The Daily WTF

"If you want to sneak in an ad that doesn't necessarily belong in Kongregate, I guess a little creative spelling is one way to do it," wrote Ben J.

WT Durham had never met Bruce, former sales executive and new COO of Prepackaged Pixels, before he paid a visit to WT’s department. They were responsible for maintaining the licensing API for the company’s toolkit bundle, which included their prized platform-agnostic GUI. The bundle was used for internal projects as well as for third-party licensing, and customers often bought the entire bundle just to use the GUI. Bruce wasn’t too happy about that.“We’ve conducted several customer surveys,” Bruce said. “Two-thirds of our customer base only want the GUI toolkit, not the rest of our bundle.”“Isn’t that a good thing?” WT replied. “We get a big markup on selling our toolkits as a bundle.”“We could capture more of the market if we sell the GUI toolkit separately,” Bruce responded. “We need the ability to license just the GUI.”“We’ll need to refactor our API.” WT did some mental calculations. “It’ll take our team six months.”“All twelve of you working for six months?!” Bruce shouted. “Just to make the installer work with one toolkit? That thing is 150MB! I’ll bet the installer would be one-tenth of that size with just the GUI toolkit.” Bruce made it clear that single-toolkit licensing – and decreasing the size of the installer – would be their priorities.Stovepipe SolutionWT wasn’t sure where Bruce, who had no programming experience, had gotten that information about the install size, but had a suspicion it was the head of the GUI toolkit team.“He called me first.” Mindy, senior developer for the GUI toolkit, welcomed WT into her office. “Probably right after he got promoted.”“You told him the installer size was 150MB?”“I was making nice. Everyone complains about the size of the installer.”WT sighed. “We inherited the installer codebase from a contractor almost ten years ago and built the licensing API on top of it. I told Bruce it would take six months to refactor for single-toolkit licensing, but who knows how long it would take to figure the base installer code out.”“Maybe you can just trim it down?” Mindy suggested. “Fork the installer, tear out anything not related to the GUI, and stovepipe the licensing code for now. That would take less than six months, right?”Redundant RedundanciesWT convinced the rest of his team to give the stovepipe solution a try. At worst, it would be a month wasted. At best, it would save them months of development time, allowing them to refactor the licensing code – and the underlying installer – properly later on.While every part of the installer was audited, they would analyze their installation statistics, seeing exactly what environments they needed (and which they could chuck). If a particular environment fell below 5% of their installation base, they’d throw it out.As the audit progressed, it became very apparent just why their installer was 150MB. Binaries were distributed in both 32- and 64-bit varieties, and each API namespace had its own binary. There were also optimized binaries for three different compilers. Each of these were duplicated again for debug and release versions. In all, 24 binaries per library were shipped in the installer.And the installation stats? Nearly every installation was for the 64-bit GUI toolkit, using two of their three supported compilers. Out of 24 copies of each library, they needed only two.Crash DietBruce’s demeanor changed when he heard that the licensing team could deliver a GUI-only installer in a month. “I knew it wasn’t that hard!” he said, not knowing at all how hard it was.Unfortunately, sales of the overpriced bundle – which included the GUI as well as their other toolkits – fell, as everyone bought the discounted GUI-only installer instead. Without their marked-up product sales, Prepackaged Pixels faced their first quarter without a profit. Bruce weathered the storm, but WT and others fell victim to layoffs.Several years later, WT bought a license for Prepackaged Pixel’s toolkit bundle for a freelance project. The company no longer sold GUI-only licenses, so WT had to download the entire bundle – all 150MB of it. Prepackaged Pixels had kept their business model intact, but hadn’t been able to de-bloat their installer.[Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet. Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!

"I'd say that this brings new meaning to what a 'core dump' really is," Paul N. writes.

In the Before Times, the Ancients would gather in well-sheltered caverns, gather to themselves foods blessed by the gods, drink strange, unnaturally colored concoctions, and perform the Rite of the LAN Party.In the era when the Internet was accessed by modem, to have any hope of playing a game with usable latency, you had to get all the players in the same place. This meant packing up your desktop in a car, driving to your friend’s house, and setting up your computer on whatever horizontal surface hadn’t already been claimed by another guest.

Radio WTF Presents!Jump to transcriptWelcome back to Radio WTF. This week, we visit a two kilometer wide mushroom in space, and find out WTF happens when unexpected guests arrive...Soundcloud Links:Radio WTF: Space for GuestsDirect Download:SpaceForGuests.mp3Starring (in order of appearance)Jane Bailey... as Commander Josephine Garneau

"I have a feeling that VS Code is trying to tell me that the object class provides functionality common to all JavaScript objects," writes Eric.

Hikari had just left Apps R' Us when our submitter, Steve, was asked by the CEO to review some of his code. Now, Steve wasn't on the same project as Hikari, but he had a reputation for being thorough and concise, while Hikari had a reputation for being fast but sloppy. Apps R' Us was a smallish shop, so Steve was a good pick for taking over the project despite barely knowing the requirements.Hikari was working on an augmented reality game for a very specific problem domain. In this use case, GPS was going to be unreliable. Instead, they needed to focus on the compass heading and rough location most times, at most correcting a little from GPS data. Steve skimmed through the code, looking for the overall structure before he dove into the fine details, but the following comment stopped him in his tracks:

Usul is taking a college course on Java programming, and it’s doing an excellent job preparing him for the real world. Already, he’s been forced to cope with someone who knows one true fact and has run off to apply it in the dumbest way possible. This would be his professor.Our true fact is this: A Java PreparedStament object, used for running database queries, should be closed after use. This returns its connection to the pool and frees any resources the statement was using. You should do this, and you should do it as soon as you’re done with your connection.Now, putting a call to stmt.close() in every finally block was just too much for Professor McCloseypants to deal with. So he provided this “convenience” object to deal with that problem.It’s a lot of code, so we’re going to do this in pieces. First, let’s look at the declaration:

David was recently hired on to head the company’s development team. This was a brand-new position; previously, William, the company’s IT Manager managed the developers directly in addition to his other duties.While getting his workstation set up, he was unable to install the FileZilla FTP client. It was completely blocked via domain policy. Finding this very strange, David talked to the IT Manager and hoped there was a legitimate reason.“FTP is a big security risk,” William explained. “We got hacked through FTP once so I firewalled it by blocking FileZilla installation with Group Policy.” David began to suspect that things at the company were not quite right.“Um, Group Policy isn’t a firewall,” David tried to explain. “And blocking an FTP client installer is unlikely to have an effect on network security.”William clearly didn’t understand and doubled down on his incorrect ideas. “Trust me, it works,” he said. David soon gave up and simply installed a different FTP client–which worked just fine despite FTP being “firewalled.”Later, while familiarizing himself with the business’s core applications, David decided to examine the company’s main database server. “It’s set up with RAID 10 for the best performance,” William explained. RAID 10, sometimes called RAID 1+0, mirrors all data into two arrays for fault tolerance, and then each array is striped onto additional disks to greatly improve read/write performance. It’s one of the fastest RAID configurations and a great fit for database servers.But David ran a disk benchmark and was not convinced. “That disk I/O is way too low for RAID 10,” he explained. “Can you show me the configuration?”“Of course,” William replied. “It has to be RAID 10. We ordered it that way.”They opened the RAID manager for the system, and sure enough the system was not running RAID 10. “Um, this is RAID 5,” David explained. RAID 5 uses three or more disks for striping, but the capacity of one disk is lost for storing parity data which allows the array’s data to survive a single-disk failure. Due to the required parity calculations, RAID 5 writes are not nearly as fast as RAID 10, which is bad for an I/O bound application such as the company’s main database server.“That can’t be,” William responded. “Oh, I know…Kieran must have changed it!” He called the company’s so-called systems administrator to the room, and David endured the uncomfortable exchange as William hurled wild accusations. “I know we ordered this system with RAID 10! Why did you change it?”“I just unboxed it and racked it,” Kieran responded. “Whatever RAID level it has is what it was shipped with.”“That can’t be true! You tampered with it!”Kieran rolled his eyes and turned to leave. “I have real work to do elsewhere,” he rudely explained as he excused himself from the conversation. Later on, he sent an email to both David and William which contained the original Purchase Order for the server. The PO clearly showed that William had specifically requested RAID 5 for the server.David found himself wondering if management was aware of William’s behavior and general incompetence, but tried to avoid making waves during training. But the final straw came when he set about installing several of the company’s internal applications and was unable to find any installers on his own. Once again he went to talk to William.“Oh, we don’t install any of our applications. That’s too slow!” he explained. “Instead, look at the database server. It has a shared folder called ‘APPS’, and just map that as a network drive and run everything from there.”Once again, David found himself doubting the IT Manager’s wisdom. “Doesn’t it hurt our database performance to have the entire company mapping a network drive to the same RAID array as the databases?” he asked.“Oh no,” he replied. “It actually makes it faster. The apps can talk to the database much faster if they’re running from the same server!”David was stunned by William’s poor understanding of how network-mapped file systems actually work. “That might be true if it was a terminal server…but the applications still run locally on the end user PCs. The files just happen to be stored elsewhere.”“What do you know, you’re still the new guy! We’ve had this procedure in place for years now, and for good reason!”Despite being a newbie, David decided to approach management about the ineptness he’d discovered, and explained that William was rude, incompetent, and had no business working in IT. To his surprise, management conducted a brief investigation and agreed with him! Shortly afterwards, William was let go.The new IT manager was shocked at the company’s infrastructure and quickly made a range of improvements. This included installing a proper Storage Area Network which greatly improved the database server’s performance; a new storage pool for mapped drives which was on separate disks than databases; and a real hardware firewall which, among other things, actually blocked incoming FTP connections from the Internet.David then forwarded his story on to us at The Daily WTF as a reminder that sometimes things actually do turn out okay in the vast WTF-land that is the IT industry. [Advertisement] Easily create complex server configurations and orchestrations using both the intuitive, drag-and-drop editor and the text/script editor. Find out more and download today!

I have certain mantras that I use to guide my programming. They generally revolve around this theme: "Thinking is hard, and I'm not very good at it; every block of code should be simple and obvious, because if it makes me think, I'll probably screw it up and break something." It's a good rule for me, and a good general guideline, but it's a little vague to implement as a policy.Erika’s company wanted to implement this idea as a policy, so they set a limit on how many lines could be in a single method. The thinking was that if each method was short- say, under 100 lines- it would automatically be simple(r), right?Well, Garret, down the hall, wrote a method that was three hundred lines long. During a code review, he was told to refactor it to simplify the logic and comply with the policy. So he did.

"Wow! Those folks from null and undefined must be big fans! I mean, just look at that voting turnout!" Kayleigh wrote.

Alan worked for Maria in the Books-and-Records department of a massive conglomerate. Her team was responsible for keeping all the historical customer transaction records on line and accessible for auditors and regulatory inquiries. There was a ginormous quantity of records of varying sizes in countless tables, going back decades.Maria was constantly bombarded with performance issues caused by auditors issuing queries without PK fields, or even where-clauses. Naturally, these would bring the servers to their proverbial knees and essentially prevent anyone else from doing any work.To solve this problem, Maria decided that all auditors and regulators would be locked out of the database for purposes of direct queries. Instead, they would be provided with an API that would allow them to mimic a where-clause. The underlying code would check to see if no PKs were specified, or if a where clause was missing altogether. If so, it would run the query at a much lower priority and the auditor issuing the offending query would wait while the servers did the massive scans in the background, so the other auditors could continue working with a reasonably responsive database.So far, so good.Alan wanted to build a mechanism to query the list of available tables, and the columns available in each. This could be provided via the API, which the auditors' developers could then programmatically use to create the objectified where-clause to submit as part of a query.Maria would have nothing to do with that. Instead, she wanted to sit with each potential auditor and have them define every single query that they could possibly ever need (table(s), column(s), join(s), etc). Alan pointed out that the auditors could not possibly know this in advance until some issue arose and they had to find the data relevant to the issue. Since this would vary by issue, the queries would be different every time. As such, there was no way to hard-wire them into the API.She put her foot down and demanded a specific list of queries since that was the only way to build an API.Alan went to every auditor and asked for a list of all the queries they had issued in the past year. They grudgingly obliged.Maria then went on to design each API function call with specific arguments required to execute the given underlying query. The results would then be returned in a dedicated POJO.Again, Alan groaned that defining a POJO for each and every subset of columns was inappropriate; they should at least design the POJOs to handle the entire column set of the given table, and have getters that represented columns that were not requested as part of a given API query throw a column-not-queried exception. Maria said No and insisted on separate POJOs for each query.Some time later, Alan had finished building the API. Once it was tested and deployed, the other development teams built relevant GUIs to use it and allow the auditors to pick the desired query and appropriate parameters to pass to it.This worked well until an auditor needed to add a column to one of the queries. If Maria had let Alan use table-wide column pick-lists and POJOs that had all the fields of a table, this would have been easy. However, she didn't, and made him create another virtually identical API function, but with a parameter for the additional column.Then it happened with another query. And another. And another.After a while, there were so many versions of the API that the managers of the other teams blasted her choice of implementation (they had to deal with the different versions of the POJOs for each table in their code too) and demanded that it be made sane.Finally, under pressure from above, Maria relented and instructed Alan to change the API to use the pick lists and POJOs he had originally wanted to provide.To implement this required changing the signature of every method in the API. Fearing a riot from his counterparts, he got them all together and offered a two month window during which both old and new versions of the method calls would be supported. This would give their teams a chance to make the code changes without forcing them to drop their current priorities. The other developers and managers quickly agreed to the dual-mode window and thanked Alan.Then a few of the other managers made the mistake of thanking Maria for the window in which to make changes.She royally reamed Alan: "Did I tell you to give them a dual-mode window? Did I? You will immediately pull the old methods from the API and re-deploy. You will NOT email the other teams about this. Get it done; NOW!"Alan had worked very hard to develop a good working relationship with his peers and their respective managers. Now he had been ordered to do something that was downright nasty and would absolutely destroy said relationships.Alan changed the API, ran the tests, and entered the command to deploy it, but did not hit ENTER.Then he quietly went around to each of the other managers, told them what he had been instructed to do and apologized for what was about to happen. He was somewhat taken aback when every single one of them told him not to worry; they had dealt with Maria before, that they appreciated his well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to be a team player, and that they completely understood.After that, he went back to his desk, hit ENTER, and contemplated asking the other managers if they could use a good developer.[Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet. Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!

Ah, the grand old Dictionary/Map structure. It’s so useful, languages like Python secretly implement most of their objects using it, and JavaScript objects imitate it. One of its powers is that it allows you to create a sparse array, indexed by any data type you want to index it by.Catherine’s cow-orker certainly thought this was pretty great, so they went ahead on and used the Dictionary to map interest rates to years. Years, for this application, were not tracked as actual years, but relative to an agreed upon “year zero”- the first year of the company’s operation. There was a new annual interest rate tracked for each year since.If you’re saying to yourself, “wait… this sounds like a use case for arrays…”, you’re onto something. Pity you didn’t work with Catherine. You probably wouldn’t have left this behind:

Dima had just finished her Masters in electrical engineering, and was eagerly seeking out a job. She didn't feel any particular need to stick close to her alma mater, so she'd been applying to jobs all over the country.When the phone rang during lunch hour, she was excited to learn it was a recruiter. After confirming he had the right person on the phone, he got right down to business: "We saw your resume this morning, and we're very impressed. We'd like you to come out for an on-site interview and tour. What's your availability next week?"Dima agreed. It was only after she hung up that she realized he'd never given his name or company. Thankfully, he sent her an email within ten minutes with the information. It seemed he was representing DefCo, a major defense contractor with the US government. This would normally be worth a look; it was particularly interesting, however, because she'd only submitted her resume about an hour and a half prior.They must be really impressed, she thought as she replied to confirm the travel arrangements. It'll be nice working someplace large that doesn't take forever to get things done.A week later, Dima hopped out of the cab and made her way into the building. Wrinkle number one immediately presented itself: there were at least twenty other people standing around looking nervous and holding resumes.I guess they interview in groups? she wondered. Well, they're clearly efficient.As Dima waited to tour her first top-secret manufacturing plant, she made small talk with some of the other candidates, and hit wrinkle number two: they weren't all here for the same job. Several were business majors, others had only a high school diploma, while others were mathematicians and liberal arts majors.Clearly they're consolidating the tour. Then we'll split up for interviews ...?The tour guide, a reedy man with a nervous demeanor and a soft, timid voice, informed them that interviews would be conducted later in the day, after the tour. He walked them down the hallway.Dima kept close to near the front so she could hear what he was saying. She needn't have bothered. As they passed the first closed door, he gestured to it and stammered out, "This might be a lab, I think? It could be one of the engineering labs, or perhaps one of the test facilities. They might even be writing software behind there. It's bound to be something exciting."This went on for the better part of two hours. They passed locked door after locked door, with their guide only speculating on what might be inside as he fidgeted with his glasses and avoided eye contact. Finally, he declared, "And now, we'll tour the test facilities. Right this way to the warehouse, please. You're going to love this."Wait, he didn't hedge his bets? We might actuallyseesomething today?! Dima knew better than to get her hopes up, but she couldn't help it. It wasn't as though they could get any lower.They were let into the warehouse, and their guide took them straight toward one particular corner. As they crowded around what appeared to be an ordinary truck, their guide explained its significance in hushed, breath-taken tones: "This is the system upon which our new top-secret mobile Smart-SAM and cross-pulsed radar will be mounted. Soon, this will be one of the most advanced mobile platforms in the United States!"And soon, it will be exciting, thought Dima in dismay. Right now, it's a truck."This concludes our tour," announced the guide, and it was all Dima could do not to groan. At least the interview is next. That can't be nearly as much of a let-down as the tour.Dima was shown to a waiting area with the mathematician, while the others were spilt into their own separate areas. She was called back for her interview moments later. At least they're still punctual?The interviewer introduced himself, and they shook hands. "Have you ever worked on a power supply, Dima?" he asked, which seemed like a logical question to begin the interview. She was just about to answer when he continued, "Just last week I was working on the supply for our cross-pulsed radar. That thing is huge, you wouldn't even believe it. Of course, it's not the biggest one I've ever built. Let's see now, that would've been back in '84 ..."To her horror, he continued in this vein for fifteen minutes, discussing all the large power supplies he'd worked on. For the last five minutes of the interview he changed topics, discussing sound amplifiers you could run off those power supplies, and then which bands would make best use of them (Aerosmith? Metallica? Dima didn't care. She just kept nodding, no longer bothering to even smile). Finally, he thanked her for her time, and sent her on her way.The next day, Dima was informed that she hadn't obtained the position. She breathed a sigh of relief and went on with her search.[Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet. Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!

Dan has inherited a pile of Objective-C. That’s not the WTF. The previous developer had some… creative problem solving techniques.For example, he needed to show a splash screen, and after three seconds, make it vanish. You might be thinking to yourself, “So I set a timer for 3000 milliseconds, and then close the splash screen, right?”

"With fraud protection like this, I feel very safe using my card everywhere," Brad W. writes.

Thanks to a combination of illnesses, travel, timezones, and the other horrors of the modern world, we took a week off. If Angular can skip version 3, we can skip episode 3. Welcome to Episode 4 of Software on the Rocks, brought to you by Atalasoft.In today’s episode, we are joined by TDWTF author Jane Bailey. We talk about the process of writing, the nature of programming, and “programmer anarchy”.This episode of Software on the Rocks is brought to you by Atalasoft.MP3Web Player

Sacha received custody of a legacy Python API, and was tasked with implementing a fresh version of it.He focused on authentication first. The existing API used JSON web tokens that, for some reason, never expired. Assignments like expiration=86400 and expiration=3600 were littered throughout the code, but seemed to go ignored.It didn't take long to track down the token generating code and figure out the tokens' source of (near) immortality:

The 80's were a time of great technological marvels. The Walkman allowed a person to listen to music anywhere they went. The Video Cassette Recorder allowed you to watch your favorite movies repeatedly until they wore out. Then there was the magic of Fiber Optics. Advances in the light-blasted-through-glass medium allowed places like Seymour's company to share data between offices at blistering speeds.Bill, the President of Seymour's company, always wanted them to be on the cutting edge of technology. He didn't always know the why or the how surrounding it, but when he heard about something that sounded cool, he wanted to be the first company to have it. That's where Seymour came in. As Vice President of Technological Development (a fancy job title he got for being the organization's only true techie) he made Bill's dreams come true. All he had to do was ask for the company credit card.When Bill caught wind of fiber optics at a trade show, he came back to the office ranting and raving about it. "Seymour, we've got to link the offices up with these fiber optical things!" he shouted with enthusiasm. Since their buildings were a mere three miles apart it seemed like overkill, but Seymour was bored and needed a new project. "I've had it with these slow noisy modem things we use to exchange data! I want you to weave these fibers into our computers. You can start today!"Seymour had to calm Bill down and explain to him what a big ordeal getting set up on fiber would be. Since there weren't any existing lines in town, one would have to be routed underground on the route between offices. Seymour got in contact with local utility and telecommunications companies and the initiative was underway.Fast-forwarding eight months, Seymour's fiber connection was a success. The cranky old modems had been mothballed and were a distant memory. Files and reports were being sent between offices at literal light-speed. Bill made it worth all the trouble with a sizable deposit into Seymour's bank account and his own company credit card. But then one day things went awry.Seymour's phone rang at 6:30 one morning. Bill, always the early arriver, was on the other end in a panic. "Seymour! You need to get here right now! The fibers are cooked and we can't download anything to the other office!" Seymour quickly threw on some clothes and got in his car. His commute took longer than normal because of some irritating utility work slowing down traffic but he was sure he'd have it solved in no time.Upon arrival, he took out his trusty fiber testing kit and hooked it up to one of the pairs. Nothing. He tried the next pair. Nothing. The other 13 pairs yielded the same result. "What in the hell?" he thought to himself, with Bill hovering over his shoulder. Further inspections showed nothing was wrong with their equipment in the building."Seymour, this isn't acceptable!" Bill bellowed to him, growing sweatier by the minute. "First it takes you forever to get here, now you don't have any answers for me!""I'm sorry, Bill. I got here as soon as I could. There was this damned utility work in the way..." Seymour cut himself off as an illuminated fiber light went off in his head. "I'll be right back!" Seymour ran out to his car to drive back the way he came. The route he took to work also happened to share some of the fiber line's route.He stopped at the dig site to find it mostly cleaned up with one construction worker remaining. Inspecting the ground, he found the utility company had done their work spray painting the correct areas not to dig. Green here, for the sewer, yellow for natural gas gas over there, and a communications line there. A new utility pole stood proudly, far away from any of the marked areas.Well, it was a good thought, anyway. Seymour ducked under the pole's anchor cable and started back to his car- then stopped. He looked at the anchor cable, and tracked its end down into the orange spray-paint that marked a communication line. He bent down for a closer look and found shredded bits of fiber optic cable. Bingo. He flagged down the last remaining worker to point it out, "Excuse me, sir. I think there's been an accident. This line here was essential to my company's computer system."The portly man in a hard had sauntered over, unconcerned. "Wut? This here thing? Ain't nothin but a bundle of fishing line some'un went an buried fer some reason. This ain't no computer.""Oh, right... My mistake," Seymour offered a token apology and decided he wasn't going to get through to this particular city worker. He drove back to the office and filled Bill in on the mishap. Bill's anger was quickly channeled into an unfriendly phone call to city hall and within 24 hours Seymour's incredible fiber line was back in service. After all the effort the past several months, a getaway to use actual fishing line for its intended purpose sounded like something Seymour badly needed.[Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet. Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!

A few months ago, Hannes shared with us some recycled code. In that installment, we learned that one of his team mates has… issues with strings. And naming things. And basic language features.These issues continue.For example, imagine if you well that you have a file. This file contains certain characters which you want to remove. Some need to be converted into other forms, like the letter “G” should become “6”, and “B” should become “8”. Think through how you might solve this.

"Microsoft has really stepped up their remote publishing game with their Visual Studio 2017 RC!" writes Robert M.

John N supports a C# project that, on first run, needs to initialize a database. It pulls that data from a dbInstallFilePath, controlled by the application .config file. This brings us to our representative line:

John C was a vigilant protector of justice, a dark guardian of a public who didn’t even know he existed, striking fear into the hearts of criminals. Specifically, he did IT support for the local police department. It wasn’t a great job. Their infrastructure was ancient, underfunded, and under-supported. He was expected to provide just as much support for the department’s website as well as their radio system. The customers were a “special” brand of ignorant, and often pretty angry about it. The department provided service 24/7, which meant John was expected to be available at weird hours, and not even for emergencies. Many of his customers only worked night shifts, and he had to support them.At around 3AM, John caught a ticket, entered in by one of the secretarial staff. “Officer Bishop reports her email is broke”. With that cornucopia of information, he called Officer Bishop.“I had a high school student participate in a ride-along,” she said. “He wanted some pictures of what our shooting range looked like for a presentation, so I tried to email them. I emailed them to ‘napoleon dot wilson at hot mail dot com,’ but I got an error message about it was undeliverable.”“Well,” John said, “are you sure the email address is accurate?”“Yes!” Bishop said. “It was his first name, dot last name, at hot mail dot com.”“And it’s spelled correctly?”“Yes!” Bishop said, becoming increasingly indignant. “n-a-p-o-l-e-o-n-dot-w-i-l-s-o-n-at-h-o-t-m-a-l-e.com”John chuckled. “I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it’s hotmail, as in postal mail. Like a letter. M-a-i-l.”“I know what email address he gave me,” Bishop said. “He said ‘hotmale’. I know what he said.”John took a breath and tried a different tack. “The words ‘male’ as in a man and ‘mail’ as in letters sound the same. If he just said his email address aloud, you might have simply heard him wrong.”“I know what he said,” Bishop said. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know what words mean. He told me his address was hot male!”“Officer, I’m not saying you’re stupid,” John said, summoning every ounce of self-control that he could. “But hotmail, like the letter, is a popular email service. Hotmale, like the restroom, is… um… something very different.”“Look, I know you IT people think you’re soooooo smart, but stop treating me like an idiot. I’ve been a police officer for longer than you’ve been wearing diapers. I know what he said.”“Ma’am, can I just get you to try sending an email to napoleon.wilson@hotmail.com, like the letter? Just try it for me?”“He said hotmale.”Fine, John thought to himself. It was 3AM, and Officer Bishop was on his last nerve. “Ma’am, let’s try something here. I want you to open hotmale.com in your web browser.” He was the IT person- and thus he knew that there was a lot of porn-browsing on station computers, what was a little more, right?“That’s the little blue E, right?”“Yes.”After a beat, he heard, “ACK!”John waited a beat, hoping to hear Officer Bishop could finally turn her powerful investigative mind to understand what he had been trying to tell her. Her “ack” segued into a gasp of understanding. John started nodding to himself, happy that Bishop had finally figured it out, now that a gay pornography site was staring her in the face.“Oh, I didn’t know… he’s gay?! He didn’t look gay.”“No, he’s not- I mean, he might be, but-”Bishop wasn’t listening to him at all. “Oh, but I guess you can never tell these days…”“No, try and go to hotmail, like the letter now…”“Hey, there’s a link to contact them at the bottom of the site. Maybe we should tell them that their email is broken.”John looked at the clock- it was 3:15 at this point, but it felt like he’d been working on this ticket for hours. “Okay, actually, so it sounds like the problem must be on their end. Why don’t you do this: start a new email, and send it to admin@hotmale.com. Tell them that you were trying to get in contact with Napoleon Wilson, and include the error message that you were getting, along with the message you were trying to send to Napoleon.”“Okay, I’ll do that, but let me give you a piece of advice- don’t talk to people like they’re stupid.”“I’ll definitely keep that in mind,” John said. “I’m just going to go ahead and close this ticket.” [Advertisement] Universal Package Manager – store all your Maven, NuGet, Chocolatey, npm, Bower, TFS, TeamCity, Jenkins packages in one central location. Learn more today!

Let’s say you needed to initialize a buffer to be 260 bytes long, and they all should be 255. Now, you’re using a high-level language, like C#, to talk to a legacy device, so you might have to jump through some hoops to deal with the device API, but how hard could it be? A better question might be, “how hard can you make it?”There’s an old saying: “fast, good, or cheap: pick two”. Massimo’s employer doesn’t want to be greedy, so they consistently pick one: cheap, which means they get code like this:

Fresh off an internship, Trace landed his first full-time job performing customer service and administration at a large company.Oddly enough, customer service wasn't the worst part of the job. He barely had time to help customers due to all the tasks required just to tread water in the company's lumbering beast of an ERP system. All day long, he had to click the same buttons, generate the same PDF files, and send the same emails.This drudgery wasn't limited to Trace, either. Everyone in his department, from other young graduates to the most senior reps, performed the same grueling ritual. It'd been devised long before Trace was born, and it was taken for granted—right along with the resultant stress, weariness, and repeated mantra of "I'm too busy right now!"Trace saw no reason why the repetitive process couldn't be automated in some fashion, but Trace wasn't a programmer himself. Undaunted, he scheduled a meeting with his boss to go over his idea."Let's bring in someone who can write a program for this. It'll save lots of time and effort in the long run, which we can then use to help our customers." Trace smiled, excited by the prospect of making a real difference at his new corporate home.There was no crack in his manager's tired expression. "It's not an ideal process, sure, but it works. Besides, we don't have room in our budget to hire programmers."That was the day Trace learned that there wasn't a single sound suggestion in the universe that couldn't be shot down with the words, "There's no budget for that."He returned to his desk, discouraged. Just as he was about to plow back into his paperwork, he had a new thought. Wait, why can'tImake this happen? He wasn't a programmer, but that didn't mean he couldn't learn. Hadn't his college roomate always told him that 90% of his CompSci major came down to how well he phrased his Google searches?During downtime and after work, Trace began to teach himself how to code. At first, he'd learn operations and then copy/paste them like mad—he hadn't learned loops yet—but over time, the program gained sophistication. It could click buttons, create PDF files, send emails, and lookup and consolidate important information.It was time to show it to the team. Trace spent a few coffee breaks approaching people at their cubes, demonstrating his achievement. "Isn't this great?"Some of the newer coworkers saw the benefit at once. The more veteran employees frowned with confusion, scorn, or outright fear."Are you trying to get us all fired, kid? If you show this to management, we're screwed!""I don't have any control over this!""My way works for me!"Trace reluctantly left these folks to keep clicking the same buttons, generating the same PDF files, sending the same emails, and making the same old tired complaints about their workload. He learned another important lesson about how easy it was to become complacent with, and even dependent upon, the status quo.With that lesson firmly in mind, he spent his free time deepening his programming knowledge, refining his existing code, even throwing in a few loops. It paid off as his daily administrative chores became a matter of clicks rather than hours. Customers gave him great feedback because he had time to give their issues the attention they deserved.Over time, Trace climbed the ladder with promotions, and quietly shared his program with each new hire. Whenever they suggested process improvements of their own, he made sure to listen.[Advertisement] Release!is a light card game about software and the people who make it. Play with 2-5 people, or up to 10 with two copies - only $9.95 shipped!

Hugo K. writes, "Space Mountain is closed for refurbishment. It will reopen when all security patches are installed."