by Mark Bowytz on (#3EAY3)
Joe P. wrote, When I tried to buy a coffee at the airport with my contactless VISA card, it apparently thought my name was '%s'."
The Daily WTF
| Link | http://thedailywtf.com/ |
| Feed | http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf |
| Updated | 2025-11-25 20:01 |
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by snoofle on (#3E7Y9)
Technology improves over time. Storage capacity increases. Spinning platters are replaced with memory chips. CPUs and memory get faster. Moore's Law. Compilers and languages get better. More language features become available. But do these changes actually improve things? Fifty years ago, meteorologists used the best mainframes of the time, and got the weather wrong more than they got it right. Today, they have a global network of satellites and supercomputers, yet they're wrong more than they're right (we just had a snowstorm in NJ that was forecast as 2-4", but got 16" before drifting).As with most other languages, FORTRAN also added structure, better flow control and so forth. The problem with languages undergoing such a massive improvement is that occasionally, coding styles live for a very long time.Imagine a programmer who learned to code using FORTRAN IV (variable names up to 6 characters, integers implicitly start with "I" through "N" and reals start with any other letter - unless explicitly declared, flow control via GOTO, etc) writing a program in 2000 (using a then-current compiler but with FORTRAN IV style). Now imagine some PhD candidate coming along in 2017 to maintain and enhance this FORTRAN IV-style code with the latest FORTRAN compiler.A.B.was working at a university with just such a scientific software project as part of earning a PhD. These are just a couple of the things that caused a few head-desk moments.Include statements. The first variant only allows code to be included. The second allows preprocessor directives (like #define).
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by Scot Devera on (#3E5B3)
I once inherited an application which had a bug in it. Okay, I’ve inherited a lot of applications like that. In this case, though, I didn’t know that there was a bug, until months later, when I sat next to a user and was shocked to discover that they had evolved a complex work-around to bypass the bug which took about twice as long, but actually worked.“Why didn’t you open a ticket? This shouldn’t be like this.â€â€œEnh… it’s fine. And I hate dealing with tickets.â€In their defense, our ticketing system at that office was a godawful nightmare, and nobody liked dealing with it.The fact is, awful ticket tracking aside, 99% of users don’t report problems in software. Adding logging can only help so much- eventually you have a giant haystack filled with needles you don’t even know are there. You have no way to see what your users are experiencing out in the wild.But what if you could? What if you could build, test and deploy software with a real-time feedback loop on any problems the users were experiencing?Our new sponsor, Raygun, gives you a window into the real user-experience for your software. With a few minutes of setup, all the errors, crashes, and performance issues will be identified for you, all in one tool.You're probably using software and services today that relies on Raygun to identify when users have a poor experiences: Domino's Pizza, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Unity all use it, along with many others.Now’s the time to sign up. In a few minutes, you can have a build of your app with Raygun integration, and you’ll be surprised at how many issues it can identify. There’s nothing to lose with a 14-day free trial, and there are pricing options available that fit any team size. [Advertisement] Otter allows you to easily create and configure 1,000's of servers, all while maintaining ease-of-use, and granular visibility down to a single server. Find out more and download today!
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by Jane Bailey on (#3E4TC)
Oh, PHP. It's the butt of any number of jokes in the programming community. Those who do PHP often lie and pretend they don't, just to avoid the social stigma. Today's submitter not only works in PHP, but they also freelance: the bottom of the bottom of the development hierarchy.Last year, Ilya was working on a Joomla upgrade as well as adjusting several components on a big, obscure website. As he was poking around in the custom code, he found today's submission. You see, the website is in Italian. At the top of the page, it shows not only the date, but also the saint of the day. This is a Catholic thing: every day of the year has a patron saint, and in certain cultures, you might even be named for the saint whose day you were born on. A full list can be found on this Italian Wikipedia page.Every day, the website was supposed to display text like "18 luglio: santi Sinforosa e sette compagni" (July 18: Sinforosa and the Seven Companions). But the code that generated this string had broken. It wasn't Ilya's task to fix it, but he chose to do so anyway, because why not?His first suspect for where this text came from was this mess of Javascript embedded in the head:
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by Remy Porter on (#3E1KM)
Michael W came into the office to a hair-on-fire freakout: the midnight jobs failed. The entire company ran on batch processes to integrate data across a dozen ERPs, mainframes, CRMs, PDQs, OMGWTFBBQs, etc.: each business unit ran its own choice of enterprise software, but then needed to share data. If they couldn’t share data, business ground to a halt.Business had ground to a halt, and it was because the archiver job had failed to copy some files. Michael owned the archiver program, not by choice, but because he got the short end of that particular stick.The original developer liked logging. Pretty much every method looked something like this:
by Remy Porter on (#3DYFX)
“Probably the best thing to do is try and reorganize the project some,†Tim, “Alienâ€â€™s new boss said. “It’s a bit of a mess, so a little refactoring will help you understand how the code all fits together.â€â€œAlien†grabbed the code from git, and started walking through the code. As promised, it was a bit of a mess, but partially that mess came from their business needs. There was a bunch of common functionality in a Common module, but for each region they did business in- Asia, North America, Europe, etc.- there was a region specific deployable, each in its own module. Each region had its own build target that would include the Common module as part of the build process.The region-specific modules were vaguely organized into sub-modules, and that’s where “Alien†settled in to start reorganizing. Since Asia was the largest, most complicated module, they started there, on a sub-module called InventoryManagement. THey moved some files around, set up the module and sub-modules in Maven, and then rebuilt.The Common library failed to build. This gave “Alien†some pause, as they hadn’t touched anything pertaining to the Common project. Specifically, Common failed to build because it was looking for some files in the Asia.InventoryManagement sub-module. Cue the dive into the error trace and the vagaries of the build process. Was there a dependency between Common and Asia that had gone unnoticed? No. Was there a build-order issue? No. Was Maven just being… well, Maven? Yes, but that wasn’t the problem.After hunting around through all the obvious places, “Alien†eventually ran an ls -al.
by Mark Bowytz on (#3DQ5Y)
"I appreciate that TIAA doesn't want to fully recognize that the country once known as Burma now calls itself Myanmar, but I don't think that this is the way to handle it," Bruce R. writes.
by Remy Porter on (#3DKZZ)
Adding assertions and sanity checks to your code is important, especially when you’re working in a loosely-typed language like JavaScript. Never assume the input parameters are correct, assert what they must be. Done correctly, they not only make your code safer, but also easier to understand.Matthias’s co-worker… doesn’t exactly do that.
by snoofle on (#3DGTC)
During the few months after getting my BS and before starting my MS, I worked for a bank that held lots of securities - and gold - in trust for others. There was a massive vault with multiple layers of steel doors, iron door grates, security access cards, armed guards, and signature comparisons (live vs pre-registered). It was a bit unnerving to get in there, so deep below ground, but once in, it looked very much like the Fort Knox vault scene in Goldfinger.At that point, PCs weren't yet available to the masses and I had very little exposure to mainframes. I had been hired as an assistant to one of their drones who had been assigned to find all of the paper-driven-changes that had gone awry and get their books up to date.To this end, I spent about a month talking to everyone involved in taking a customer order to take or transfer ownership of something, and processing the ledger entries to reflect the transaction. From this, I drew a simple flow chart, listing each task, the person(s) responsible, and the possible decision tree at each point.Then I went back to each person and asked them to list all the things that could and did go wrong with transaction processing at their junction in the flow.What had been essentially straight-line processing with a few small decision branches, turned out to be enough to fill a 30 foot long by 8 foot high wall of undesirable branches. This became absolutely unmanageable on physical paper, and I didn't know of any charting programs on the mainframe at that time, so I wrote the whole thing up with an index card at each junction. The "good" path was in green marker, and everything else was yellow (one level of "wrong") or red (wtf-level of "wrong").By the time it was fully documented, the wall-o-index-cards had become a running joke. I invited the people (who had given me all of the information) in to view their problems in the larger context, and verify that the problems were accurately documented.Then management was called in to view the true scope of their problems. The reason that the books were so snafu'd was that there were simply too many manual tasks that were being done incorrectly, cascading to deeply nested levels of errors.Once we knew where to look, it became much easier to track transactions backward through the diagram to the last known valid junction and push them forward until they were both correct and current. A rather large contingent of analysts were then put onto this task to fix all of the transactions for all of the customers of the bank.It was about the time that I was to leave and go back to school that they were talking about taking the sub-processes off the mainframe and distributing detailed step-by-step instructions for people to follow manually at each junction to ensure that the work flow proceeded properly. Obviously, more manual steps would reduce the chance for errors to creep in!A few years later when I got my MS, I ran into one of the people that was still working there and discovered that the more-manual procedures had not only not cured the problem, but that entirely new avenues of problems had cropped up as a result. [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!
by Ellis Morning on (#3DDN9)
At the end of 2016, Ian S. accepted a contract position at a large medical conglomerate. He was joining a team of 6 developers on a project to automate what was normally a 10,000-hour manual process of cross-checking spreadsheets and data files. The end result would be a Django server offering a RESTful API and MySQL backend."You probably won't be doing anything much for the first week, maybe even the first month," Ian's interviewer informed him.Ian ignored the red flag and accepted the offer. He needed the experience, and the job seemed reasonable enough. Besides, there were only 2 layers of management to deal with: his boss Daniel, who led the team, and his boss' boss Jim.The office was in an lavish downtown location. The first thing Ian learned was that nobody had assigned desks. Each day, everyone had to clean out their desks and return their computers and peripherals to lockers. Because team members needed to work closely together, everyone claimed the same desk every day anyway. This policy only resulted in frustration and lost time.As if that weren't bad enough, the computers were also heavily locked down. Ian had to go through the company's own "app store" to install anything. This was followed by an approval process that could take a few days based on how often Jim went through his pending approvals. The one exception was VMWare Workstation. Because this app cost money, it involved a 2-week approval process. In the middle of December, everyone was off on holiday, making it impossible for Ian's team to get approvals or talk to anyone helpful. Thus Ian's only contributions that month were a couple of Visio diagrams and a Django "hello world" that Daniel had requested. (It wasn't as if Daniel could check his work, though. He didn't know anything about Python, Django, REST, MySQL, MVC, or any other technology relevant to the project.)The company provided Ian a copy of Agile for Dummies, which seemed ironic in retrospect, as the team was forced to the spend entire first week of January breaking the next 6 months into 2-week sprints. They weren't allowed to leave sprints empty, and had to allocate 36-40 hours each week. They could only make stories for features, so no time was penciled in for bug fixes or paying off technical debt. These stories were then chopped into meaningless pieces ("Part 1", "Part 2", etc.) so they'd fit into their arbitrary timelines."This is why medical insurance is so expensive", Daniel remarked at one point, either trying to lighten the mood or stave off his pending insanity.Later in January, Ian arrived one morning to find the rest of his team standing around confused. Their project was now dead at the hands of a VP who'd had it in for Jim. The company had a tenure process, so the VP couldn't just fire Jim, but he could make his life miserable. He reassigned all of Jim's teams that he didn't outright terminate, exiled Jim to New Jersey, and gave him nothing to do but approve timesheets. Meanwhile, Daniel was told not to bother coming in again."Don't worry," the powers-that-be said. "We don't usually terminate people here."Ian's gapingly empty schedule was filled with a completely different task: "shadowing" someone in another state by screen-sharing and watching them work. The main problem with this arrangement was that Ian's disciple was a systems analyst, not a programmer.Come February, Ian's new team was also terminated."We don't have a culture of layoffs," the powers-that-be assured him.They were still intent on shoving Ian into a systems analyst position despite his requisite lack of experience. It was at that point that he gave up and moved on. He later heard that within a few months, the entire division had been fired.[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!
by Remy Porter on (#3DATZ)
In the process of resolving a ticket, Pedro C found this representative line, which has nothing to do with the bug he was fixing, but was just something he couldn’t leave un-fixed:
by Mark Bowytz on (#3D3JA)
"Good news! I can get my order shipped anywhere I want...So long as the city is named Hamilton," Daniel wrote.
by Remy Porter on (#3D0D8)
Guy’s eight-person team does a bunch of computer vision (CV) stuff. Guy is the “framework Guyâ€: he doesn’t handle the CV stuff so much as provide an application framework to make the CV folks lives easy. It’s a solid division of labor, with one notable exception: Richard.Richard is a Computer Vision Researcher, head of the CV team. Guy is a mere “code monkeyâ€, in Richard’s terms. Thus, everything Richard does is correct, and everything Guy does is “cute†and “a nice attemptâ€. That’s why, for example, Richard needed to take a method called readFile() and turn it into readFileHandle(), “for clarityâ€.The code is a mix of C++ and Python, and much of the Python was written before Guy’s time. While the style in use doesn’t fit PEP–8 standards (the official Python style), Guy has opted to follow the in use standards, for consistency. This means some odd things, like putting a space before the colons:
by Remy Porter on (#3CX5M)
Greenwich must think they’re so smart, being on the prime meridian. Starting in the 1840s, the observatory was the international standard for time (and thus vital for navigation). And even when the world switched to UTC, GMT is only different from that by 0.9s. If you want to convert times between time zones, you do it by comparing against UTC, and you know what?I’m sick of it. Boy, I wish somebody would take them down a notch. Why is a tiny little strip of London so darn important?Evan’s co-worker obviously agrees with the obvious problem of Greenwich’s unearned superiority, and picks a different town to make the center of the world: Halifax.
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by snoofle on (#3CSSE)
There are two ways of accumulating experience in our profession. One is to spend many years accumulating and mastering new skills to broaden your skill set and ability to solve more and more complex problems. The other is to repeat the same year of experience over and over until you have one year of experience n times.Anon took the former path and slowly built up his skills, adding to his repertoire with each new experience and assignment. At his third job, he encountered The Man, who took the latter path.If you wanted to execute a block of code once, you have several options. You could just put the code in-line. You could put it in a function and call said function. You could even put it in a do { ... } while (false); construct. The Man would do as below because it makes it easier and less error prone to comment out a block of code:
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by Remy Porter on (#3CP5S)
Starting with the film Saw, in 2004, the “torture porn†genre started to seep into the horror market. Very quickly, filmmakers in that genre learned that they could abandon plot, tension, and common sense, so long as they produced the most disgusting concepts they could think of. The game of one-downsmanship arguably reached its nadir with the conclusion of The Human Centipede trilogy. Yes, they made three of those movies.This aside into film critique is because Greg found the case of a “JavaScript Centipedeâ€: the refuse from one block of code becomes the input to the next block.
by Mark Bowytz on (#3CEYK)
Robert K. wrote, "Let's just keep this error between us and never speak of it again."
by Remy Porter on (#3CC6D)
Thanks to Hired, we’ve got the opportunity to bring you another little special project- Legacy Hardware. Hold on tight for a noir-thriller that dares to ask the question: “why does everything in our organization need to talk to an ancient mainframe?†Also, it’s important to note, Larry Ellison really does have a secret lair on a volcanic island in Hawaii.Once again, special thanks to Hired, who not only helped us produce this sketch, but also helps keep us keep the site running. With Hired, instead of applying for jobs, your prospective employer will apply to interview you. You get placed in control of your job search, and Hired provides a “talent advocate†who can provide unbiased career advice and make sure you put your best foot forward. Sign up now, and find the best opportunities for your future with HiredThanks to director Zane Cook, Michael Shahen and Sam Agosto. And of course, extra special thanks to our star, Molly Arthur.Thanks to Academy Pittsburgh for the office location!For the video averse, also enjoy the script, which isn't exactly what ended up on camera:Setting: 3 “different†interrogation rooms, which are quite obviously the same room, with minor decorative changes.Time: Present dayCharacters:
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by Jane Bailey on (#3C9BM)
"Troy! Troy!"Troy looked up from his keyboard with a frown as his coworker Cassie skidded to a halt, panting for breath. "Yes?""How soon can you get that new client converted?" Cassie asked. "We're at DEFCON 1 in ops. We need to be running yesterday!"Troy's frown only deepened. "I told you, I've barely had a chance to peek at their old system."The client was hoping to convert sometime in the next month—usually no big deal, as they'd just have to schedule a date, write a handful of database conversion scripts, and swing the domains to a fresh instance of their own booking software. It was that middle step that Troy hadn't gotten to. With no go-live date picked, working on new features seemed a higher priority.Cassie had been spouting doom-and-gloom predictions all month: the client's in-house solution read like mid-1990s code despite being written in 2013. She'd been convinced it was a house of cards ready to collapse at any minute. Apparently, she'd been right."Okay, slow down. Where's the fire?" It wasn't that Troy didn't believe her per se, but when he'd skimmed the database, he hadn't seen anything spectacularly bad. Even if the client was down, their data could be converted easily. It wasn't his responsibility to maintain their old system, just to get them to the new one. "Is this a data problem?""They're getting hundreds of new bookings for phantom clients at the top of every hour," Cassie replied. "At this rate, we're not sure we'll be able to separate the garbage from the good bookings even if you had a conversion script done right now." Her eyes pleaded for him to have such a script on hand, but he shook his head, dashing her hopes."Maybe I can stop it," Troy said. "I'm sure it's a backdoor in the code somewhere we can have them disable. Let me have a look.""You do that. I'm going to check on their backup situation."As Cassie ran off again, Troy closed his Solitare game and settled in to read the code. At first, he didn't see anything drastically worse than he was expecting.PHP code, of course, he thought. There's an init script: login stuff, session stuff ... holy crap that's a lot of class includes. Haven't they ever heard of an autoloader? If it's in one of those, I'll never find it. Keep pressing on ... header? No, that just calls ob_start(). Footer? Christ on a cracker, they get all the way to the footer before they check if the user's logged in? Yeah, right there—if the user's logged out, it clears the buffer and redirects instead of outputting. That's inefficient.Troy got himself a fresh cup of coffee and sat back, looking at the folder again. Let's see, let's see ... login ... search bookings ... scripts? Scripts.php seems like a great place to hide a vulnerability. Or it could even be a Trojan some script kiddie uploaded years ago. Let's see what we've got.He opened the folder, took one look at the file, then shouted for Cassie.
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by Remy Porter on (#3C6HW)
You may remember “Harry Peckhard’s ALM†suite from a bit back, but did you know that Harry Peckhard makes lots of other software packages and hardware systems? For example, the Harry Peckhard enterprise division releases an “Intelligent Management Center†(IMC).How intelligent? Well, Sam N had a co-worker that wanted to use a very long password, like “correct horse battery stapleâ€, but but Harry’s IMC didn’t like long passwords. While diagnosing, Sam found some JavaScript in the IMC’s web interface that provides some of the stongest encreption possible.
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by Remy Porter on (#3C495)
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by snoofle on (#3BXH5)
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by Charles Robinson on (#3BTTS)
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by Jane Bailey on (#3BR73)
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by Remy Porter on (#3BNWP)
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by Remy Porter on (#3BM2J)
It’s Christmas, and thus technically too late to actually go caroling. Like any good project, we’ve delivered close enough to the deadline to claim success, but late enough to actually be useless for this year!Still, enjoy some holiday carols specifically written for our IT employees. Feel free to annoy your friends and family for the rest of the day.Push to Prod (to the tune of Joy To the World)
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by Mark Bowytz on (#3BDBZ)
"For the non-German speaking people: it's highly confidential & highly restricted information that our canteen is closed between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Now, sue me for disclosing this," Stella writes.
by Charles Robinson on (#3BADC)
Nelson thought he hit the jackpot by getting a paid internship the summer after his sophomore year of majoring in Software Engineering. Not only was it a programming job, it was in his hometown at the headquarters of a large hardware store chain known as ValueAce. Making money and getting real world experience was the ideal situation for a college kid. If it went well enough, perhaps he could climb the ranks of ValueAce IT and never have to relocate to find a good paying job.He was assigned to what was known as the "Internet Team", the group responsible for the ValueAce eCommerce website. It all sounded high-tech and fun, sure to continue to inspire Nelson towards his intended career. On his first day he met his supervisor, John, who escorted him to his first-ever cubicle. He sat down in his squeaky office chair and soaked in the sterile office environment."Welcome aboard! This is your development machine," John said, pressing the power buttons on an aging desktop and CRT monitor. "You can start by setting up everything you will need to do your development. I'll be just down the hall in my office if you have any issues!"Eager to get started, Nelson went down the checklist John provided. He would have to install TortoiseSVN, check out the Internet Team's codebase, then install all the dependencies. Nelson figured it would take the rest of the day, then by Tuesday morning he could get into some real coding. That's when the security prompts started.Anything Nelson tried to access was met with an abrupt "Access denied" prompt and login dialog that asked for admin credentials. "Ok... I guess they just don't want me installing any old thing on here, makes sense," Nelson said to himself. He tried to do a few other benign things like launching Calculator and Notepad, only to be met with the same roadblocks. He went down the hall to fetch John to find out how to proceed."Dammit, they just implemented a bunch of new security policies on our workstations. Only managers like me can do anything on our own machines," John bemoaned. "I'll come by and enter my credentials for now so you can get set up."The trick worked and Nelson was able to get the codebase and begin poking around on it. He was curious about some of the things they were doing in code, so he opened a web browser to search for them. He was allowed to open the browser only to get nothing but "The page is not available" and a login prompt for any site he tried to browse. "Son of a..." he muttered under his breath. He got up for another trip to John's office."Hey John, sorry to bother you again. You'll love this one. As a member of the Internet Team, I'm unable to access the internet," Nelson quipped with a nervous chuckle. "I was just hoping to learn some things about how the code works.""Oh no, don't even bother with that," John told him, rolling his eyes. "Internet is a four-letter word around here if you aren't a manager. The internet is dark and full of terrors and is not to be trusted in the hands of anyone else. They expect you to learn everything from good old-fashioned books." John motioned to his vast library of programming books. Nelson grabbed a few and took them home to study after a frustrating initial day.After a late-night cram session, Nelson arrived Tuesday morning prepared to actually accomplish something. He hoped to fire up a local instance of the eCommerce site and make some modifications just to see what he could do. As it turned out, he still couldn't do much of anything. He was still getting blocked on local web pages. To add injury to insult, any of the .aspx pages he had tried to access were replaced with the HTML for "page not found" in source.After travelling the familiar route to John's office, Nelson explained what happened, hoping to borrow admin credentials again. "Sorry, kid. I can't help you," John told him, sounding dejected. "The network overlords noticed that I logged in to your machine, so they wrote me up for it. Any coding you want to do will have to be done via notepad.""I already said I can't even launch Notepad though... literally everything is locked down!" Nelson exclaimed, growing further irritated."Oh I didn't mean Notepad the program. An actual notepad." John pulled a spiral pad of paper and a pen out of his drawer and slid it over to Nelson." Write down what you want on here, give it to me, and I'll enter it into source and check it in. That's the best I can do."Nelson grabbed his new "development environment" and went back to his desk to brood. It was going to be a long summer. Perhaps Software Engineering wasn't the right major for him. Maybe something like Anthropology or Art would be more fulfilling.[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!
by Remy Porter on (#3B769)
Chris D’s has a problem. We can see a hint of the kind of problem he needs to deal with by looking at this code:
by Ellis Morning on (#3B42X)
From submitter Christoph comes a function that makes your average regex seem not all that bad, actually:
by Remy Porter on (#3B0YJ)
One can often hear the phrase, “modern JavaScriptâ€. This is a fig leaf, meant to cover up a sense of shame, for JavaScript has a bit of a checkered past. It started life as a badly designed language, often delivering badly conceived features. It has a reputation for slowness, crap code, and things that make you go “wat?â€Thus, “modern†JavaScript. It’s meant to be a promise that we don’t write code like that any more. We use the class keyword and transpile from TypeScript and write fluent APIs and use promises. Yes, a promise to use promises.Which brings us to Dewi W, who just received some code from contractors. It has some invocations that look like this:
by Mark Bowytz on (#3ASHF)
"If it didn't involve setting up my own access, I might've tried to find what would happen if I dared defy their labeling," Jameson T. wrote.
by Ellis Morning on (#3AP9E)
Reader Jeremy sends us this baffling JavaScript: "Nobody on the team knows how it came to be. We think all 'they' wanted was a sequence of numbers starting at 1, but you wouldn't really know that from the code."
by Remy Porter on (#3AK5B)
Natasha found a job posting for a defense contractor that was hiring for a web UI developer. She was a web UI developer, familiar with all the technologies they were asking for, and she’d worked for defense contractors before, and understood how they operated. She applied, and they invited her in for one of those day-long, marathon interviews.They told her to come prepared to present some of her recent work. Natasha and half a dozen members of the team crammed into an undersized meeting room. Irving, the director, was the last to enter, and his reaction to Natasha could best be described as “hate at first sightâ€.Irving sat directly across from Natasha, staring daggers at her while she pulled up some examples of her work. Picking on a recent project, she highlighted what parts she’d worked on, what techniques she’d used, and why. Aside from Irving’s glare, it played well. She got good questions, had some decent back-and-forth, and was feeling pretty confident when she said, “Now, moving onto a more recent project-â€â€œOh, thank god,†Irving groaned. His tone was annoyed, and possibly sarcastic. It was really impossible to tell. He let Natasha get a few sentences into talking about the next project, and then interrupted her. “This is fine. Let’s just break out into one-on-one interviews.â€Jack, the junior developer, was up first. He moved down the table to be across from Natasha. “You’re really not a good fit for the position we’re hiring for,†he said, “but let’s go ahead and do this anyway.â€So they did. Jack had some basic web-development questions, less on the UI side and more on the tooling side. “What’s transpiling,†and “how do ES2015 modules workâ€. They had a pleasant back and forth, and then Jack tagged out so that Carl could come in.Carl didn’t start by asking a question, instead he scribbled some code on the white board:
by Remy Porter on (#3AG06)
I’m old enough that, when I got into IT, we just called our organizational techniques “software engineeringâ€. It drifted into “project managementâ€, then the “software development life-cycleâ€, and lately “application life-cycle management (ALM)â€.No matter what you call it, you apply these techniques so that you can at least attempt to release software that meets the requirements and is reasonably free from defects.Within the software development space, there are families of tools and software that we can use to implement some sort of ALM process… like “Harry Peckherdâ€â€™s Application Life-Cycle Management suite. By using their tool, you can release software that meets the requirements and is free from defects, right?Well, Brendan recently attempted to upgrade their suite from 12.01 to 12.53, and it blew up with a JDBC error: [Mercury][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]Cannot find the object "T_DBMS_SQL_BIND_VARIABLE" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. He picked through the code that it was running, and found this blob of SQL:
by Remy Porter on (#3ACQJ)
I’ve brushed up against the automotive industry in the past, and have gained a sense about how automotive companies and their suppliers develop custom software. That is to say, they hack at it until someone from the business side says, “Yes, that’s what we wanted.†90% of the development time is spent doing re-work (because no one, including the customer, understood the requirements) and putting out fires (because no one, including the customer, understood the requirements well enough to tell you how to test it, so things are going wrong in production).Mary is writing some software that needs to perform automated testing on automotive components. The good news is that the automotive industry has adopted a standard API for accomplishing this goal. The bad news is that the API was designed by the automotive industry. Developing standards, under ideal conditions, is hard. Developing standards in an industry that is still struggling with software quality and hasn’t quite fully adopted the idea of cross-vendor standardization in the first place?You’re gonna have problems.The specific problem that led Mary to send us this code was the way of defining data types. As you can guess, they used an XML schema to lay out the rules. That’s how enterprises do this sort of thing.There are a bunch of “primitive†data types, like UIntVariable or BoolVariable. There are also collection types, like Vector or Map or Curve (3D plot). You might be tempted to think of the collection types in terms of generics, or you might be tempted to think about how XML schemas let you define new elements, and how these make sense as elements.If you are thinking in those terms, you obviously aren’t ready for the fast-paced world of developing software for the automotive industry. The correct, enterprise-y way to define these types is just to list off combinations:
by Mark Bowytz on (#3A57C)
"Who would have guessed Microsoft would have a hard time developing web apps?" writes Sam B.
by Remy Porter on (#3A22J)
Tim W caught a ticket. The PHP system he inherited allowed users to upload files, and then would process those files. It worked… most of the time. It seemed like a Heisenbug. Logging was non-existent, documentation was a fantasy, and to be honest, no one was exactly 100% certain what the processing feature was supposed to do- but whatever it was doing now was the right thing, except the times that it wasn’t right.Specifically, some files got processed. Some files didn’t. They all were supposed to.But other than that, it worked.Tim worried that this was going to be difficult to replicate, especially after he tried it with a few files he had handy. Digging through the code though, made it perfectly clear what was going on. Buried on about line 1,200 in a 3,000 line file, he found this:
by Remy Porter on (#39YQM)
A long time ago, in a galaxy right here, we ran a contest. The original OMGWTF contest was a challenge to build the worst calculator you possibly could. We got some real treats, like the Universal Calculator, which, instead of being a calculator, was a framework for defining your own calculator, or Rube Goldberg’s Calculator, which eschewed cryptic values like “0.109375â€, and instead output “seven sixty-fourths†(using inlined assembly for performance!). Or, the champion of the contest, the Buggy Four Function Calculator, which is a perfect simulation of a rotting, aging codebase.The joke, of course, is that building a usable calculator app is easy. Why, it’s so easy, that we challenged our readers to come up with ways to make it hard. To find creative ways to fail at handling this simple task. To misinterpret and violate basic principles of how calculators should work.Well, I bring this up, because just a few days ago, iOS 11.2 left beta and went public. And finally, finally, they fixed the calculator, which has been broken since iOS 11 launched. How broken? Let's try 1+2+3+4+5+6 shall we?For those who can't, or don't wish to watch the video, according to the calculator, 1+2+3+4+5+6 is 75. I entered the values in quickly, but not super-speed.I personally discovered the bug for myself while scoring at the end of a round of board games. I just ran down the score-sheet to sum things up, tapping away like one does with a calculator, and got downright insane results.The underlying cause, near as anyone has been able to tell, is a combination of input lag and display updates, so rapidly typing “1+2+3†loses one of the “+â€es and becomes “1+23â€.Now Apple’s been in the news a lot recently- in addition to shipping a completely broken calculator, they messed up character encoding, causing “I†to display a placeholder character, released a macOS update which allowed anyone to log in as root with no password, patched it, but with the problem that the patch broke filesharing, and if you didn’t apply it in the “right†order, the bug could come back.The root cause of the root bug, by the way, was due to bad error handling in the login code.Now, I’ll leave it to the pundits to wring their hands over the decline of Apple’s code quality, worry that “is this the future of Apple?!?!!11?â€, or claim “this never would have happened under Jobsâ€. I’m not interested in the broad trends here, or prognosticating, or prognostibating (where you please only yourself by imagining alternate realities where Steve Jobs still lives).What I am interested in is that calculator app. Some developer, I’m gonna assume a more junior one (right? you don’t need 15 years of experience to reimplement a calculator app), really jacked that up. And at no point in testing did anyone actually attempt to use the calculator. I’m sure they ran some automated UI tests, and when they saw odd results, they started chucking some sleep() calls in there until the errors went away.It’s just amazing to me, that we ran a contest built around designing the worst calculator you could. A decade later, Apple comes sauntering in, vying for an honorable mention, in an application they actually shipped. [Advertisement] High availability, Load-balanced or Basic – design your own Universal Package Manager, allow the enterprise to scale as you grow. Download and see for yourself!
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by snoofle on (#39VGX)
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by Remy Porter on (#39R9B)
“Hey, Herbie, we need you to add code to our e-commerce package to send an email with order details in it,†was the requirement.“You mean like a notification? Order confirmation?â€â€œYes!â€So Herbie trotted off to write the code, only to learn that it was all wrong. They didn’t want a human-readable confirmation. The emails were going to a VB application, and they needed a machine-readable format. So Herbie revamped the email to have XML, and provided an XML schema.This was also wrong. Herbie’s boss wrangled Herbie and the VB developer together on a conference call, and they tried to hammer out some sort of contract for how the data would move from system to system.They didn’t want the data in any standard format. They had their own format. They didn’t have a clear idea about the email was supposed to contain, either, which meant Herbie got to play the game of trying his best to constantly revamp the code as they changed the requirements on the fly.In the end, he produced this monster:
by Mark Bowytz on (#39GNQ)
"The great words of inspirationalAuthor.firstName inspirationalAuthor.lastName move me every time," wrote Geoff O.
by Remy Porter on (#39DAN)
C++’s template system is powerful and robust enough that template metaprogramming is Turing complete. Given that kind of power, it’s no surprise that pretty much every other object-oriented language eschews templates for code generation.Java, for example, uses generics- essentially templates without the metaprogramming. What we still keep is compile-time type-safety, and all the benefits of generic programming, but without the complexity of compile-time code generation.Thierry L inherited a Java application, and the original developer seems to miss that degree of complexity.
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by Jane Bailey on (#39A12)
"Dealing with real customers is a hard job," Katya declared from the safety of the employee breakroom. "Dealing with big companies is even harder!""I know what you mean," her coworker Rick replied, sipping his tiny paper cup of water. "Enterprise security requirements, arcane contract requirements, and then they're likely to have all that Oracle junk to integrate with ...""Huh? Well, that too, but I'm talking about Google.""Google? What'd they do?" Rick raised an eyebrow, leaning against the wall by the cooler, as Katya began her story.As the lead architect, Katya was responsible for keeping their customers happy—no matter what. The product was a Java application, a server that stood between legacy backends and mobile apps to push out notifications when things happened that the customer cared about. So when one of their biggest customers reported that 30% of the Google Cloud messages weren't being delivered to their devices in production, it was all hands on deck, with Katya at the helm."So I of course popped open the log right off," she said, her voice dropping lower for effect. "And what do you think I saw? CertPathValidatorExceptions.""A bad SSL certificate?" Rick asked. "From Google? Can't be.""You've done this before," Katya pouted, jokingly. "But it only happened sporadically. We even tried two concurrent calls, and got one failure, one success.""How does that even work?" Rick wondered."I know, right? So we cURL'd it, verbose, and got the certificate chain," Katya said. "There was a wildcard cert, signed by an intermediate, signed by a root. I checked the root myself, it was definitely part of the global truststore. So I tried again and again until I got a second cert chain. But it was the same thing: cert, intermediate, trusted root.""So what was the problem?" Rick asked."Get this: the newer cert's root CA was only added in Java 7 and 8, back in 2016. We were still bundling an older version of Java 7, before the update.""Ouch," sympathized Rick. "So you pushed out an updated runtime to all the customers?""What? No way!" Katya said. "They'd have each had to do a full integration test cycle. No, we delivered a shell script that added the root CA to the bundled cacerts.""Shouldn't they be worried about security updates?" wondered Rick"Sure, but are they actually going to upgrade to Java 8 on our say-so? You wanna die on that hill?"It just pissed me right off. Why didn't Google announce the change? How come they whipped through them all in two days—no canary testing or anything? I tell you, it's almost enough to make a girl quit and start an alpaca farm upstate." [Advertisement] Atalasoft’s imaging SDKs come with APIs & pre-built controls for web viewing, browser scanning, annotating, & OCR/barcode capture. Try it for 30 days with included support.
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by Remy Porter on (#396QN)
The startup Juan worked for was going through a growth spurt. There was more work than there were people, and plenty of money, so that meant interviews. Lots, and lots of interviews.Enter Octavio. Octavio had an impressive resume, had worked for decades as a consultant, and was the project lead on an open source project called “JavaBachataâ€. Before the interview, Juan gave the project site a quick skim, and it looked like one of those end-to-end ORM/MVC frameworks.Juan planned to bring it up during the interview, but Octavio beat him to the punch. “You’ve probably heard of me, and my project,†he said right after shaking hands. “JavaBachata is the fastest Java framework out there. I use it on all my projects, and my customers have been very happy.â€â€œAh… we already have a framework,†Juan said, uncertain if this was an interview or a sales-pitch.“Oh, I know, I know. But if you’re looking for my skills, that’s the place to look. It’s open source.â€While Juan pulled up the GitHub page, Octavio touted the framework’s strength. “I was doing no SQL before NoSQL was a thing,†he said. “All of our queries are executed in-memory, using TableBeans. That’s what makes it so fast.â€Juan decided to start looking in the TableBean class, since Octavio brought it up. The bulk of the class looked like this:
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by Remy Porter on (#393GY)
We know stereotypes are poor placeholders for reality. Still, if we name a few nations, there are certain traits and themes that come to mind. Americans are fat, loud, gregarious, and love making pointless smalltalk. The English are reserved, love tea, and have perfected the art of queuing. The French are snobbish, the Japanese have weaponized politeness, the Finns won’t stand within ten meters of another human being at the bus stop, and so on. They can range from harmless to downright offensive and demeaning.Laurent is Canadian, working for an insurance company. Their software is Russian- in that it comes from a Russian vendor, with a support contract that gives them access to a Russian dev team to make changes. While reviewing commits, Laurent found one simply labeled: “Fix some Sonars issueâ€.The change?
by Dan J. on (#38W6C)
by Remy Porter on (#38SG4)
It’s Thanksgiving here in the US, so we’re taking a long weekend. In lieu of a more traditional “from the archives†post, I’m going to give thanks.You know what I’m thankful for? I’m thankful that data packets on the Internet are routed and handled the same way, regardless of which network originated them, nor which network is their destination, nor what they may contain. You could say that networks are… neutral about packets.A few years ago, the FCC enshrined this common sense into its regulatory framework. We were all pretty happy about it, and were optimistic that it was done. Unfortunately, it’s never over, and the new management at the FCC wants to reverse that, and plans to vote about it in a few weeks.Remember: prior to making Network Neutrality the regulated standard, network operators largely (but not completely) followed the rule anyway. Network Neutrality was the default, and then the bean-counters recognized an unexploited revenue stream (why should Netflix get to send data to our customers without paying us for the privilege?). The Internet worked under Network Neutrality, and the FCC only needed to enforce it by rule because network operators wanted to change the playing field.In any case, if you’re thankful for an Internet that works, between gorging yourself in typical American fashion and arguing with your racist uncle, take a few minutes to do something about network neutrality.I’d be ever so thankful if you did.[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!
by Remy Porter on (#38P7G)
There are some submissions that we get, and we simply sit on, because there’s nothing much to say about them. They’re awful code, but there’s no major comments to be added. It’s clear and simple in its awfulness.For example, you have some code that needs to display details about colleges around the US. Each College has a name, a full name, a short name, a state and city where it exists, and full names for those states and cities. You are likely reaching for an object to store that information, but why do that, when you can employ what I call the “Arrject Patternâ€. Y’know, when instead of using objects, you use multiple arrays and store related data at the same index? Stuff like what Kevin found in his codebase:
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by Ellis Morning on (#38JZW)
Sheldon was a support engineer at Generic Media Co. In his 6 years with the company, he'd enjoyed working for several great managers—but then came the reorg. Once the dust cleared, he found himself in the wrong department, reporting to one of the most loathed individuals in the entire organization.Gene was the type of manager who believed his fancy title awarded him instant respect. No engineer who spent any time working with him had anything good to say. Sheldon went in hoping for the best ... but Gene's relentless micromanaging and childish stunts quickly ground Sheldon's optimism into dust. When it came time for Sheldon to go on an extended vacation, he felt like a shell-shocked veteran limping out of the trenches.The months away were bliss, but Sheldon couldn't enjoy the last few days out of dread. To his surprise, though, Gene wasn't waiting at his cubicle with twelve urgent tasks upon his return. There hadn't been a peep from Gene all vacation long: no emails, no meeting requests. It was getting close to performance review time; nothing about that, either.As Sheldon worked through his vacation backlong, it became starkly apparent that he was being allowed to work through his vacation backlog. No panicky IMs, emails, cubicle pop-ins. The radio silence extended into days, then weeks. Sheldon began to wonder whether Gene even still worked there. Not wanting to kick a potential sleeping dragon in the nose, he asked his coworkers instead."Of course he's still here," one of them grumbled. "If they haven't canned him by now, they're not going to."Soon after, Sheldon found out he had it exactly backwards.A meeting invitation from Gene landed in his inbox. Catch-up meeting, tomorrow. No agenda, no room booked. Distracted with work, Sheldon didn't immediately accept the meeting. By the end of the day, his desk phone rang.Gene. When had Gene ever phoned his desk? Frowning, Sheldon picked up."I need you to accept the invite," Gene blurted with no preamble. It was then that Sheldon's paranoia clued him into reality. Gene still works here. I'm the one who's out. Gene's extended avoidance had been just another of his immature games. They'd never even done that performance review, had they?"I'll be there," Sheldon muttered.All that night, Sheldon tried to put a positive spin on the situation. A job he'd enjoyed had been ruined by a terrible manager, it was true. But he'd soon be free to look for a better job and a better manager.Sure enough, once the meeting began, Gene smugly informed Sheldon that his role was going offshore, making him redundant. (Sheldon later found out that the offshore bit was a lie, but you didn't hear it from us.) Sheldon hoped this would be the last of their interaction, but it wasn't to be.Fast-forward to Sheldon's second-to-last day, 4:00 PM. Sheldon was leaving to pick up his kids from school. He was on a tight schedule, as he had a train to catch. He hurried to the lobby, summoned an elevator, and darted in.Just as he turned around, he spied Gene entering the lobby from the stairwell. Gene saw Sheldon as well, and flashed him a big smile.Not to be cowed, Sheldon smiled right back.Gene frowned, confused. "Do you have a minute?""No," Sheldon answered honestly as the elevator doors began to close."I need to collect your badge!" Gene yelled.The doors shut, and the elevator began its descent. You're a day early, Sheldon thought to himself, shaking his head.He made it to his train and boarded just in time. While shuttling along, he grabbed his phone and sent Gene a quick message via Google Hangouts. I'll be in tomorrow. You can have my badge then.The message seemed to have trouble going through. A few moments later, the Hangout closed. You have been successfully logged out.Strange. Sheldon switched to Slack. You have successfully signed out."What?" Sheldon blurted aloud.It got him thinking. Gene had just seen him leaving the building in a hurry, grinning like a fool. Did he think Sheldon had planted a bomb or something? Sheldon had no bombs, but he did have admin access to plenty of important systems. Had Gene gotten his account terminated in a panic?Sheldon called the IT department and confirmed his suspicions. There was even a note attached to his account, from Gene: DO NOT RE-ENABLE."What am I supposed to do for my last day?" Sheldon asked."No worries," the tech replied. "I'll roll it back."Upon returning the next day, Sheldon learned his security badge didn't work, either. The security guard at the front desk had to call Gene for authorization. Still too much of a wimp to show his face, Gene just told him to let Sheldon through."He couldn't even get my last day right," Sheldon said with a chuckle.Gene kept his distance whole day. Sheldon left at 4:00 PM again, this time headed for the whiskey bar with a few ex-colleagues to celebrate freedom. [Advertisement] Universal Package Manager - ProGet easily integrates with your favorite Continuous Integration and Build Tools, acting as the central hub to all your essential components. Learn more today!
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