The Daily WTF

Annie works in a bioinformatics department. There's a lot of internally developed code, and the quality is… special. But it's also got features that are on their critical path of doing their jobs.One example is that, based on one input form, the next input form needs to display a drop down. The drop down elements don't change, but the individual item that's selected does. So, if the rank HTTP POST variable is set, we want to make sure the matching entry is selected.

I started writing a paragraph about why this code Gilda found was bad, and then I had to delete it all, because I wasn't putting the entire block in context. At a glance, this looks almost fine, but I thought I spotted a WTF. But only when I thought about the fact that this C code runs inside of a loop that I realized the real problem.

Lets say you have a simple problem. You have a string variable, and you'd like to store that string in another variable. You have a vague understanding of string immutability and something about the way references work in C#, but you don't really understand any of that. So, what do you do?Well, if you're Tina's co-worker, you do this:

This week we bring you a whole set of submissions that prove,once again, that web programmers just can't keep track of time. But first, a sop with a regular. Is a flying NaN saferthan a Camel? I wouldn't recommend making either a habit.Friend Argle B.is right, submissions to Error'd fromactual desktop applications are rare. He explanes "I routinely expect this from websites. I didNOT expect to find it in MSFS. It came up whenI deleted all the digits." Good for you, Mr. B. Ican't type a lick without digits.

Managing datasets is always a challenging task. So when Penny's co-worker needed to collect a pile of latitude/longitude positions from one dataset and prepare it for processing in a C++ program, that co-worker turned to the tools she knew best. Python and C++.Now, you or I might have dumped this data to a CSV file. But this co-worker is more… performance minded than us. So the Python script didn't generate a CSV file. Or a JSON document. Or any standard data file. No, that Python script generated a C++ file.

In mythology, Narcissus was so enraptured by his own beauty that he turned away all potential lovers until he came across a still pool of water. Upon spying his reflection, he fell in love and remained there for the rest of his life. After his death, a narcissus flower grew in his place- a daffodil or jonquil.One important element of Narcissus's myth is that while yes, he was incredibly self-absorbed, he was also beautiful. That's less true for this C# code from frequent commenter Sole Purpose Of Visit. There is nothing beautiful about this code.

Sandra (previously) is still working with Bjørn. Bjørn also continues to like keeping things… simple."Simple" for Bjørn is "do as much in PHP as possible since I am okay at PHP, including templating out JavaScript. If I have any third party libraries, just copy and paste them into the project and never, ever use a bundler because WebPack is scary."Which, in Bjørn's defense, WebPack and tools like it are scary, and I hate them all as a class. But that's a separate rant that's wildly off topic, so let's just get back to Bjørn.Because Bjørn does JavaScript via PHP templates, copy/paste, and general "massage the code until it works", we end up with this nonsense line not only getting deployed, but staying deployed until someone has the time and budget to do a large scale refactoring of all of the code:

The submissions this week seemed to have coincidentallydeveloped a theme of self-reference. You tell me.First, persistent Caleb S. tried over and over again to submit this same item for our consideration. He called it a "space-enfolding bus" and said that"There's apparently more space in this Afternoon Tea busthan meets the eye -- you can book seats for 500 adults and 500 children."Alas, his submission came without an image, so we asked for a do-over.Dutifully done, Caleb's second and third attempts both reported "Please use the comments from when I tried to submit this without an image."With that behind us, here is the image from the final attempt.

We've all been there. We need to make a change to the codebase or else. The right solution is going to take time and refactoring. There's a quick fix that will keep the production system from falling over and crushing the business. So you make the quick fix, with the idea that, eventually, you'll really fix it.And eventually never comes.But Adam's co-workers have at least found a way to make that process rewarding for the developers involved.This comment was added to the code-base in January, of 2017:

Something I see in a lot of code, and generally dislike, is this pattern:

One of the common mistakes in a beginner programmer is to wait using a busy loop. Need to pause a program? for(int i = 0; i < SOME_LARGE_NUMBER;i++) continue;There are a lot of good reasons to not do this, but in microcontroller land, sometimes you actually do want to wait this way. There may be better ways, but there also might not- it depends on your specific constraints.So, when David S found these lines of C code, it wasn't precisely a WTF.

"The app I work on is a 1.2MLOC big-ball-o-wtf," writes Mark B.As with a lot of big piles of bad code, it's frequently hard to find a snippet that both represents the bad code and is concise enough to submit. In this case, the code in question shows a questionable grasp of both switch statements and enums.

This week we have a veritable grab-bag of all themost common sorts of website errors: the NaN, the null, theundefined, the bad text substitution and the wonky date math.Honestly, they'regetting tedious. Somebody should build a tool to help developers scrub their code of impurities and dross. Theycould call it something catchy like, I dunno, purifieror lintbrush.Timely Todd R. tells us "I left a window open in Workday for too long, and like alot of other apps it threatened to log me out. I justwish I knew when that was..."

This week we have a veritable grab-bag of all themost common sorts of website errors: the NaN, the null, theundefined, the bad text substitution and the wonky date math.Honestly, they'regetting tedious. Somebody should build a tool to help developers scrub their code of impurities and dross. Theycould call it something catchy like, I dunno, purifieror lintbrush.Timely Todd R. tells us "I left a window open in Workday for too long, and like alot of other apps it threatened to log me out. I justwish I knew when that was..."

Ellen had just finished washing her hands when her phone buzzed. It vibrated itself off the sink, so there was a clumsy moment when it clattered to the restroom floor, and Ellen tried to pick it up with wet hands.After retrieving it and having another round of hand washing, Ellen read the alert: the UPS was in overload.That wasn't good. Their power supply was scaled for future growth- there was more than enough capacity to run all their servers off the UPS. So that meant something was very wrong. Ellen dashed out of the bathroom, conveniently located just off the server room, expecting to see something shorting out and sparking and an ugly cloud of smoke.But everything was fine. Everything in the server room continued to hum along nicely. Barry, the other server room tech, had already checked the UPS management console: something was drawing 2000W above the baseline load. "Something in here must be drawing extra power," Ellen said. Barry agreed, and they went off searching.While they searched, their phones pinged again: the UPS was no longer in overload."Weird," Barry said. "Do you think it's the health monitoring going off?""I mean, it could be," Ellen admitted. "But reporting an overload? I suppose we should open a ticket with the manufacturer."So Ellen did that, while Barry trotted off to make his trip to the restroom. A few hours later, the UPS manufacturer sent their reply, which in short was something like: "You clearly have misconfigured it. Check this wiki article on how to set alert thresholds. Closing this ticket."Frustrated, and full of coffee, Ellen traipsed back to the restroom to relieve herself. This time, she was halfway out the restroom door when her phone buzzed. The UPS was in overload again.Once again, there was nothing obvious going wrong, but the management console reported that something was drawing 2000W above the normal load. "Some device in here has to be going wildly wrong," Ellen said. "Did somebody plug in a fridge, or a space heater or something?""I dunno," Barry said. "Do you think we're going to need to do an inventory?""I suppose so," Ellen said. She checked her phone. "There are a few hours left in the day, let's see if there's some device we don't expect, or something.""Sure, but ah, gotta hit the head first," Barry said. He went to the restroom while Ellen pulled up the inventory of the server room and started walking the racks, looking for anything out of place.That's how they spent the rest of the day, searching through the server room, trying to figure out what might be drawing a whopping 2000W of power off the UPS. There was nothing unusual or out of place, however.Frustrated and annoyed, Ellen took one last trip through the restroom before she left for the day. And, like clockwork, she was just drying her hands on a paper towel when her phone pinged. The UPS was in overload again.Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern. When Ellen used the bathroom, the alert went off. When Barry used it, it didn't.Ellen looked around the bathroom. It was a spartan, functional room, without much in it. Lights. Exhaust fan. Sink. Sink. The sink used hot water. On the wall, under the sink, was a petite five liter instant-on hot water heater."Oh, they didn't."The next morning, they got an electrician in. Within a few minutes, Ellen was able to confirm that they, in fact, had: they had wired the bathroom circuit to the server room UPS, not building mains. Every time Ellen washed her hands, the UPS went into overload.The electrician was able to rewire the bathroom, which lifted that additional load off the UPS. That solved the obvious problem, and made everyone happy.Nothing could fix the other problem, however. Ellen couldn't bring herself to shake Barry's hands anymore. Maybe he just used cold water… maybe. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Mario's team had a nasty stutter in the UI of their web application. Frequently, when going back to the server for data, the UI would just hang. The requests themselves were happening asynchronously, and it wasn't just network lag anyway- the server was able to serve up large JSON responses well within any reasonable timelines. Certainly nothing in the timing justified such a nasty UI hang. So what was going on?Well, in many of the places where they were handling JSON responses, specifically large JSON responses, this code was copy-pasted in multiple places:

I have a bit of a vendetta against the Singleton pattern. It's not to say that I won't use it, it's just that it's a pattern that gets overused and misapplied. The result is, instead of guaranteeing that only one instance of an object exists (because there can be only one), and just reinvent global variables.Today, George sends us some code that is in a Java factory class that constructs thread pools. In this case, the thread pool itself is returned as a singleton. I've got some questions about the logic of why that's the case, but that's what it is.And then there's this method/comment combination which is just… perfect.

Knock knock.Matthew shared a classic catch-22 that didn't catch any, explaining"Redditstatus.com is in the middle of a Reddit outage (actually,after the outage has been "restored" and we are "monitoring the situation").The whole point of hosting a status page separatelyis so that it does not share common failure mechanism with the site being monitored!"

Suri was about to add some new functionality to an existing application, and since it was a relatively big change, she spent a few hours tidying up the codebase. Sitting in there, in the code actually running in production, she found this:

Switches are great. Given a value, you can switch to different code paths based on that value. The problem is… what if you have other conditions too?Well, Hubert's co-worker found a way around that. Here's a heavily anonymized version of the pattern.

Kimberly L sends us an example of what is clearly template-generated code, so I think this is an opportunity to go on a rant.Now, the important thing to note here is that this code was in a packaged library that they were considering using.

Frequent contributor Argle (previous) is mildly famous, and not just around here. He writes:

Buffalo, New York is a recovering Rust Belt city which has given theworld several notable achievements. First, a fairly forgettable slicedmeat sandwich au jus more known for its barely edible stale roll thanfor the entirely unremarkable beef entombed within. Second, an innovativerepurposing of a castoff fowl appendage into a drunkard's delicacy (and MlleSimpson's famed befuddlement). Most of all, it's indispensable for the constructionof a lighthearted linguistic shibboleth: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo...and so on. Unfortunately, the city also brings us bad news this week.But first,Tony H. reminds us of a famously scandal-ridden bank. Theirs might not have been the worst fraud in 2016 (or 2017, or 2018,or 2019) but apparently they're now tightening down the screws on consumer lending.Tony observes, frostily, "a credit card with a limit below zero is alarming even for Wells Fargo."

"We have an internal website that shows, among other things, the daily availability of my coworkers for the next three months to help with scheduling, especially when planning vacations," writes Alexander."This vacation planner data is represented as a table. An image of a table to be more precise."Displaying data as images is already a WTF. It's certainly not user friendly, it's definitely not accessible, and it makes one wonder whyyyy. That, however, is the least of the WTFs Alexander has in store for us.First, the front-end sent its HTTP requests to a single end-point. Every request went to the same URL. When the user clicked the button to show the vacation planner, the browser would submit a form- yes a form, creating a body which looked like:

Madeline inherited some Python 2.7 code, with an eye towards upgrading it to a more modern Python version. This code generates CSV files, and it's opted to do this by cramming everything into a 2D array in memory and then dumping the array out with some join operations, and that's the real WTF, because that's a guaranteed way to generate invalid CSV files. Like so many things, the CSV files are actually way more complicated than people think.But we're going to focus in on a smaller subset of this pile of WTFs. I'll lead with the caveat from Madeline: "I've changed some of the variable names around, for a bit of anonymity, but couldn't get variable names quite as terrible as the original ones."

Christopher Walker continues to struggle against ancient PHP applications in the automotive industry. With the point system behind him, there was a whole pile of internal applications for handling information about laws, misconceptions about the law, and other driver services.One, a home-grown CMS, was useful for publishing blog-style content about changes in the law. There was just one problem: if a post was published without a thumbnail, attempts to view that post failed with an error. It wasn't hard to find the offending line.

There's an old saying in programming: you don't have to spell correctly, you only have to spell consistently. As long as you mispell everything the same way, your language will understand your code. However, most editors and IDEs have spell-check integration, though, because it's hard to get everyone on a team to spell things wrong consistently.Unless, of course, you know just implement some bonus methods, like John's co-worker. This was frequently spammed in the Java codebase:

I remember when gasoline was under a dollar a gallon inthe US! And penny candy was only a penny! And a poundsterling could buy you a decent dinner, not just a fewounces of meat product! And the euro! Let me tell you about the euro!!

Crystal Reports falls into that category of tool which promises to help end users accomplish technical tasks easily. They can point it at a database, ask the database a question, and voila, a report pops out, complete with pretty fonts and colors.Like any such tool, however, there's a point where it starts getting technical. Jon's company passed that point ages ago, and hired on a dedicated Crystal Reports Developer to write reports that were too complicated for the end users. But even that has its limits, and eventually, their reporting needs outgrew what a Crystal Report implemented by their dedicated developer could do.So Jon's team was handed a pile of reports and told, "implement these as stored procedures in SqlServer." Now, there wasn't anything so fancy as being given requirements or any sort of description about what the reports were for, or what they did, or what would qualify as a successful port version an error. The reports themselves were the requirements: reverse engineer them exactly as written, doing a 1-to-1 mapping wherever possible.That was mostly fine, but there were a few "special" points in the original reports, where the developer had implemented their own custom Crystal Report functions. Including their own custom date functions. Like this one:

Another day, another time where someone from Brian's team needs to log into their MySQL database and kill a query. This particular query hangs while holding a lock, which hangs up every other query which needs to touch this table, which is a lot of them.

Taffer is the team lead on a team making security products. As such, they have very strict policies about how they write their code, they have very thorough code review systems, and they also have automated tests for everything.And yet, things can still slip through.Taffer submitted this change. It passed two code reviews. It didn't cause any unit tests to fail. It made it into the main branch, and sat there for two months. A team of very experienced, very senior developers didn't catch this glitch until a new hire happened to notice it during a review for something else.

Annalise has a pile of… unfortunate JavaScript. It's thousands of files with no real organization or logic behind their organization. It's got so much tech debt that it takes a full time developer just to keep it running, let alone provide support or add features or fix bugs. And the backlog of features and bugs is so long that it's best described in terms of א.Which is to say, there's a lot in there that nobody understands. So when you see a bunch of callbacks registered to onFunctionCall, you might assume that this handler is doing… something. You'd be wrong.

Yankee Ezra A.explains the screenshot below at some length. Says he:"I live in Newton, MA, an affluent, wealthy suburb of Boston.In general, city services are excellent, although thehome page of the website is a bit crowded, so I was gladto get an email with a link to the page where I couldsee how the city is handling my request/complaint aboutsidewalks, via the city's 311 service (I have no ideawhat the 311 stands for)When I went to the website, I found what you see in thephoto.I guess one can't really complain about one small errorin a large website." It's certainly an effective strategyfor keeping the complaints box empty!

Guillaume's company frequently uses consultants. It's a pretty standard setup: Guillaume's employer has many multi-year projects in flight, all of which are layered atop an existing ecosystem of in-house "do everything" applications, each full of their own WTFs.Because of the complexity, Guillaume's team has a pretty strict code review policy. Someone new to the team will write a merge request, a senior developer will coldly review it and provide huge amounts of comments. By the end of the process, the senior team member may have provided most of the code and architecture via those code review comments, and the junior member is left to just follow the instructions.When Guillaume was tasked to review a senior contractor's submission though, that felt like a change of pace. Guillaume still left a lot of comments, but it was more obviously a good merge request. Still, "good" is not "ready for production", and Guillaume ended up in a conflict with management: they wanted the merge now, he wanted the merge right: in compliance with their standards, containing no obvious gotchas, and with clear comments and documentation."This is a senior consultant," Guillaume's boss said, "and they know the product. You need to have a little trust in your senior developers' skills."Guillaume tried to explain that it wasn't about trust; everyone needed their code reviewed because more eyes was better. That didn't budge management, so Guillaume found a compromise: the merge could happen, if there was a follow up to fix the "less urgent comments". That made the users happy, that made Guillaume- well, if not happy, not irritated, and it definitely made the boss happy.One of those "less urgent" comments was on this line:

Managing true and false values is historically challenging. In the world of C, there's even a history to those challenges. Prior to the C99 standard, there wasn't a standardized version of boolean values, but there was a convention which most applications followed, based on how C conditionals and boolean logic works.In C, anything non-zero is considered "true". So, if(0) { … } won't execute the branch, but if(99) { … } will. As a result, when people wanted to make boolean equivalents, they'd use the C preprocessors to specify something like:

Matt P was spending a few hours trawling through a Java code base, working through the poorly documented logic and the bugs and the odd conventions. It was the kind of code base that rightly eschewed "magic numbers", favoring constants, but was also the kind of code base which took that to an extreme which arguably didn't help readability.For example:

This week brings an ongoing installment in a long-running gag, and a plea for helpwith a truly execrable pun. Can someone please find me some map-related material in Idaho? I promise not to credit you directly!Workaholic Stuart Longland flexes "Yes, I'm working on a Sunday. And yes, I've workedsome long hours in the past. But 56 hours in one day?I don't know whether to crow or cry!ButTRWTF is the fact these phantom work entriesre-incarnate after I delete them." In his own defense, Stuart explains (and I concur)"Monday-Friday is fairly meaningless after COVID and the Queensland Floods."

In many places, driver's licenses work on a point system. As you commit infractions, you gain or lose points, when your point score hits a certain threshold, your insurance company raises your rates or you may even lose your driver's license. Where Christopher Walker lives, you start with twelve points, and each infraction takes a few away. Once a year, you have the option to attend a workshop on safe driving, where you can then regain a few of those points.It's complicated and tedious, so several organizations, from the local department of motor vehicles to various insurance companies, have set up systems to manage this information. One of those organizations built a PHP application about fifteen years ago, and it gradually grew in kruft and complexity and confusion from that point forward. It works, but it's entirely unmaintainable.So Christopher was hired to help upgrade it to something hopefully supportable. It's still in PHP, but it's redesigned to use some best practices, switch to Laravel as its framework, and basically be as modular and component-oriented as possible.The real challenge was porting the existing data into the new system. The old schema was a mess. The "simple" problems were all around the fact that once upon a time the database only used ASCII, but was eventually upgraded to use UTF-8, but however that was done made it so that many characters like 'é' got mangled into '‡' or '§'.But all of that was nothing compared to the problems updating the revision history tables. The other developers had given up on the revision/audit history many years ago. Instead of providing detailed reports, they simply displayed "[username] changed this participant."The application tracked an audit log, and it was fairly thorough. At first glance, it even seemed pretty sensible. It had a timestamp, an action code (like "USRUPDATE" or "USRCREATE"), a "detailsaction" which contained what appeared to contain the new value of a modified field, and then a "request" which just seemed to log the raw SQL run to alter the table. That last one didn't seem important, so Christopher went ahead and started porting the old table to the new database.That's when Christopher hit the first speed bump. Some of the records were sane, comprehensible audit logs. Some of them simply weren't. For some of them, the audit fields conveyed no information. For others, you needed to look at the request field and try and reconstruct what happened from the raw SQL. Except that was easier said than done: many of the queries in the audit log referenced tables and fields which no longer existed, or had been renamed at some point. By combing through the huge pile of data, Christopher was able to determine that there were only about 20 different ways those queries got deprecated, so it wasn't too hard to come up with a script that could translate them into the new architecture.The other unusual edge case were that instead of storing SQL in the field, many stored a condensed array representing the row that was altered, like:a:23:{s:14:"participantsid";i:123456;s:5:"titre";s:8:"Monsieur";s:3:"nom";s:5:"[LAST_NAME]";s:6:"nom_jf";s:0:"";s:6:"prenom";s:6:"[FIRST_NAME]";s:10:"profession";s:1:"0";s:14:"naissance_date";s:10:"xxxx-xx-xx";s:14:"naissance_lieu";s:15:"STRASBOURG (67)";s:8:"adresse1";s:20:"[REDACTED]";s:8:"adresse2";s:0:"";s:11:"code_postal";s:5:"12345";s:5:"ville";s:9:"[REDACTED]";s:4:"tel1";s:14:"[REDACTED]";s:4:"tel2";s:0:"";s:5:"email";s:24:"[REDACTED]@gmail.com";s:6:"membre";s:0:"";s:15:"immatriculation";s:0:"";s:2:"ac";s:3:"NON";s:12:"permisnumero";s:12:"[REDACTED]";s:10:"permisdate";s:10:"2019-01-21";s:10:"permislieu";s:9:"PREFET 67";s:8:"remarque";s:0:"";s:14:"naissance_pays";s:0:"";}That wasn't terrible to manage, aside from the fact that the dumps didn't actually reference existing tables and fields. Christopher could figure out what the replacement tables and fields were and map the data back to actual audit log entries.That got Christopher 90% of the way there. But 90% isn't all the way, and the last ten percent was going to take a lot more time. Or perhaps was going to be impossible to do. Because the remaining audit log records stored queries that had nothing to do with the entity that was changed. Many of them weren't even modification statements.For example, the audit log entry that seemed to be about updating a workshop's status from "active" to "cancelled" was purportedly done by this query: SELECT lieux.departement FROM lieux JOIN stages ON stages.lieuxid = lieux.lieuxid WHERE stages.types = 'PAP' AND stages.stagesid ='123456'.Christopher summarizes:

Linda discovered a new anti-pattern, helpfully explained with comments.

Kerin inherited a scheduling application for a university. This application stored the scheduled days for a class in the database… as one comma-separated field. This was a problem for Kerin, who was hired to add predictive scheduling and classroom density measurements to the system.This particular function was written to take that data and transform it for display. Sort of.

Nullable types, at least in theory, make our code simpler and easier to maintain. If nothing else, we know when there's a risk of a null value, and can handle it with some grace. At least, that's how it works if we understand what they do.Boaz's co-worker knows that nullables are valuable, but doesn't quite get it.

Danish cookie connoisseur Jørgen N. contributes our starter course this week. "Cloudera has an interesting way of implementing "Required only" cookies." It's an exercise for the frist poster to explain to the peanut gallerywhat's so distasteful about third-party cookies.