that or not. And since much of the state is global, you have to be cautious about which parts of the state you reset.Greta adds:

Robert R picked up a bug in his company's event scheduling app. Sometimes, events were getting reported a day off from when they actually were.It didn't take too long to find the culprit, and as is so often the case, the culprit was handling dates with strings.

... when I'm eight thousand and three? Doesn't quite scan.Old soul jeffphi hummed "It's comforting to know that I'll have health insurance coverage through my 8,030th birthday!"

Wolferitza sends us a large chunk of a C# class. We'll take it in chunks because there's a lot here, but let's start with the obvious problem:

Handling non-existent values always presents special challenges. We've (mostly) agreed that NULL is, in some fashion, the right way to do it, though it's still common to see some sort of sentinel value that exists outside of the expected range- like a function returning a negative value when an error occurred, and a zero (or positive) value when the operation completes.Javier found this function, which has a... very French(?) way of handling invalid dates.

Alicia recently moved to a new country and took a job with a small company willing to pay well and help with relocation costs. Overall, the code base was pretty solid. Despite the overall strong code base, one recurring complaint was that running the test suite was painfully long.While Alicia doesn't specify what the core business is, but says: "in this company's core business, random numbers were the base of everything."As such, they did take generating random numbers fairly seriously, and mostly used strong tools for doing that. However, whoever wrote their test suite was maybe a bit less concerned, and wrote this function:

Brian (previously)found himself contracting for an IoT company, shipping thermostats and other home automation tools, along with mobile apps to control them.Brian was hired because the previous contractor had hung around long enough for the product to launch, cashed the check, and vanished, never to be heard from again.And let's just say that Brian's predecessor had a unique communication style.

As I was traveling this week (just home today), conveyances of all sorts were on my mind.Llarry A. warned "This intersection is right near my house. Looks like it's going to be inconvenient for a while..." Keeping this in mind, I chose to take the train rather than drive.

Our submitter, Gearhead, was embarking on STEM-related research. This required him to pursue funding from a governmental agency that we'll call the Ministry of Silly Walks. In order to start a grant application and track its status, Gearhead had to create an account on the Ministry website.The registration page asked for a lot of personal information first. Then Gearhead had to create his own username and password. He used his password generator to create a random string: D\h.|wAi=&:;^t9ZyoOUpon clicking Save, he received an error.Your password must be a minimum eight characters long, with no spaces. It must include at least three of the following character types: uppercase letter, lowercase letter, number, special character (e.g., !, $, % , ?).Perplexed, Gearhead emailed the Ministry's web support, asking why his registration failed. The reply:

Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.Now, it's worth noting the route Dotan took to find the function. He navigated there from a different documentation page, which sent him to an anchor in the middle of a larger documentation page- vendorsite.com/docs/product/specific-api#specific-function.This meant that as the page loaded, his browser scrolled directly down to the specific-function section of the page. Thus, Dotan missed the gigantic banner at the top of the page for that API, which said this:

Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.The way the background task was launched was this:

The first time Z hit the captcha on his company's site, he didn't think much of it. And to be honest, the second time he wasn't paying that much attention. So it wasn't until the third time that he realized that the captcha had showed him the same image every single time- a "5" with lines scribbled all over it.That led Z to dig out the source and see how the captcha was implemneted.

"Getting ready to!" anticipatedrichard h. but then this happened."All I want are the CLI options to mark the stupid TOS box so I can install this using our Chef automation. "What are the options" is too much to ask, apparently.But this is Microsoft. Are stupid errors like this really that unexpected?"

Everyone's got workplace woes. The clueless manager; the disruptive coworker; the cube walls that loom ever higher as the years pass, trapping whatever's left of your soul.But sometimes, Satan really leaves his mark on a joint. I worked Tech Support there. You may remember The C-Level Ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story. Night after night, my dreams are full of me trying and failing at absolutely everything. Catch a bus? I'm already running late and won't make it. Dial a phone number to get help? I can't recall the memorized sequence, and the keypad's busted anyway. Drive outta danger? The car won't start. Run from a threat? My legs are frozen.Then I wake up in my bed in total darkness, scared out of my skull, and I can't move for real. Not one muscle works. Even if I could move, I'd stay still because I'm convinced the smallest twitch will give me away to the monster lurking nearby, looking to do me in.The alarm nags me before the sun's even seen fit to show itself. What day is it? Tuesday? An invisible, overwhelming dread pins me in place under the covers. I can't do it. Not again.The thing is, hunger, thirst, and cold are even more nagging than the alarm. Dead tired, I force myself up anyway to do the whole thing over.The office joe that morning was so over-brewed as to be sour. I tossed down the last swig in my mug, checking my computer one more time to make sure no Tech Support fires were raging by instant message or email. Then I threw on my coat and hat and quit my cube, taking the stairs to ground level.I pushed open a heavy fire-escape door and stepped out into the narrow alley between two massive office buildings. Brisk autumn air and the din of urban motor traffic rushed to greet me. The dull gray sky above threatened rain. Leaning against the far brick wall were Toby and Reynaldo, a couple of network admins, hugging themselves as they nursed smoldering cigarettes. They nodded hello. I tipped my hat in greeting, slipping toward the usual spot, a patch of asphalt I'd all but worn grooves in by that point. I lit my own cigarette and took in a deep, warming draw. "Make it last another year," Toby spoke in a mocking tone, tapping ash onto the pavement. "I swear, that jerk can squeeze a nickel until Jefferson poops!"An ambulance siren blared through the alley for a minute. The rig was no doubt racing toward the hospital down the street.Reynaldo smirked. "You think Morty finally did it?"Toby smirked as well.I raised an eyebrow. "Did what?""Morty always says he's gonna run out into traffic one of these days so they can take him to the hospital and he won't have to be here," Reynaldo explained.I frowned at the morbid suggestion. "Hell of a way to catch a break.""Well, it's not like we can ask for time off," Toby replied bitterly. "They always find some way to rope us back in."I nodded in sympathy. "You have it worse than we do. But my sleep's still been jacked plenty of times by 3AM escalated nonsense that shoulda been handled by a different part of the globe."Reynaldo's eyes lit up fiercely. "They have all the same access and training, but it never falls on them! Yeah, been there."The door swung open again, admitting a young woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders. This was Megan, a junior developer and recent hire. I tipped my hat while helping myself to another drag.She hastened my way, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her handbag. With shaking hands, she fumbled to select a single coffin nail. "I quit these things!" she lamented. After returning the pack to her bag, she rummaged through it fruitlessly. "Dammit, where are those matches?!" She glanced up at me with a pleading expression. I pulled the lighter from my coat pocket. "You sure?"She nodded like she hadn't been more sure about anything in her entire life.I lit it for her. She took a lung-filling pull, then exhaled a huge cloud of smoke."Goin' that well, huh?" I asked.Megan also hugged herself, her expression pained. "Every major player in the industry uses our platform, and I have no idea how it hasn't all come crashing down. There are thousands of bugs in the code base. Thousands! It breaks all the time. Most of the senior devs have no clue what they're doing. And now we're about to lose the only guy who understands the scheduling algorithm, the most important thing!""That's tough." I had no idea what else to say. Maybe it was enough that I listened.Megan glanced up nervously at the brewing storm overhead. "I just know that algorithm's gonna get dumped in my lap.""The curse of competence." I'd seen it plenty of times."Ain't that the truth!" She focused on me again with a look of apology. "How've you been?"I shrugged. "Same old, same old." I figured a fresh war story might help. "Had to image and set up the tech for this new manager's onboarding. Her face is stuck in this permanent glare. Every time she opens her mouth, it's to bawl someone out.""Ugh.""The crazy thing is, the walls of her office are completely covered with crucifixes, and all these posters plastered with flowers and hearts and sap like Choose Kindness." I leaned in and lowered my voice. "You know what I think? I think she's an ancient Roman whose spite has kept her alive for over two thousand years. Those crosses are a threat!"That teased a small laugh out of Megan. For a moment, the amusement reached her eyes. Then it was gone, overwhelmed by worry. She took to pacing through the narrow alley. Back at my cube, I found a new urgent ticket at the top of my case load. Patricia Dracora, a senior project manager, had put in a call claiming her computer had been hacked. Her mouse cursor was moving around and clicking things all on its own.It was too early in the morning for a case like this. That old dread began sneaking up on me again. The name put me on edge as well. Over the years, our paths had never crossed, but her nickname throughout Tech Support, Dracula, betrayed what everyone else made of her."Make like a leaf and blow!"The boss barked his stern command over my shoulder. I stood and turned from my computer to find him at my cubicle threshold with arms folded, blocking my egress.I couldn't blow, so I shrugged. "Can't be as bad as The Crucifier.""Dracula's worse than The Crucifier," the boss replied under his breath in a warning tone. "For your own good, don't keep her waiting!" He tossed a thumb over his shoulder for good measure.When he finally backed out of the way, I made tracks outta there. A few of my peers made eye contact as I passed, looking wary on my behalf.The ticket pegged Dracora's office in a subfloor I'd never set foot in before. Descending the stairs, I had too much time to think. Of course I didn't expect a real hacking attempt. Peripheral hardware on the fritz, some software glitch: there'd be a simple explanation. What fresh hell would I have to endure to reach that point? That was what my tired brain couldn't let go of. The stimulants hadn't kicked in yet. With the strength of a kitten, I was stepping into a lion's den. A lion who might make me wish for crucifixion by the time it was all over.From the stairwell, I entered a dank, deserted corridor. Old florescent lighting fixtures hummed and flickered overhead. That, combined with the overwhelming stench of paint fumes, set the stage for a ripping headache. There were no numbers on the walls to lead me to the right place. They must've taken them down to paint and never replaced them. I inched down worn, stained carpeting, peeking into each open gap I found to either side of me. Nothing but darkness, dust, and cobwebs at first. Eventually, I spotted light blaring from one of the open doors ahead of me. I jogged the rest of the way, eager to see any living being by that point.The room I'd stumbled onto was almost closet-sized. It contained a desk and chair, a laptop docking station, and a stack of cardboard boxes on the floor. Behind the desk was a woman of short stature, a large purse slung over one shoulder. Her arms were folded as she paced back and forth in the space behind her chair. When I appeared, she stopped and looked to me wide-eyed, maybe just as relieved as I was. "Are you Tech Support?""Yes, ma'am." I entered the room. "What's-?""I don't know how it happened!" Dracora returned to pacing, both hands making tight fists around the straps of the purse she was apparently too wired and distracted to set down. "They made me move here from the fourth floor. I just brought everything down and set up my computer, and now someone has control of the mouse. Look, look!" She stopped and pointed at the monitor.I rounded the desk. By the time I got there, whatever she'd seen had vanished. Onscreen, the mouse cursor sat still against a backdrop of open browsers and folders. Nothing unusual."It was moving, I swear!" Anguished, Dracora pleaded with me to believe her.It seemed like she wasn't hostile at all, just stressed out and scared. I could handle that. "I'm sure we can figure this out, ma'am. Lemme have a look here."I sat down at the desk and tried the wireless mouse first. It didn't work at all to move the cursor."The hacker's locked us out!" Dracora returned to pacing behind me.As I sat there, not touching a thing, the mouse cursor shuttled across the screen like it was possessed."There! You see?"Suddenly, somehow, my brain smashed everything together. "Ma'am, I have an idea. Could you please stand still?"Dracora stopped.I swiveled around in the chair to face her. "Ma'am, you said you were moving in down here. What's in your purse right now?"Her visible confusion deepened. "What?""The mouse cursor only moves around when you do," I explained.Her eyes widened. She dug deeply into her purse. A moment later, she pulled out a second wireless mouse. Then she looked to me like she couldn't believe it. "That's it?!""That's it!" I replied."Oh, lord!" Dracora replaced the dud sitting on her mousepad with the mouse that was actually connected to her machine, wilting over the desk as she did so. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."I knew the feeling. But the moment of triumph, I gotta admit, felt pretty swell. "Anything else I can help with, ma'am?""No, no! I've wasted enough of your time. Thank you so much!"I had even more questions on the way back upstairs. With this huge, spacious office building, who was forcing Dracora to be in that pit? How had she garnered such a threatening reputation? Why had my experience been so different from everyone else's? I didn't mention it to the boss or my peers. I broke it all down to Megan in the alley a few days later."She even put in a good word for me when she closed the ticket," I told her. "The boss says I'm on the fast track for another promotion." I took a drag from my cigarette, full of bemusement. "I'm already as senior as it gets. The only way up from here is management." I shook my head. "That ain't my thing. Look how well it's gone for Dracora."Megan lowered her gaze, eyes narrowed. "You said it yourself: the only reward for good work is more work."And then they buried you ... in a basement, or a box.I remembered being at the start of my career, like Megan. I remembered feeling horrified by all the decades standing between me and the day when I wouldn't or couldn't ever work again. A couple decades in, some part of me that I'd repressed had resurfaced. What the hell is this? What have I been doing?Stop caring, a different part replied. Just stop caring. Take things day by day, case by case.I'd obeyed for so long. Where had it gotten me?Under my breath, I risked airing my wildest wish for the future. "Someday, I wanna break outta this joint."Megan blinked up at me. I had her attention. "How?""I dunno," I admitted. "I gotta figure it out ... before I go nuts." [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Way back in 1964, people were starting to recgonize that computers were going to have a large impact on the world. There was not, at the time, very much prepackaged software, which meant if you were going to use a computer to do work, you were likely going to have to write your own programs. The tools to do that weren't friendly to non-mathematicians.Thus, in 1964, was BASIC created, a language derived from experiments with languages like DOPE (The Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). The goal was to be something easy, something that anyone could use.In 1977, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II all launched, putting BASIC into the hands of end users. But it's important to note that BASIC had already been seeing wide use for a decade on "big iron" systems, or more hobbyist systems, like the Altair 8800.Today's submitter, Coyne, was but a humble student in 1977, and despite studying at a decent university, brand spanking new computers were a bit out of reach. Coyne was working with professors to write code to support papers, and using some dialect of BASIC on some minicomputer.One of Coyne's peers had written a pile of code, and one simple segment didn't work. As it was just a loop to print out a series of numbers, it seemed like it should work, and work quite easily. But the programmer writing it couldn't get it to work. They passed it around to other folks in the department, and those folks also couldn't get it to work. What could possibly be wrong with this code?

For C programmers of a certain age (antique), booleans represent a frustrating challenge. But with the addition of stdbool.h, we exited the world of needing to work hard to interact with boolean values. While some gotchas are still in there, your boolean code has the opportunity to be simple.Mark's predecessor saw how simple it made things, and decided that wouldn't do. So that person went and wrote their own special way of comparing boolean values. It starts with an enum:

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.South Korea made the choice to do it themselves, with their G-Drive system (short for Government Drive, no relation to Google Drive), a government file store hosted primarily out of a datacenter in Daejeon. Unfortunately, "primarily" is a bit too apropos- last month, a fire in that datacenter destroyed data.

It's been several years now that our reliable contributor Daniel D.has been sending us the same gripe time after time. We get it, really we do. It irks us too,but it is astounding just how many times he's been able to find this!

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um... probably shouldn't have been found.

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.

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.Despite being called file.bat, it was in fact a Bash script, and thus did have access to the basic mathematical operations bash supports. So while this could have been done via some pretty basic arithmetic in Bash, doing entirely in Bash would have meant not using Awk. And if you know how to use Awk, why would you use anything but Awk?

Cool cat Adam R. commented"I've been getting a bunch of messages from null in my WhatsApp hockey group."

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."Unfortunately, that was hardly a bug report. "Things stop working?" What does that even mean. Claus's team made a note of it, but no one thought too much about it, until January. That's when a flood of tickets came in, all relating to setting a date.Now, this particular date picker didn't default to having dates, but let the users pick values like "Start of last month", or "Same day last year", or "Same day next month". And the trick to the whole thing was that sometimes setting dates worked just fine, sometimes it blew up, and it seemed to vary based on when you were setting the dates and what dates you were setting.And let's take a look at one example of how this was implemented, which highlights why January was such a problem:

Dear Third-Party API Support,You're probably wondering how and why your authorization server has been getting hammered every single day for more than 4 years. It was me. It was us-the company I work for, I mean. Let me explain.I'm an Anonymous developer at Initech. We have this one mission-critical system which was placed in production by the developer who created it, and then abandoned. Due to its instability, it received frequent patches, but no developer ever claimed ownership. No one ever took on the task of fixing its numerous underlying design flaws.About 6 months ago, I was put in charge of this thing and told to fix it. There was no way I could do it on my own; I begged management for help and got 2 more developers on board. After we'd released our first major rewrite and fix, there were still a few lingering issues that seemed unrelated to our code. So I began investigating the cause.This system has 10+ microservices which are connected like meatballs buried deep within a bowl of spaghetti that completely obscures what those meatballs are even doing. Untangling this code has been a chore in and of itself. Within the 3 microservices dedicated to automated tasks, I found a lot of random functionality ... and then I found this!See, our system extracts data from your API. It takes the refresh token, requests a new access token, and saves it to our database. Our refresh token to this system is only valid for 24 hours; as soon as we get access, we download the data. Before we download the data, we ensure we have a valid access token by refreshing it.One of our microservice's pointless jobs was to refresh the access token every 5, 15, and 30 minutes for 22 of the 24 hours we had access to it. It was on a job timer, so it just kept going. Every single consent for that day kept getting refreshed, over and over.Your auditing tools must not have revealed us as the culprit, otherwise we should've heard about this much sooner. You've probably wasted countless hours of your lives sifting through log files with a legion of angry managers breathing down your necks. I'm writing to let you know we killed the thing. You won't get spammed again on our watch. May this bring you some closure.Sincerely,A Developer Who Still Cares [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.

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 thing about a three decade old application is that it often collects a lot of kruft. For example, this procedure:

SQL Server Integration 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.Which is why Lisa was so surprised that her predecessor had a "call stored procedure" node called "move file". And more than that, she was surprised that the stored procedure looked like this: