by Mark Bowytz on (#4FSGH)
"I do my best at teaching my children the basics in life, but then 'educational' toys like this one get in my way," Roger G. writes.
Link | http://thedailywtf.com/ |
Feed | http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf |
Updated | 2025-07-11 08:30 |
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by Ellis Morning on (#4FQ3Z)
Many years ago, Chris B. worked for a company that made CompactPCI circuit boards. When the spec for hot-swappable boards (i.e., boards that could be added and removed without powering down the system) came out, the company began to make some. Chris became the designated software hot-swap expert.The company bought several expensive racks with redundant everything for testing purposes. In particular, the racks had three power supply units even though they only required two to run. The idea was that if one power supply were to fail, it could be replaced while the system was still up and running. The company also recommended those same racks to its customers.As part of a much-lauded business deal, the company's biggest-spending customer set up a lab with many of these racks. A short while later, though, they reported a serious problem: whenever they inserted a board with the power on, it wouldn't come up properly. However, the same board would initialize without issue if it were in place when the system was first started.Several weeks slipped by as Chris struggled to troubleshoot remotely and/or reproduce the problem locally, all to no avail. The customer, Sales, and upper management all chipped in to provide additional pressure. The deal was in jeopardy. Ben, the customer's panicked Sales representative, finally suggested a week-long business trip in hopes of seeing the problem in situ and saving his commission the company's reputation. And that was how Chris found himself on an airplane with Ben, flying out to the customer site.Bright and early Monday morning, Chris and Ben arrived at the customer's fancy lab. They met up with their designated contact—an engineer—and asked him to demonstrate the problem.The engineer powered up an almost empty rack, then inserted a test board. Sure enough, it didn't initialize.Chris spent a moment looking at the system. What could possibly be different here compared to our setup back home? he asked himself. Then, he spotted something that no one on the customer side had ever mentioned to him previously."I see you only have one of the three power supplies for the chassis in place." He pointed to the component in question. "Why is that?""Well, they're really loud," the engineer replied.Chris bit back an unkind word. "Could you humor me and try again with two power supplies in place?"The engineer hooked up a second power supply obligingly, then repeated the test. This time, the board mounted properly."Aha!" Ben looked to Chris with a huge grin on his face."So, what was the issue?" the engineer asked."I'm not a hardware expert," Chris prefaced, "but as I understand it, the board draws the most power whenever it's first inserted. Your single power supply wasn't sufficient, but with two in there, the board can get what it needs."It was almost as if the rack had been designed with this power requirement in mind—but Chris kept the sarcasm bottled. He was so happy and relieved to have finally solved the puzzle that he had no room in his mind for ill will."You're a miracle-worker!" Ben declared. "This is fantastic!"In the end, functionality won out over ambiance; the fix proved successful on the customers' other racks as well. Ben was so pleased, he treated Chris to a fancy dinner that evening. The pair spent the rest of the week hanging around the customer's lab, hoping to be of some use before their flight home. [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!
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by Bobby T. Johnson on (#4F5RD)
Gary works at a medium company. Big enough that workers are specialized in their duty, but small enough to know people in other departments and to make turf wars a little more close and personal: danger close. Most of the departments see themselves as part of a team, but a few individuals see themselves as McCarthy, who will themselves alone save the company and defeat the enemies (who are all spies inside the company sent to destroy it from the inside).One of these individuals is named Eric. Eric is close to a Kevin. Eric is the front-end developer, and neither likes nor cares about what happens on the backend. Whenever Eric has an issue, he blames the backend. CSS rendering glitch? Backend problem. Browser crash? That’s the backend problem. Slow UI, even when all the data is cached clientside? Definitely a backend problem. Gary used to get mad, but now knows that Eric is so dumb that he doesn’t even know how dumb he is.Eric grates on people’s nerves. Since nothing is his problem, he doesn’t seem to have any work, so he bugs backend developers like Gary with terrible jokes. A typically Eric joke:“Do you know why they call back end developers back end,†Eric asked.
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by snoofle on (#4EPWJ)
When I was in college, as part of the general course requirements we had to take Probability and Statistics. The first time around I found it to be an impenetrable concept beyond my grasp, and I flunked. Since it was a requirement, I took it again and barely skated by. Joy; I had cleared the hurdle!By that time, it had become clear to me that I was going into a field that required a whole lot more understanding of P&S than I had acquired. Since I wanted to be properly prepared, I signed up for a free summer school course to try it once more.This time, the professor was a crotchety old German mathematician. He would not allow us to record the lectures. We were told not to bring the textbook to class as the turning of pages distracted him. We were not even allowed to take notes. Every class began with Good morning, Pencils Down! He firmly believed that you had not mastered a skill unless you could explain it in simple words to a complete neophyte, by merely describing it in non-technical terms that they already understood.Based upon my prior two attempts at this subject, after two classes I was convinced that this was going to be a waste of time. After all, if I could barely understand it with the textbook and notes, what chance did I have like this? But I had already signed up and committed the time, so I stuck with it.To my shock-surprise-awe, he managed to verbally paint a picture through which the concepts became crystal clear; not just to me, but to everyone in the class. I had no trouble acing all the homework assignments and tests, and my entire notebook for the course consisted of:
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by Jane Bailey on (#4E3NB)
Sometimes the writing is on the wall; sometimes, you know you have to get out. Today's submitter, Pietyr, was in just that sort of situation. He decided to head for greener pastures, hoping for a job with a good atmosphere, someplace where he could take it easier and enjoy his work more.Initech was a startup, one that didn't have any clients yet. No external deadline pressure, just venture funding and free beer Fridays. Pietyr gave them a call and spoke with their receptionist-who-was-also-HR, Chrysanthemum."May I call you Chrissy?" he asked, trying not to laugh."You can call me anything you like, Sugar, so long as it's not 'late for dinner.'"Pietyr scored an interview same day—"Come on over when you get a chance, darling, we're here all afternoon"—and so, at 4:00, he called off for a doctor's appointment and drove to the site. It was a suite in a larger building, all one dim room, lit mostly by Christmas lights ... in March. A dozen people crowded onto long tables, plugging away at MacBooks, entirely uninterested in his arrival. While Chrissy answered phones, he watched a good ten minutes of Kindergarten Cop on the large TV they clearly had on for white noise in the background.At least it's different, he told himself."Mr. Taberd will see you now," Chrissy said, interrupting Arnold."Ah, right. And that is ...?""The CTO."With no further preparation than that, he was ushered into a side room, little bigger than a closet, into which a lean blond man and a midsize desk had been crammed unceremoniously. He shook hands, sat, and let the CTO do most of the talking."What's the biggest issue with cloud computing?" Mr. Taberd finally asked, leaning forward."Security?" guessed Pietyr."Wrong! It's monitoring. When you don't have access to the servers, you don't know what they're doing! But that's where Initech comes in," boasted the blond, in what was clearly a prepared elevator pitch. "Windows is always doing things under the hood, and it's impossible to tell what at scale. Not without a centralized system. What we're doing here is hooking the Windows API calls—""Which ones?""All of them! Every API in the user, gdi, and networking DLLs, plus some of the internal kernel functions. We hook them through a backdoor my boys have cooked up, save off all the parameters whenever they're called. Our background process reads those parameters from shared memory, ships them to a cluster of databases—we're doing about 250 elastisearch instances per server—and reads it all into our responsive web frontend. That way you know exactly what it's doing at all times!"Pietyr could tell right away it would never work. Not even in Windows XP, let alone more secure versions. Too much overhead; it would bring the monitored server to its knees.But, on the other hand, free beer. And hey, if the product never sold, he could kick back and take it easy, right? As soon as Tabard mentioned free lunch every day—"Thanks to our Venture Capital funds!"—he was in.He took the job, working on the low-level hook code so that all the cloud nonsense was someone else's problem. A month later, he received a letter informing him his shares were effectively worthless. Fine by him, since he had no shares anyway.It took another month before he casually asked a coworker how long they'd been working there."Oh, not long. Only about two years.""Really? You must have been here since the beginning then, or nearly," Pietyr commented. He would have guessed from the codebase the company had only been running six months or so, but he kept that to himself."No, no. Jan has been here all seven years, I've only been here two."Pietyr stared. "Seven years?! You've been working on this with no customers for seven years?!""Well, I heard a rumor we've got a client about to sign up for the beta.""A rumor." Pietyr sighed, firmly placing the conversation in the not-my-business bucket, and got on with his work. Still, the sense of unease didn't leave him.A month after that, the unthinkable happened: Taberd not only left his little office, but turned off the television. "Alright, everyone, listen up! Stop what you're doing. We're out of money."And just like that, Pietyr was back on the job market. That day, he learned a valuable lesson: don't let free beer convince you to ignore red flags. [Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
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by Ellis Morning on (#4DPWN)
Not so long ago in 2015, Carl C. was asked to give a talk to an amateur radio club. The venue was a local church that rented out their meeting hall to various community groups, businesses, and even the odd academic session. The space boasted a multimedia setup with several video screens, making it a great place at which to present.Carl prepared his talk, and a PowerPoint slide deck to go with. On the day of the presentation, he arrived at the meeting hall with plenty of time to spare. Alone in silence, he headed toward the front of the room and surveyed the technical setup. Thankfully, it was straightforward: there was a table set up in front of the projector screen, with a VGA connector resting directly on it. Carl unpacked his laptop, retrieved the HDMI-to-VGA adapter he'd brought along, and began plugging everything together."NOOO!"Carl jumped, then glanced up wide-eyed like a deer in headlights. It wasn't a truck bearing down on him, but rather a flustered gentleman hugging a laptop to his chest."I'm the IT guru here," he introduced himself breathlessly, hurrying around the table to all but elbow Carl aside. "We don't allow outside computers to be connected to our system. That's how viruses spread! You'll have to run your presentation from our computer." He connected his own laptop to the AV system in lieu of Carl's."Uh ..." Carl blurted."Yes?" The guru fixed him with a withering stare.I'm not joining your network, Carl thought. There's no such thing as VGA viruses! But the stare was so intense that the objections died before they left his throat."How, uh ... how do I get my presentation on there?" he asked instead, gesturing to the guru's laptop."Can you copy it to a USB stick?" the guru asked. "That's the best way."Right. No one's ever gotten a virus from a random USB stick. Biting his lip to short-circuit a laugh, Carl dug through the side pockets on his laptop bag. "I think I've got one with me." [Advertisement] Forget logs. Next time you're struggling to replicate error, crash and performance issues in your apps - Think Raygun! Installs in minutes. Learn more.
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by Charles Robinson on (#4DAZE)
Alvin had the fortune of working with an exceptional talent while he was employed at Virtucon. Bart knew how to do everything from desktop support to software development to database administration to IT security. Not only was he proficient in all of them, he also knew them better than those with many years of experience.Bart had been with Virtucon since the early days, racking up nearly 20 years of tenure. During this time, he 'mastered' everything and asserted himself to the point that no changes could happen without his approval. His changes were auto-approved because of course any idea he had was a good one. This led to myriad problems for fellow IT people like Alvin, who were hired after Bart."Be wary of Bart," Alvin was warned by his coworker Bob, who was Bart's junior by a couple years. "He has a long history of buffoonery, yet has somehow ascended to the #3 position in IT." Alvin sipped on a generous mug of coffee while Bob regaled with the Ballad of Bart. From the time he was just a helpdesk intern that put his shoulder through a core switch after tripping while carrying boxes, Bart was wrecking things.When Bart worked his way up to server support, he 'fixed' an Exchange issue by restoring a backup into production without warning because "It worked when the backup was taken." When he was assigned a web server problem, he spent a few days troubleshooting it without asking for any help. When he finally gave in, he told Bob that he couldn't figure out a frustrating IIS HTTPS binding issue. Bob explained to him that something else had to be the problem because the server was running Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.When Bart added software development to his repertoire, he clearly didn't understand how code changes worked. Or code repositories for that matter. He always wanted to be the one to fix problems, so he would stick his nose in code that it didn't belong.Bart once tried to make fee schedule changes to accounting software by opening its PowerBuilder libraries in Notepad++. He proceeded to print out the .PBL and use a pencil to scribble out every value from the old schedule and wrote in the new ones. He then scanned his penciled changes in as a PDF and emailed it to Bob to implement.Frustrated, Bob spent an entire day showing Bart how their GitHub repositories worked. He seemed to understand, so Bob went on his way. While Bob hoped Bart wouldn't actually produce any more code, perhaps it would save their printer some toner if he did. The next day, all the developers were complaining to Bob that they couldn't access GitHub. It turns out Bart saw GitHub as a threatening malicious code breeding ground so he had a network admin block it on the firewall. He then sent an email to development staff explaining this and that they were supposed to now use 'BartHub', a file share he set up on his own computer.Bob and the developers managed to distract Bart by pointing out how the DBA team needed help. The first thing he did was try to create an SSRS report using a series of text boxes in a grid to make a matrix. The DBA's had a good laugh at that until Bart started to commit worse atrocities.One day an entire metrics database suddenly became a bunch of null values, which is not very helpful for metrics. Bart threw a fit because the data he was working on was gone. He demanded whomever messed up the data be hunted down. He suggested that missing historical data could be found by performing 'key triggers', whatever those were. He emphasized his point by making hand motions like he was scrambling a Rubik's cube. They ignored him and a lead DBA ran a profiler trace to find that the unconstrained null updates came from... Bart's workstation.Alvin had long since imbibed his coffee when Bob finished his story. Bob turned back to his workstation to check his email, "Oh, would you look at that. I guess we have some changes up top!" The email stated that the current VP of IT was announcing his retirement after 30 years at Virtucon. The CTO would be taking on that new role at the end of the month.The transition plan began and the CTO was groomed to take over. That plan was shredded a week before it was to take place because the CTO suddenly found himself unemployed. The finance department was investigating his use of the company credit card and found thousands of dollars in personal charges, so he was unceremoniously terminated. Turmoil gripped the office as an entire department waited to find out who their new leader would be.Everyone except Bart put in a good word for Bob to become the next VP of IT. At minimum, they should hire someone from the outside. Pretty much anyone but Bart was the popular suggestion.Bart predictably put in a good word for himself and talked a big game about all of his expertise. He added security expert to his resume by talking about disabling his home WIFI’s SSID broadcast and changing the default password. Then there was the previously-unmentioned experience as an IT Project Manager where he apparently led several teams at Schmoeing.That Friday, that dreaded email with the subject New VP of IT came out. Being the most tenured person remaining while having "great leadership qualities," Bart got the promotion and Bob didn't. Many job search sites probably thought they were getting a DDoS attack over the weekend while everyone in Virtucon IT looked to abandon ship. Bart's reign of terror lasted 18 months before Virtucon realized they made a grave mistake. Bob, Alvin, and many others weren't around to see the way it all ended. [Advertisement] Forget logs. Next time you're struggling to replicate error, crash and performance issues in your apps - Think Raygun! Installs in minutes. Learn more.
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by Lorne Kates on (#4C7W4)
Radio WTF Presents!Jump to transcriptWelcome back to Radio WTF. This week, we learn of the power of confidence.Soundcloud Links:Radio WTF: ConfidenceDirect Download:DownloadStarring (in order of appearance)Remy Porter... as Kyle
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by Alex Papadimoulis on (#4BY8R)
A couple weeks back, I posted the Free Mug Day campaign: run through the quick BuildMaster tutorial, and I'll send you a free mug. Today, I have a slightly different offer: meet me at InedoCon (Portland, May 22/23) as a TDWTF delegate, and let's chat software over scotch!Why Portland? As part of the mug campaign, I asked everyone to share their feedback/comments/advice, and I got lots of suggestions on how we can improve the software itself. That was great, and then I saw this:
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by Jane Bailey on (#4BS3E)
If you ask an engineer whether it's safe to cross a bridge, he'll happily walk you through how safe bridges are, how the mathematics work out, how far we've come in structural safety. You'll come away from the conversation feeling confident that no bridge will ever collapse anywhere on the face of the Earth. If you ask a software engineer about banks, however, you'll likely come away terrified, with a 50/50 chance you're now convinced to put all your money in bitcoin. Banks are notorious for bad software decisions—not so much because the decisions are worse, but because most people assume banks are more careful and security-minded.Today's submitter, Kato, worked at Inibank, where they used a commercial product called T24 as the core of their banking system. T24 is used by hundreds of banks worldwide. It's customizable for a wide range of banking solutions, and so like most large customizable suites, there are programmers that specialize in writing custom code for it and consultants that will hold your hand through major upgrades.Inibank brought in a consultant to take on a special project while their resources were busy. At the end of the business day, there is a Close Of Business process that has to be done to ensure all the money gets where it's going, all the appropriate outputs are recalculated, and all the relevant reports are run. In banks, this also changes the system's date to the next working day—which is why if you do online banking on a Sunday, none of it begins to process until Monday morning. The consultant was meant to create a new report that would run during the Close Of Business process, which would do extra processing if it were also the End of Month.Kato sat down with the new guy, showing him how they'd set up their end of day reports. "You see here, there's a global for the last working day, one for today, and one for the next working day. Those are YYMMDD, so they're easier to work with.""Right, right okay, gotcha. Gotcha. And what format is that?""... I don't know the standard off the top of my head, but it's year, month, day.""Right, right, okay. Cool. I'll get right to work, then."Kato walked away from the conversation with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he tried to ignore it. The consultant said he was all set up and ready. Surely he knew what he was doing, right? Kato put it out of his mind, and didn't worry about it again until it came time to review the code, and he found this gem:
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