The Daily WTF

Back when we were setting up The Daily WTF: Live, I gave a shout-out to the Pittsburgh tech community group, Code & Supply. They’ve been a great way to network with local developers, dev-opsers, designers, and more, ranging from the seasoned vets to those just cutting their teeth on IT. I’m a huge fan of their events, and I only wish I could make it to more of them.But there’s one event I’m not going to miss, and if you can get to Pittsburgh, you shouldn’t miss it either. Code & Supply is launching their new conference, Abstractions. Abstractions, like Code & Supply, is a cross-techology, multi-skillset event, dedicated to bringing some of the best speakers in a variety of technologies together for one of the best conference lineups I’ve seen.

Being a freelancer is hard. Being a freelancer during the downturn after the Dot-Com bust was even harder. Jorge was in that position, scrambling from small job to small job, fighting to make ends meet, when one of his freelance clients offered him a full-time gig.Carol, the customer, said “Jorge, we’re really short-handed and need help. We’d like you to start on Monday. You know PHP, right?”Jorge didn’t know PHP, but he knew plenty of other languages. He said yes, crash-coursed over the weekend, and was confident he could learn the rest on the job. When he showed up on Monday, Carol introduced him to Luke- “who will mentor you on our application.”“Hey!” Luke grabbed Jorge’s hand, started shaking, and kept at it for far longer than comfortable. “It’s great to have you here, really great, you’re really going to like our code, it’s really really great. We’ve got a lot of great customers, and they’re really really happy with our great software. Do you like encryption? I built our encryption layer. It’s really really great. And I hope you like getting things done, because we’ve got a really really great environment with no obstacles.”Jorge recovered his hand, wiped it on his pants, and tried to smile to cover the internal panic that was taking over his thought processes. That internal panic got louder and louder as Luke showed him the ropes.They had a few dozen tiny applications, and the code for those applications lived in one place: the production server. Server, singular. There was no dev environment, there was no source control server. Their issue tracking was, “When there’s an issue, a customer will call you, and you’ll fix it.” Luke explained, “I like to work on it while I’m on the phone with them, so I can just edit the code and have them refresh the page right there.”Jorge nearly quit, but Carol had been a great customer in the past, and he really wanted a steady gig. He ignored his gut, and instead tried to convince himself, “This is an opportunity. I can help them get really up to speed.”He found an ancient Cobalt RaQ in a closet, with a 366MHz processor (with MMX!) and 64MB of RAM. Jorge hammered on that whenever he had a spare moment, setting it up as a dev environment, a CVS server and Bugzilla. This took weeks, because Jorge didn’t have a lot of spare moments. Luke kept him busy on a “deep dive” into the code.Jorge was largely ignorant of PHP’s details and nuances, but Luke was massively ignorant. Luke’s indentation was so chaotic it could double as a cryptographically secure random number generator. Wherever possible, Luke reinvented wheels. Instead of using a server-side redirect, he instead injected a <script> block into the page to send the browser to a different page. When PHP changed their register_globals behavior for security reasons, Luke didn’t think about why that happened or what that meant. He didn’t even bother to flip the PHP.ini flag which would revert to the old behavior. Instead, he just pasted this block into every PHP file:

Jamie has a co-worker who subscribes to the “malloc is slow” school of thought. Now, for most programs, it’s fine, but Jamie works on a high-performance computing system operating in a massively parallel configuration, so there are portions of their application where that philosophy is completely valid.In this case, however, the code Jamie’s co-worker wrote is in their message handling layer. There’s really no reason to pool buffers there, as the performance gain is practically non-existent based on the frequency of buffer allocation. That doesn’t change Jamie’s co-worker’s opinion though- malloc is slow.

What, again? Michael stared at the Explorer window in disbelief. The free disk space bar was glowing red, and the text underneath reported that his half-terabyte system partition had a measly few gigs left before filling up.When it had first happened, he hadn't thought twice about it. In fact, he'd been rather glad; at least he'd had the motivation to finally discard all the games and software he would never use again. But when the disk space ran out again the next month, and again the month after, he started getting more and more worried. Was he really using that much space, or was something else going on?Curious, he decided to finally investigate the issue. A cursory look at his hard drive with WinDirStat confirmed his suspicions. With over 80 percent of his hard drive space labelled as "unknown", something was definitely amiss. He kept searching, manually scouring through his folders and files, until finally he managed to pinpoint the culprit: an innocuously named "C:\Windows\System32\Config" folder filled with hundreds of thousands of files, taking up 420 gigabytes in size.A quick trip to Google and a bit of playing with Process Monitor revealed the answer to the mystery. As it turned out, every modification to Windows Registry—the oft-derided database of all the Windows and Windows application settings—generated a transaction log file to ensure the data integrity, prevent corruption, and allow rollback of changes. Usually those small 512KB files weren't much of an issue. They got deleted after a clean reboot, and most software only modified the registry during installation or after a configuration change.However, some applications and drivers—among them, Nvidia's 3D service—didn't play nice with the registry, shuffling the values around every few seconds or minutes. That, together with Michael's habit of not turning the computer off too often, resulted in cluttering the disk with more and more files until it filled up completely.The solution, luckily, was rather simple. Michael purged the folder of all but the most recent log files, then uninstalled all the unnecessary bloatware from Nvidia, hoping it was the last thing he'd be deleting for a long while.[Advertisement] Use NuGet or npm? Check out ProGet, the easy-to-use package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds and npm repositories. It's got an impressively-featured free edition, too!

"We spent a good deal of time developing our customer information display software, to make it easy for our users to update the daily menu screen outside our restaurant," Steve M. wrote, "Someone, however, noticed that the price of the Fish Steak Crunch was wrong, and decided to take a more hardware-based approach to doing the update."

Today, we're breaking out something a little different. I put this together more for fun than anything else, and we piloted it around in the Side Bar, along with a few other shares.After some feedback, we're happy to bring this to the front page, and we plan to produce more of videos in this vein as a recurring periodic feature.Sometimes, it feels like getting our work done is an epic struggle, suitable for retelling by the greatest of bards. And you know what? You're absolutely right. IT is an epic quest- and that's why I can't stand the Lord of the Rings. It's too much like work.[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!

Terrell inherited some database stored procedures. Like all good, Enterprisey stored procedures, it was written in PL/SQL. Unlike most Enterprisey procedures, it had a clear purpose: to clean your dirty inputs.The actual problem: based on user input, the PL/SQL code needed to write a temporary file to the filesystem. Since user input is full of filthy, illicit characters, this procedure needs to clean them up.

Jane took a job at a big financials company. The pay and the benefits were the first draw, but she was really sucked in by the visions of building analytics and juggling billions of dollars with cutting edge data mangling techniques. “Big data” came up in the interview many times, along with “cloud”.The first cold blast of reality was when she was given her developer desktop: a Windows XP box with 4GB of RAM and a CPU that could get lapped by the processor in a BlackBerry. “Oh, is this just a dumb terminal I use to connect to your cloud?” Jane asked.“No,” her boss said. “This is your work computer.” As it turned out, Jane had misunderstood the interview- they had asked about “big data” and “cloud” because those were buzzwords that they might be interested in, someday. Today, there were only two applications Jane needed to worry about.Corporate policy dictated that her computer must be shutdown every night. Each day, when Jane came into work, she would start it up. After a few cups of coffee, it would eventually chug to life, at which point she could fire up the two required applications: Outlook and SameTime.Jane wasn’t officially considered “at work” unless her boss saw her logged into SameTime. In fact, as Jane quickly discovered, the rapid path to promotion was to leave yourself logged into SameTime for twelve hours a day. Even if you never committed a single line of code, that was enough to make you a “productivity leader”, like Chad.Chad was the “productivity leader” on their team. He had committed just one, one-line-bug-fix in his entire time at the company, but he was always online. Once or twice a week, Jane’s boss would swing by, “Hey, you should really talk to Chad,” he’d say, “I’ve told him to mentor you, and he’s got exactly what it takes to succeed here.”Jane didn’t, because sometimes, Jane would try and write software. The emphasis was on try. The first step was to launch Eclipse. The only version she was allowed to use was so ancient that it predated the Jovian naming convention. Waiting for this to start was enough time for Jane to exhaust her phone’s data plan streaming Netflix.Finally, Jane could actually look at some Java code. Running it was a bit more of a challenge- it meant launching a local WebLogic server, connecting with Firefox, and then trying to replicate and fix bugs. Between the ancient hardware, the ancient OS, the ancient Eclipse, a version of WebLogic that was so old that it could be featured on Antiques Roadshow, and code that was intimately tied to the database server, it could take hours to make it through a single edit-compile-debug cycle.It was an uphill battle against processes and attitudes that were frozen in 1983, but each Day, Jane went home, confident that she had made the code better. In a small way. A very small way.One day, Jane’s boss transferred to a different team and vaulted up a pay-grade in the process. Their “productivity leader”, Chad, was sucked into the vacancy in his wake. On his first day, Chad called a meeting.“Now, I know we’re a little behind the times here,” Chad said.Jane nodded like a bobblehead.“And I know that we spend more time sitting and waiting than doing any real work,” he continued. “But I’ve been talking to management, and they’re really enthusiastic about modernization. So be ready for some big changes in the near future, and not to spoil anything- but the word ‘cloud’ is going to feature big in our plans.” After the announcement, Chad asked Jane to stay behind. Once they were alone, he said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the amount of time you’re logged into SameTime…”That was the last Jane heard about the modernization project until Chad sent out a memo announcing the new “Dev Cloud Machine”. “Now,” his memo explained, “pretty much all cloud provider options require us to put our software into their infrastructure, which we don’t want to do. Instead, we’ve built our own ‘private cloud’.”This so-called “private cloud” was an old desktop machine that was pressed into service as a WebLogic server. Gone was the painful struggle that was their edit-compile-debug cycle, and in its place was a “cloud” process. Jane edited the code locally, didn’t run it locally, and instead checked it into CVS. An automated job (running once every fifteen minutes) pulled the code from CVS, built it, and deployed the resulting WARs onto the “Dev Cloud Machine”. Now Jane could connect to the WebLogic server and check her work.The Dev Cloud Server also used the QA database as its backend, an environment which QA, shockingly, used for their own tests. This frequently caused schema mismatches and added to the overall churn.Even if she wanted to, Jane wasn’t allowed to go back to the old process- since the developers no longer “needed” WebLogic, corporate policy was that it was now forbidden. This rule was enforced by a script that deleted WebLogic installs with every bootup. “For consistency,” Chad explained, “we want all of the developers to use the same process, and that process is the Dev Cloud Machine.”Some time after this policy change, Jane’s SameTime client stopped working. Maybe the WebLogic policy broke a DLL somewhere, maybe a file or the registry got corrupted somehow. Jane had no power to reinstall, so she raised a ticket. It vanished into wherever tickets go to get ignored by the Help Desk, and Jane did her best to focus on getting work done.Every few days, Jane would repeat the same conversation with Chad. He’d call her into his office, and say, “We have a problem with your SameTime logins…”“Yes,” Jane said. “I’ve raised a ticket. I can try and get it escalated.”After a few rounds of this, though, the conversation changed.“I have tried to stress the importance of our company policies,” Chad said, “specifically regarding SameTime. And I have to say, your lack of compliance on this front has become a serious problem. We’re going to have to ask you to clean out your desk…”Jane didn’t bother to mount a defense, and walked out happier than she’d been since she started.

Steam. AT&T. Marks and Spencer. Bebo. What do they all have in common? One morning, as customer support tickets rolled in at her online retail firm, it became Belle's job to find out.Belle had inherited the codebase, which had originally been made overseas in India. It seemed as solid as any offshored website could be—which is to say, it had a million different quirks and the source code made her want to vomit, but it had been tested until the BA got tired of filing bugs and just decided to put it in prod.So Belle expected it to get basic functionality like ordering a product right. Alas, that assumption was unfounded. While the BA's testing had been, for all intents and purposes, single-threaded, no sooner had the doors been opened to the public than reports came in of users being greeted by the wrong name, and with the wrong list of stored credit cards. Once the Ops guys rolled it back, Belle girded her loins and dove into the code head-first.The first thing she found while tracing the retrieval of user credentials was this gem:

"Really. There's nothing to see here. Move along," wrote John A.

Sven built a PHP-based website on contract then handed it off to his customer, Bob.“You won’t be getting a lot of support calls from me,” Bob said, “because I actually know a thing or two about PHP. I’ll be maintaining this myself.”Sven smiled, nodded, and moved on to the next contract. Months later, Bob sent him an email. “Hey, sometimes, the submit button isn’t available, and I’d like the submit button to appear all the time, but I can’t figure it out.”Sven was busy, didn’t reply right away, and wasn’t terribly surprised when his customer pinged him back: “Nevermind, I got it.”Eventually, though, Bob did find a problem he wasn’t confident enough to solve himself. When Sven had handed it off, the logic to show the submit button looked like this:

It was the mid-nineties and the Iron Curtain in urban Kerblekistan had come crashing down. Everything was in turmoil, and people were trying to make up for all of the years lost behind the locked borders by trying everything with enthusiasm. The WWW was still in its infancy, but that didn't stop the budding entrepreneurs.Enter a young whippersnapper, still in high school. Daddy hooked him up with a buddy of his at a certain state institution. Now don't go imagining secret agencies or ministries-of-defense; we're talking more like parks-and-recreation. Therein was a department that still had a nice chunk of unspent budget. In the sweet tradition of bureaucrats everywhere, they were looking to spend it and hopefully wind up with something to show for it.The kid went to meet the head of the department. He took the bus to a narrow street near the center of the city. The building guards checked him out and let him in. The interior was the expected pre-iron-curtain Kerbleki decor;the ancient elevator, the carpeted dark corridors, the musty offices and portraits of stoic leaders overseeing all.The department head was a nice enough older gentleman. He explained "Look kid, we have to manage a lot of people and resources. We keep it all in these notebooks and ledgers, with hand and pen." He opened up the big iron closet and the kid saw row upon row of paper files. He continued: "We got this spare PC around. Do you think you can do something to put it all in there?"The young boy was sure he could, so the head promised a nice chunk of change for the work.The kid hooked up the 286-PC running MS-DOS and decided to go with Fox Pro. He drew up some menus and UIs. He planned some database files. He spent his summer vacation entering all the data from the files into the computer. He ironed out the bugs and made it work.And work it did. It had search. It had all kinds of nifty tools for stuff they used to have to do by hand. It printed reports to the printer. It did backups on floppy disk. For its day, it was pretty slick.Everyone was ecstatic and the kid got his money. The department showed off the program to everybody.Sure, they still had to keep manually entering the data into paper files (that was the official way after all). But once they also entered it into the PC they could do all kinds of neat stuff with it, in mere seconds.Apparently, Kerblekistan hadn't yet learned how real IT projects turn out...A couple of years later, the kid was now a young man at college. One day Daddy called again, to arrange a meeting with the old department head. He said that there was some more money to be made. In dire need of cash, the kid took a break from girls, booze and pool halls and went back to work.The scenery had changed. The old institution was no longer drab and under the watchful eyes of Kerbleki leaders. It had been westernised and was much nicer.The department head was happy to see the kid. They still used his program every day. The old PC was, amazingly, still running perfectly, in its corner, if under several sedimentary layers of dust.The department head mentioned that they now all had these nicer, faster PC's. They needed to be able to use the program from each of their own PCs, and perhaps add some stuff, like getting reports out as PDF, and sending them over email. He then offered a bit of cash up front, and there would be some nice money in it for success.Now, you're probably smirking and settling down in your armchair to better enjoy this part. You're saying to yourself, I smell a classical Fox Pro "multi-client" monstrosity, built with single-lock files in Novell network shares.But you're not giving the young guy enough credit. Between all the girls and boozing the guy managed to do some reading. He looked over the PC's and the head guys' box was the best and by far the most powerful. He told the boss "We're going need one PC to be the 'master'; it will have to be on for the others to work." Since the boss was the first one into the office in the morning anyway, he agreed.So the young guy got to work. They had Windows 98 on the PC. He slapped installations of Apache and MySQL on there (because adding web servers and the internet always speeds things up). He started designing web pages and relational databases. He wrote some scripts to port data from the Fox Pro files over to MySQL. Sadly, he couldn't find the original sources for the program anywhere, but it would be OK; it's not like Fox Pro translates well to PHP anyway. Besides, the old guy probably knew the procedures by heart.So one day it was finally done, sort of. He felt that it wasn't exactly his best work ever. Any search at all took ages. Maybe he hadn't quite grasped those "index" things yet. He poked at it for a few more days but time was running short.He didn't know if the problem was his inability to make things efficient in MySQL, that the web-stuff was more expensive (chronologically) than he thought, both, or something else. After all, PHP had been around for a few years, so it must be stable and fast, right? Maybe MySQL was too new and there were unknown issues? What performance problem could possibly be caused by web servers?Finally, he got into a bit of a panic. This stuff was cutting into his chicks and booze time and it wasn't getting any better. He went in one morning, slapped it on the boss's PC, showed him around and then excused himself for a rapid exit. He disappeared, didn't return the advance money and left daddy to deal with his old buddy.So they wound up still using the original system on the 286 until the old guy retired a couple of years later. And you'll be happy to know that they managed to spend the budget that year anyway.By a show of hands, who thinks the kid would go on to have a bright future in software management?[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!

William Heimbinger joins the ranks of developers who come to us to confess their sins. This particular sin was committed when he was but a young child of fifteen years old, which raises more questions than it answers.Young William was writing Perl and building an anti-spam bot for IRC channels. As he wrote code, he wanted to quickly reload the module to test it, but actually learning how to reload modules looked like too much work. William decided to reinvent that wheel, using a hammer he already knew.With a trivial block of Perl code:

Dick was the main man in charge of his homegrown facilities-management system known as Q-Max. His brainchild was utilized across a large office complex to enter and track building maintenance tasks. Whenever a sink was broken, toilet clogged, or a foul-smelling science experiment had to be exterminated from a fridge, Q-Max was there to track and route the incident.While that was its original intent, Dick wound up selling the office managers on expanding its role to include reporting that would help them make budgetary decisions. It helped them determine which maintenance guys deserved a raise and which buildings needed renovations the most. So despite the maintenance department despising Q-Max because it made them do stuff, management loved every bit of it. Little did they know how precarious the system was on the backend.Dick focused on keeping this amazing application running, and let the company's "Disaster Recovery Team"- one guy named Pete- worry about the worst case scenarios. They kept a regular offsite backup of its data so that in case of something catastrophic like a meteor strike, Q-Max would not go the way of the dinosaurs. Their backup system was quite simple, yet had a necessary workaround step - Every night around midnight an Oracle backup was created on the database server. From there, they copied to an offsite tape backup. Due to infrastructure limitations- bandwidth and reliability, mostly- this mirroring process had to run to get the backup to a location the tape robot could get its iron clutches on.Eventually Dick and Q-Max grew even bigger and got a larger budget to spend on infrastructure. Some network upgrades allowed Pete to have a backup system which could copy a backup directly to the tape library, thus eliminating the need for that silly mirroring job. The new system was implemented and taking nightly backups was a breeze.A few years passed as Q-Max continued to have its automated backups taken every single night. One cold winter's eve, an old pipe that happened to run over the office's server room froze and burst. One of the many casualties of the unplanned cold shower was the database server that housed Q-Max. Pete called Dick frantically one night while he was home sipping hot cocoa."DICK, I NEED YOUR HELP! There's water everywhere!" Pete shouted to him. "It's raining in the server room!"Thinking Pete was delusional, Dick calmed him down to get the full story. The loss of the database server and several others was troubling, but at least they still had their trusty offsite backup tapes! "Man, that sucks. I'll come in to help clean up and salvage what we can. In the meantime, put in an urgent request to have the last backup tape delivered first thing in the morning!"Since Q-Max was down and there were no maintenance people to be found, Dick and Pete spent the night with mops and buckets cleaning up the pipe's mess. Around 7 AM, Dick was paged down to the lobby for a delivery. "The tape is here!" he exclaimed with joy, eager to get Q-Max back online.Dick brought the tape back to the now-dry server room and prepared to restore from it on an alternate database server. The tape directory stared back at him blank. "That's odd, there's nothing in here. They must have sent the wrong tape!" Dick put in an angry call to the company that housed their tapes. They checked other tapes that had been used for Q-Max backups only to find all of them were blank.Furious, Dick could think about nothing but lawsuits against the company that screwed up their entire backup system. In the meantime, he dispatched Pete to prove the backup job on their side was working. Pete ducked out for an hour or so. When he returned, he looked like he'd just been diagnosed with some horrible disease."I checked out the backup job and, well, you're not going to like this..." Pete muttered nervously."Ok... what exactly happened?" Dick asked, unsure if he actually wanted the answer."Well, the good news is our backup job is working fine. However... Do you remember long ago when we had that stupid mirror job to copy the local backup to the external tape drive? I kinda, sorta, forgot to disable that. So after our new backup job runs, the old one copies an empty directory over top of it, and the legitimate backup is lost. It's been like that. For years."If there was any remaining water from the pipe bursting, it would have turned to steam as Dick became red hot with anger towards Pete. Dick would have to strangle him later, though. First he had to figure out how to rebuild Q-Max's data from the ground up.[Advertisement] BuildMaster is more than just an automation tool: it brings together the people, process, and practices that allow teams to deliver software rapidly, reliably, and responsibly. And it's incredibly easy to get started; download now and use the built-in tutorials and wizards to get your builds and/or deploys automated!

Jason M. wrote, "A city park has a computer problem so unsolvable, that they made a sign about it."

Michael H sends us some code that probably deserves a NSFW warning for exhibitionism. This code is a confusing bit of metaprogramming that… well, shouldn’t be allowed near schools or playgrounds.

"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O' Israel!"Something was definitely up. Ricardo, the team lead, hadn't stopped singing carols that day. Sure, it was a few weeks before Christmas, but that was hardly an excuse to serenade the whole office. No, something had happened, and Erika was determined to keep out of it.This wasn't the first time Ricardo had gotten prematurely excited over something. Usually dour and unhappy, when he truly believed in a project, he'd hype himself up about it until there was no talking sense into him. It was best to lie low. If you got sucked in, you'd only be blamed when the inevitable fallout crushed his spirit yet again.Unfortunately, fate seemed to have it in for Erika. Ricardo made a beeline for her cube, still singing carols."I bring ye tidings of great joy!" he announced, knocking on the sidewall of her cube. "They agreed to rewrite the frontend—this time, with a CMS!"That was good news. Nobody liked the aging frontend, but nobody ever seriously broached the subject of redoing it, not with the usual budget austerity. It worked, and it was "only" six years old, they should be able to patch anything that had security implications and keep it running for another ten years. Just like a used car, right?The biggest complaint was that it had no Content Management System. Every tiny image tweak Marketing wanted, every news article, every dynamic piece of content was achieved via a promotion. They'd separated content from structure as best they could in small payments on the tech debt over the years, but the prospect of a proper CMS, where they could hand the keys to Marketing and wash their hands of the content, was like Christmas come early. Still, Erika couldn't help but wonder where the catch was."What's the deadline?" she asked, already preparing to cringe."That's the best part: you won't have to worry about the project or the tech design or anything," Ricardo answered. "They're sending over a couple of guys from the East Branch to run the whole thing. Apparently they've had a CMS for a year now and love it, so they want to build the exact same thing here."Erika bristled. If they had a CMS in the East Branch, why did they give her so much crap about putting one in Corporate HQ? And now a couple of clowns were coming in to tell the team how to do their jobs?Sensing her frustration, Ricardo beamed at her. "Hey, don't worry. I know these guys. They're a couple of certified geniuses. I hear they used to work at Google! They know what they're doing, they just need us to supply a few extra pairs of hands and they'll run the whole show. I got Marketing to agree to give them free run of it, carte blanche, whatever they say goes. This is going to be the best project we've ever done!"A year later, it was almost Christmas yet again—but this time, there were no festivities in the air. Erika's hair had grown out and reverted to its natural colour; she couldn't be bothered to head to the salon, not when every day she felt like drinking herself into a stupor. Marketing seemed bound and determined to take all of IT down and replace them with offshore developers, and with good reason: every test they ran on the shiny new frontend found some new "Critical" bug. Validation was never quite right. The workflow was nothing like the design had promised. The styles were off. The images were wrong. The CMS was serving up content scheduled for the future, but only on Tuesdays. Every bug that got fixed introduced another four.Ricardo spent most of his time in meetings, trying to quell the Marketing demons and lull them back into their unhappy slumber. Erika's task was testing the application as rapidly as she could, despite no real QA training. If Marketing's testers received another bad build, all hell would break loose. The last glimmer of hope within her suggested that if she could just get a look at the code, maybe she could figure out what was wrong. Maybe she could solve it. There had to be a Node module that could fix the systemic problems, right?"Which branch is the code on?" asked Erika, passing Ricardo in the hallway. "I thought I'd take a look—""Don't you dare." Ricardo actually stopped to grip her shoulders tightly, a terrified look in his eyes. "I thought that last month, and I've regretted it ever since. I've seen things I can never unsee in that codebase. Single letter variable names. Views mixed with models mixed with half-hearted validation. Tabs and spaces together, Erika! As if they belonged that way! Don't you dare throw away your sanity on this project, you hear me?"Ricardo's theatrics aside, Erika was now more convinced than ever that she had to see the code for herself. Not because she could fix it, but because she was morbidly curious. When Ricardo wasn't looking, she poked around the repo, checked out a working copy, and sneaked home with her laptop and a bottle of chardonnay to see what she could find.The first file she opened was the account creation workflow. Remembering Ricardo's words about spacing, she ran it through Sublime's re-indention methods before she read any of it. Soon after, she swapped the chardonnay for whiskey, but she began to comprehend the problem: these guys were not developers. They didn't understand how to construct software. Whatever they'd done at the East Branch was, had to be, a fluke. Their best code was all ripped straight from StackOverflow. They were desperately trying to make intelligent decisions, but they kept coming up with bizarre conventions like this one:

Archie poked around in his company’s billing system. This was a mistake, because that system is implemented largely in PL/SQL, and only a developer made from the sternest stuff can deal with PL/SQL.Like most PL/SQL applications, the Oracle database is the closest thing they have to version control. Each developer makes changes in the live dev environment and then hopes for the best. They don’t use TOAD or SQLPlus or any “normal” tool for making these changes- they have to use an in-house developed GUI, because that GUI tracks their changes and writes rows into a database called “VersionDB”. When they finish a patch and want to release the changes to their customer sites, they send a copy of the VersionDB and let a simple script apply all of those changes.

Merriam-Webster says that synonyms of stupidity include boneheadedness, brainlessness, denseness, dim-wittednes, dumbness, mindlessness, senselessness, thickness, vacuity and witlessness (among others). Perhaps they should add management to the list.For some reason, managers tend to make leaps-of-faith in the realm of technology. If they think that they know the meanings of two words, then there must be a connection between those two words. Unfortunately, whether the connection is real or imagined, they seem to proceed as though it were always real.A couple of years ago, Harold worked for a modest company. It was your garden variety organization with the usual amenities (a break room, candy and soda machines, etc.). In this place, strict adherence to the Dilbert Principle was the standard for hiring and promotion, and the CIO was a prime example of this rule in action. The powers-that-be believed this individual to have an in-depth understanding of how technology worked, and how different roles (e.g.: developer, QA, etc.) interacted, and so he was promoted to Chief Insipient Oaf.The CIO had a very high opinion of himself and of his supreme knowledge and mastery of all things. After reading an article on the subject on the InterWebs, the CIO decreed that a new high-tech think-tank would be created to foster design, productivity and camaraderie within the organization.This facility would have a certain Feng Shui to drive the layout and ambience. It would have a specific quantity of each of a certain type of computer. There would be erasable surfaces upon which new brillance could be scribbled. It would showcase successful projects, as well as industry awards. It would even have a high-tech table capable of dynamically expanding to match the number of folks in the room (e.g.: a dining table with additional leaves).Teams would be able to brainstorm new solutions in record time in this conducive environment. Inter-team sessions would enable people to optimize work flow and productivity across departments. This new think-tank would elevate their performance to levels worthy of the word enterprise.He even wrote about it in non-peer-reviewed magazines, without discussing it with anyone above - or below him in the organization.One day, the CIO's minions were sitting around their department break room, reading and discussing their leaders' bragging about their new think-tank. In particular, since they'd never been told of its existence, they were trying to figure out where it was located. After all, they had no room that featured such computers, awards or successful projects, and it might be nice to leverage such a room for its intended purpose.Fortunately, the CIO had mentioned enough facts in the article about the think-tank that the staff was finally able to deduce that he was actually talking about their break room.One can only wonder what might have happened if someone had actually requested a brainstorming session in the think-tank...[Advertisement] BuildMaster is more than just an automation tool: it brings together the people, process, and practices that allow teams to deliver software rapidly, reliably, and responsibly. And it's incredibly easy to get started; download now and use the built-in tutorials and wizards to get your builds and/or deploys automated!

"I can't tell if it's a proofreading or a 'Y2k15' glitch," Ken L. writes.

After years of neglecting their command line tools, Microsoft decided to try and build a grown-up set of administrative tools, and released PowerShell. Nearly a decade later, and many of their flagship services still don’t integrate neatly with PowerShell. The syntax is a bit messy, and the promises of an object-oriented shell never quite came to fruition. PowerShell is a great idea, executed poorly. For all that, it still offers certain advantages compared to the Unix family of shells, and is certainly worlds better than ol’ CMD.EXE.Speaking of good ideas executed poorly: backups aren’t a good idea, they’re a great idea. And when Tommy took over as an Active Directory engineer, he was happy to hear that his predecessor had left behind a script that backed up all their user data on a daily basis. Tommy was significantly less happy when he saw the script.

As a Python developer, SEO was far outside of Ian’s toolbox, more in the realm of expensive social media consultants. However, when his friend Alec asked for help, he knew he couldn’t turn him down.Alec worked at LightBarn, a lighting supply company, and was overseeing their SEO optimizations. Alec explained that no one could actually find the company’s website with relevant keywords on popular search engines. “I looked all the way to page 150!” Alec said. “I don’t get it. We have plenty of inbound links.” Alec had worked for months writing a blog on the company’s site, and his posts were routinely linked to by other industry sites.

After ten minutes of Mike staring at the screen unmoving, Jill sighed. As the newly minted tech lead, she knew that she had to help unwedge problems. But she also knew that Mike had been tasked with a task which should have been simple, had the project been developed in their team. Alas, it had been thrown over the wall for them to maintain, as a “reward” for cleaning up so much else.The calculations for generating quotes for customers were, for some complex scenarios, quoting too low; they were missing some items. The originators of the quote system had used Excel, so there was probably a hard-coded range to be updated. She’d asked Mike to fix it, create a playbook for this system and create a ticket sketching out what might be needed to make the system more resilient and maintainable. Excel would still be required, for the actuaries wouldn’t hand over formulae in anything else, but perhaps some jiggling into independent sheets and just running summaries over “the whole sheet” would reduce the pain. Jill had thoroughly cautioned Mike that he did not want, at this point, to discover the paperwork and bureaucracy to change how the calculations were performed, so the only changes to be made in this first approach were to be the minimum necessary, while keeping the style and solution intact.What Jill did not expect as the first question from Mike, when she went over, was an inquiry into just what the bureaucracy would be like, to bite the bullet immediately. Humoring him with an explanation, she was somewhat more taken aback when, after only brief cussing, he started pulling up the forms to do so.Once she saw the code being maintained, and Mike’s proposed replacement, she signed off immediately on the paperwork parts she was authorized to approve, and went off with a printed copy to get the co-signatures needed. By the time they were done, the time taken for this override process set a new institutional record for “fastest approval”. Sometimes, lumbering bureaucracies could move quickly; dodging a bullet during a budgetary crunch with no funding available for empire expansion will do that.The code, and Mike’s replacements, went into training materials for the team. The original code may be found below; it can be summarized as:

Happy New Year! Have we got some great news for you. Subramanian has contributed a RESTful API for accessing our articles, which we’ve deployed. So now you can get started on your New Year’s resolution of writing and sharing more code.You can check the docs here. I know Subramanian is working on using this to build an Android app, which we’ll be happy to announce here when he’s ready. If you use this API for anything, do let us know. And if you have any thoughts for how to improve it, send us a pull request on GitHub. We look forward to seeing the cool stuff you guys get up to with this.[Advertisement] Scout is the best way to monitor your critical server infrastructure. With over 90 open source plugins, robust alerting, beautiful dashboards and a 5 minute install - Scout saves youvaluable engineering time. Try the server monitoring you'll 👍 today.Your first 30 days are free on us. Learn more at Scout.

The year was 2004, and Scott S. has just begun his internship at IniBank: an underdog financial institution that would, over the years, grow up to be one of the biggest players on the market. Despite being fresh out of college with little experience under his belt, he quickly found his way around the corporate culture and acclimated to the Application Development Department.His first task was to assist in rewriting a simple, internal Classic ASP application into ASP.NET and WebForms. Eager to work with the then-new and shiny technology, he spent his days researching the documentation, asking questions, and learning the ropes, slowly producing useful code.One day, as he was tweaking a simple grid, Tim—the project manager and his internship overseer—stepped into his cubicle. "Hi, how's it going?" he asked jovially. "Enjoying the company so far?""Sure!" Scott smiled. "The people are nice, the project is pretty cool, and all in all I'm having a good time here.""Well, I'm glad to hear that, because I've discussed it with the management, and we're thinking of offering you a permanent position.""Really?" Scott's eyes shone with glee. Straight out of college, and already getting a real job, how cool is that? he thought."And how's the rewrite?" Tim asked, taking a seat next to Scott. "Can I see your work?""Okay. Today I've been working on the customers view." Scott brought up the project, ran the application, and brought up a simple table. "It's almost done. You can add a person, you can edit their data, but you can't—""Hmm, let me see." Tim took the mouse and keyboard from Scott and started testing the application. After adding a few customers and playing with all the sorts and filters on the table, he spotted one more button. "Okay, so now, I click here, and it should delete the customer, right?""Um, don't—"Scott tried to say something, but the cursor was already hovering over the red "Delete" button.Click.Now, these days, IniBank has all sorts of test environments and safeguards in place. Back in 2004, however ... to say it wasn't the case was an understatement. In fact, Scott's application was hooked directly to the production environment, running happily with database administrator permissions and ready to wreak havoc.So when he heard the mouse clicking, his stomach instantly grew as heavy as an iron ball. Because he knew which part of the code he couldn't get to compile, and which part he'd commented out just a few minutes ago ..."Uh, Scott?" Tim frowned. "Why is the grid empty?""I, I ... The WHERE clause ... I'm so sorry," Scott mumbled, his face pale as a sheet of paper, as he frantically tried to remove the filters and change the parameters. But the DELETE statement in his code did its work masterfully—and since it was only half-written, instead of removing the single customer marked for deletion, it simply wiped the whole table."You didn't ... oh God!" Tim put two and two together. "Quick, let's call some DBAs and hope there's a current backup!"Luckily, after a few moments of downtime and a bit of angry shouting, the database was restored. Tim and Scott decided to share the blame and simply forget about this little incident. In the end, Scott got his position at IniBank—and a few years later, after Tim and a few other people left for greener pastures, he became the manager of the now-booming Application Development Department. And while Scott personally made sure a situation like this could never happen again by implementing best practices and proper testing regimes, he still enjoys spooking new developers with an occasional click on the "Delete" button.[Advertisement] Scout is the best way to monitor your critical server infrastructure. With over 90 open source plugins, robust alerting, beautiful dashboards and a 5 minute install - Scout saves youvaluable engineering time. Try the server monitoring you'll 👍 today.Your first 30 days are free on us. Learn more at Scout.

Happy New Year! Today's "best of" is the "best" code to copy file data that I've ever seen. Originally from September. --RemyThe great thing about Android is the low barrier to entry: thanks to open-source tooling, emulators, and the decision to build on a language often taught in schools, just about anyone can write a simple little app.The worst thing about Android is the low barrier to entry. Just about anyone can write a simple little app, whether they know what they're doing or not. The following code snippet is intended to take bytes from an InputStream (a common paradigm for web in Java) and save them into a file.

Building a good, healthy team environment is hard. In this story, they just don't bother. --RemyIn the 1980’s, there was a TV show called The A-Team. There was the scrounger, who could scam anyone out of anything. He would make promises that were sort of true to get what he wanted (sound like marketing?) There was the tough guy who could intimidate anyone into doing anything. He knew how to get things done, but underneath it all, was a nice guy. There was the leader, who could always come up with a plan to save the day. And there was the one guy who was a little crazy (the good kind of crazy), but who you could count on in a pinch. There was also the occasional outside helper who would run interference and recon. This was a group of folks who worked as a well-oiled machine to get the job done. Failure was not an option! They were a team!The A-Team never filed a project methodology document. No wonder they were wanted criminals.Alex had taken a job on a new greenfield development effort to replace an aging and unsupportable birds-nest-o-wtf™. Naturally, the position was advertised as “we intend to do things right!” The project is fully funded. We will have the proper equipment and team personnel to get this job done. We have the full support of six layers of management plus all of the users. Alex was optimistic.The first thing they did was spend several months wrapped in those numerous layers of management, end users, support folks, senior people who used to support the project (to explain the problems that plagued the old system), and the three architects of the new system. The new architecture was heavily documented, presented to and signed off on by all of the above. It was even reviewed with a critical eye by an independent third party regulatory auditing agency to ensure that the overseeing authorities were confident that the correct approach was being taken.An 8 page document detailing development coding guidelines (e.g.: code formatting settings, naming conventions, unit tests, code coverage and other such team-wide items) was created, reviewed and decreed to be followed by all who worked on the project.The project was off to a good start.Job one was to hire the development part of the team. For this, they looked (very far) offshore to find the cheapest possible talent. After all, anyone can be trained, right? A team of 11 developers who collectively had 13 years of experience, and a team leader with 5 years of experience were hired and put in place.The next major decision was which database should be used. There were three in widespread use at the company. Since all of the databases were hosted on centralized servers, one was immediately ruled out because the hardware that hosted the data servers was insufficiently powerful to handle the expected load in a reasonable time frame. Of the other two, one was widely used by everyone on the team. They knew its syntax, quirks and limits. The the third was mis-configured to have a reputation as being flaky. However, that one also was the corporate standard. In spite of the objections of the team, they used the third one.Project management decided that QA folks could be brought in later.Finally, it was time to begin doing detailed design. The offshore lead decided that a lot of time could be saved by doing design on-the-fly as required. Of course, the architects objected, but the project manager agreed to it.And so the architects started working on building the controller engine and other such mainstays of the project. The junior team, which was to query numerous remote systems for input data, merge, filter and pre-process it, decided that they knew better than what was specified in the architecture document, and started designing their own way of doing things. Without telling the architects or management.Come time for the first sprint check-in and all sorts of red flags flew up during code reviews. The junior lead decreed that the architecture document was only a suggestion that could be ignored in favor of the developers desires. Naturally, this spawned lots of are-you-f’g-kidding-me’s and emails up the chain. The project manager and above seemed disinterested, saying that the junior developers shouldn’t be doing that, but we trust them to do the right thing.This went on, with the architects pointing out implementation flaws and shortcomings that would not support the requirements. All suggestions were ignored, because the offshore lead said “Google fosters an environment of innovation and creativity; we should too!” He was reminded that Google is (in large part) a think-tank, and that this was a highly regulated project within a highly regulated industry. The architecture, which had been signed off by more than 40 managers, was not optional or a suggestion, but mandatory. This was not kindergarten, where creativity is fostered; you had to stick to the approved plan! Now, we’re not talking about how to write a subroutine, or encapsulate an object; we’re talking about using threading incorrectly and in the wrong places, doing database accesses and interprocess communication in such ways that would not be scalable, or provide enough throughput to finish daily runs by regulatory deadlines. Spawning multiple processes instead of just using threads. Using files to act as semaphores, because that’s how they did it in school. The list goes on.None of that mattered. The junior developers resented that they were not consulted on the architecture, and so were bent on ignoring it - with the blessing of their lead. The project manager continued to acknowledge the problems, but didn’t do anything about them. The problems were reported up the chain, and nothing was done. Everyone on the team should have an equal say in things.In the real world, if a student thinks the teacher is wrong, he doesn’t get to change his grade. The surgical resident cuts where the surgeon says and not the other way around. The general doesn’t discuss strategy with the privates. If you join a union, and as the new guy demand to have equal say on policy with the union bosses, you’ll be bunking with Jimmy Hoffa. Experience speaks with exclamation points. Inexperience speaks with question marks.Except on this “team”.The junior developers continued to do what they thought was best, ignoring the architects at every turn. Much of their code was written and rewritten several times over because the designs by the juniors didn’t take things into account. Things more experienced folks know to plan for. By the time 8 months had passed, so much damage had been done that some of the more complex requirements simply couldn’t be hooked in, and more than a month of back-pedaling had to be done on a greenfield development project.About this time, management acquiesced and asked some of the business users to write business-level tests (e.g.: via a spreadsheet that would be fed into JBehave to JUnit test things). The developers would provide the underlying code and some sample entries in the spreadsheets. The architects said that QA folks should be hired because business folks rarely know how to deal with edge cases, precision issues, etc. But the money was not to be spent. After six months of effort, the business users proudly decreed that all the tests for the entire application (e.g.: the entire requirements document) had been set up. A five minute glance showed that they didn’t handle edge cases, null cases, precision cases, or most of the other things that usually require tests. In fact, they had put all of the records that could possibly be processed (at least in their minds) into one giant pass-fail test. Of course, when something changed and it inevitably failed, there was no way to know what failed.Finally, it got so bad that the architects built a physical wall in the code between the setup code (written by the offshore folks) and main engine (written by the architects) sections of the application. Immediately before the main engine began to grind the data, every single variable in the system would be flushed to a state table in the database, so that when something would inevitably be challenged, they could show the inputs that were provided and send the fix-it work to the offshore team. At least this way, they could insulate the main engine from the debris.The department saved a lot of money by using cheap labor, no QA folks and the politically expedient database. Of course, all of the code of the setup portion done by the offshore team was a disaster, and for the most part, very difficult to learn, support, debug and enhance.The product hadn’t even been deployed yet, and the users were already complaining that it took too long to diagnose and fix problems (one of the main reasons the whole rewrite project was authorized), that perhaps the rewrite wasn’t satisfying the main purpose of the rewrite, and that perhaps something might be wrong…[Advertisement] Scout is the best way to monitor your critical server infrastructure. With over 90 open source plugins, robust alerting, beautiful dashboards and a 5 minute install - Scout saves youvaluable engineering time. Try the server monitoring you'll 👍 today.Your first 30 days are free on us. Learn more at Scout.

We just finished the holiday season, but it's not too long ago that we were wrapped up in a different kind of season: Hunting Season As commenter RFoxmich pointed out: this might be the first 0pt. "Buck". --RemyDeep in the wooded vales of red state America, December is hallowed not just for hunting presents, but also hunting deer. Lo, the season opened on a Friday. Clayton’s consulting firm declared it Camo Day in celebration.Employees festooned themselves and their office in their brown-and-green finest. Some posted deer horns and small taxidermic animals in prominent locations. While this particular company stopped short of installing a shotgun in the kitchen, just in case a bear happened along, it was still the most redneck of wonderlands.Clayton could even swear he smelled hunting musk as he moved through the floor, trying to get back to his desk after an exhausting code review. And everywhere he looked, camouflage-print duct tape lingered like traces of scat: patching a hole in the carpet, propping up the back of a swivel chair, cradling a leaky ceiling tile …Both tape and musk led to his manager Buck’s office.“How you doin’, Clayton!” His voice boomed out from the office like a blunderbuss’ payload, halting Clayton in his tracks. “How’d that code review go?”Clayton peeked in to find Buck applying a piece of camo duct tape to a patch of ruined drywall behind his desk chair. He ignored the scene to reply, “Fine. John has some changes to make, but nothing major.”“Good, good.” Buck rubbed a fist over the newly applied tape. “Don’t mind me, I’m just taking the initiative to fix a few things around here.”Clayton debated whether to say anything. In the end, he couldn’t help himself. “Uh, all that stuff you’re fixing probably needs more than duct tape.”This prompted Buck’s ringing laugh. “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, you’re not using enough!” Finished with the wall, Buck turned, yanked his laptop out of its docking station, and began wrapping the camo-colored tape around it.Clayton really knew better, but again couldn’t help himself. “What are you doing?”“Decorating my laptop!” Buck replied.“But … you’re covering the vents,” Clayton managed around his shock. “It’s gonna overheat.”“It’s winter and it’s cold out! This thing’ll be fine.”“Win—you’re taking it outside?” Clayton faltered.“Out to my hunting blind! I’m cutting out early to get a jump on the season.” Buck reached into his pocket. Out came an obnoxiously sized lock-back knife that he used to slice a gap into the tape layer, allowing him to open up the laptop.“Why bother working remotely?” Clayton asked. “Just call it a week.”“The usual BS quarterly meeting is this afternoon—of course.” Buck rolled his eyes. “Gotta join the WebEx and at least pretend to pay attention.”The WebEx would handle both video and audio for the meeting. Clayton imagined the deer would take a dim view to budget projections, but Buck’s laptop did have a mute button.“Happy hunting, champ! I’ll have my cell phone in case you need anything.” Buck packed his laptop, then gathered his coat and a cooler that was almost certainly full of beer.“Uh, OK.”In the end, Clayton couldn’t complain about a manager-free afternoon. He returned to his desk, dug into his work, and all was well.A few hours later, his desk phone rang. Buck’s cell.Clayton internalized a curse and picked up the phone. “Hello?”There was nothing on the other end at first aside from scuffling, and a string of very not-internalized curses from Buck.“Boss?” Clayton prompted.“The damn thing’s a brick!” Buck cried.“What is?” Clayton asked.“It just shut down on me!”“Your laptop?”“And the damn meeting’s still on!” More scuffling noises from Buck’s end. “Hopefully everyone’s too busy snoozing to notice I fell off the WebEx. Hang on, I’ll be in the office soon!”Clayton didn’t bother stifling his groan, but managed to hang up before it escaped.Twenty minutes later, Buck stampeded into his cube, cooler and laptop in tow. He dropped the camouflaged computer onto Clayton’s desk, shaking out his hand. “Sumbitch shut down on me out of nowhere!”Clayton felt the waves of hot fury radiating off the laptop when he stuck his hand near it. “It overheated, like I said. You blocked the fans that keep air circulating through there,” he explained. “We gotta get this tape off.”“Nah! If it’s hot, we just gotta cool it down, right?” Buck opened up his cooler and pulled out a half-melted bag of ice. He then turned and dropped said bag directly onto the laptop.Clayton’s jaw fell. Should he bother to say anything? No, it never helped.“While it’s cooling off, I’ll need your computer to log back into the WebEx,” Buck said.Clayton suppressed his instinctive panic. “You have to leave it here. No ice or camo. I’m done for the day, and I’m not touching any more work until Monday! Deal?”“Deal.”With a collecting breath, Clayton logged out, then stood to gather his belongings. “There you go.”Buck clapped him on the shoulder. “Happy hunting, champ!”[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!

This article, from April had a problem, so they decided to use XML. Now they have An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 7, position 32. -- RemyOnce you eliminate the impossible……Whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be XML.Developers have many weaknesses, among them this: they don’t like to say that something can’t be done. That’s why when Glenn M’s client, TelCo, asked if their request was really impossible, instead of apologizing and vigorously nodding his head, Glenn said, “Well, technically…”And that’s how he ended up writing this.

This article, from February had me cringing even as I reread it- and I wrote it! I've had the misfortune of working on a number of projects that failed because of people like Brandon making sure they failed. --Remy“I’ve got a gig for you,” said the recruiter.Clive, like many freelancers, weighed the contents of his bank account versus the daily rate he was promised, and decided that any gig was for him under those conditions. This one sounded mostly okay; an insurance company needed a new software package that would help them leap through some regulatory hoops. As a bonus, they wanted someone who could teach their devs the latest tools and techniques… like source control. Clive aced the interview, and started a week later. There was already an email waiting in his work inbox, from someone named Brandon. It read: “See me.”That nose won't know what hit it…Brandon lurked in his office, adhered to his mid–90s ergonomic chair like it was an appendage. He glared over his monitor and stared at Clive. “You work for me,” he said.In monosyllables and four word sentences, Brandon revealed that no one who participated in the hiring decision would have any day-to-day contact with Clive. Clive reported to him, and him alone.“Okay… well, when I was hired, they said that they wanted me to set up Subversion. Should I get started on that?” Clive asked.“No.”“May I ask why? Do you have another preference? Would you like to discuss the options?”“No.”Clive waited. Brandon didn’t expand. He simply stared at Clive. Stared, and stared.Clive slunk back to his cube and got started on looking at the code base. It currently lived in a file share, using the “file.pl.old”, “file.pl.old.old” versioning convention. The code was Perl, and unreadable by even Perl standards. It had grown in a culture here “parsable means runnable”, included no comments, and had absolutely no tests. Clive’s only ally was Lee, another head-hunted expert who also reported directly to Brandon, and had a two week head start on understanding the code. When Clive got stuck, he poked his head around the cube wall and asked Lee.Like a glacier grinding down a mountain, Clive slowly worked his way through the code. After about a week, he was developing a small degree of confidence. Then an email from Brandon arrived: “See me.”“You’re disrupting the dev team,” he said.“What?”“You and Lee are making too much noise. This is an office, not a social club.”“That’s crazy. I’m just asking him questions about the work we’re doing! What, do you want us to schedule a conference room just to ask questions?”“Yes.”Brandon stopped talking and resumed his staring contest. He stared, and stared… Clive got the point and scurried back to his cube.The requirements were complex and evolving, which wasn’t unusual. Only one user, Carole, actually knew what they were, which also wasn’t unusual. Clive sent her an email with a handful of questions, and tried to get some work done. He waited for a few days for her reply, and as he found new questions, he sent more emails.In a week, he had sent nearly half a dozen, but got no reply. He sent more, asking for status updates. Over this time, he had more questions. He tried calling her, but it dumped to a full voicemail box. He tried scheduling a meeting, but Carole never accepted.And then an email from Brandon arrived: “See me.”“Carole says you’re harassing her,” Brandon said.“What?”“You send her emails, even after she answers your questions. She said you called a meeting but didn’t show up for it. This needs to stop.”“That’s crazy. She never replied, and I can show you my inbox to prove it.”“Carole doesn’t use email,” Brandon explained. “An intern prints out her emails, and she replies via inter-office mail. She’s very busy. You have the requirements document. Implement it, and stop bothering her.”“What, you want us to implement a solution without ever talking to the business user who knows the requirements?”Brandon stared at him. And stared. And…With Lee’s help, Clive made some real progress over the next few months. They learned their way around the absurd date format (measured as the number of days since April 3rd, 1974, except when it was measured in the number of months since the preceding Monday, except when it was measured in the number of weeks since the following Sunday). They worked past the fact that no one was allowed to upgrade past Firefox 3, or the fact that they couldn’t run overnight jobs because all of the servers were turned off at 6PM sharp. Carole didn’t communicate, Brandon just stared at them, and the rest of their co-workers treated them like plague carriers.A few weeks before their six month stint expired, Clive was digging through the company network drive, searching for a spreadsheet containing sample data. He found one named after the recruiting company that placed him, and hoped that it was something useful. It was, after a fashion.The spreadsheet was a report illustrating exactly how much the recruiting company was getting paid to provide Clive and Lee. The fees were so abusive a used car salesman would have blushed. Change tracking and collaboration was enabled on the document, which meant Clive could read comments made by various users.From the senior management level, there were comments like, “It doesn’t matter how expensive it is.” Accounting warned, “We won’t have the money to pay annual bonuses, if we do this!”Brandon had left his own note: “Our business is too special. They will fail. This is a waste of money. They will fail.”The pieces clicked into place. Brandon hadn’t been making a prediction; he was making a promise. And he’d kept it- there was no way that Clive and Lee could deliver what was originally promised in the next few weeks.Then an email from their recruiter arrived. “That company still wants added staff. Do you want to re-up for another six months?”Having learned from Brandon, Clive sent a one-word reply: “No.”[Advertisement] Use NuGet or npm? Check out ProGet, the easy-to-use package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds and npm repositories. It's got an impressively-featured free edition, too!

Your Christmas present this year is a pile of WTFs from back in 2005. A veritable holiday smorgasbord. This post wouldn't be here if it didn't exist. --RemyIt's been a while since I've done a smorgasbord post, so here goes ...DM discovered the source of some rather ... unprofessional ... error messages in the log files ...

It’s Christmas Eve, and that means we’re taking a little break from writing new articles. Starting next week, we’ll re-run all of the best articles of this year.For today, though, while I was working on The Glitch Who Stole Christmas, I got a bit inspired, and maybe a bit carried away.

Apple refers to their in-store technicians as “geniuses”. Everyone on Earth knows that it’s nothing more than cute marketing and is a meaningless title.Well, almost everyone. Derick worked for a company where the CIO worked at Apple’s HQ at some point. Said CIO was quite proud of this achievement, and made sure everyone knew it. He wasn’t happy that his new startup had decided to use C#, but it was okay: he was ready to reinvent core pieces of the .NET framework to avoid having to deal with whatever bombs Microsoft had snuck in.And he was going to optimize it.

I shouldn't have taken that call, I thought, looking down the dark, endless staircase.But deep down, I knew there was no other choice. Running a computer repair shop in a town like Derry meant one thing: if you want to put food on the table and pay the bills, you can't afford to lose a client. No, not in this day and age, not in a market filled to the brim with geeky teenagers offering cut-throat prices. You snatch up every opportunity and suck it dry before it worms out of your hands.Besides, it was supposed to be an easy job. Just an animal shelter on the outskirts of the town with a computer—"The Machine", as the monotone voice over the phone had called it—that wouldn't turn on.Plug it back into the wall socket, pocket the cash, and head home, I'd thought, driving a muddy dirt road out of town and into a dark, foggy marsh. Easy money.But now, staring down the abyss leading to the shelter's basement, listening to the distant howl of hundreds of stray dogs, breathing the stale air filled with a faint tinge of decay ... suddenly, it didn't look that simple."Take care." Behind me, the shelter's owner—an old, weary man stuck managing a building in equally bad repair— watched me from a distance. There was something off about him, about the way he looked at the door, how his face twitched slightly every time I mentioned the computer.It's probably nothing, just the quirks of old age, I kept thinking, but the suspicion in the back of my mind refused to die down."I will," I told him, then closed the door behind me.The bare old bulb at the end of the stairwell didn't provide much light to see by. I put my hand on the unpainted wall and slowly set my foot on the concrete step below, trying to keep balance while my eyes adjusted to the dimness. Step by step, I slowly headed down, the air growing thicker and heavier around me, the noxious smell intensifying, making me sick to my stomach ... but I held on, some nagging feeling driving me further and further into the unknown.Finally, I reached solid floor and looked around the room. It was tight, quiet, and almost empty—very much unlike the rest of the shelter, as if it didn't belong to the building.And it was there, atop a light wooden table against the grey, bare wall, plugged into the sole wall socket in the room.The Machine.It was an apt name for that piece of hardware. The solid, unbranded beige tower standing next to a bulky CRT monitor and a Model M keyboard radiated an aura of nostalgic grandeur. I stepped towards the table and ran my finger across it, collecting a thick layer of dust. But the computer itself looked almost brand new, its case shining even under the weak light of the room.It must've been here for at least twenty years, I thought. Why would anyone still use such an antique? I flicked the switch on the front.The computer roared.I've heard a lot of noises coming from a computer, but never anything like that. It was the howl of a hurt, suffering animal, a scream of agony. I stepped back instinctively, but the sound persisted, filling the air with a maddening wail that I was sure could be heard throughout the whole shelter. A moment later, the monitor lit up.OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUNDI turned the poor PC off, and the noise stopped. I reached for a screwdriver in my pocket, but then I noticed a floppy drive next to the switch. I pushed the eject button, and a disk slipped out of the slot. I pulled it off and held it to the light: a red, unlabelled 3.5 inch floppy, just like any other. Hoping that would solve the problem, I set it aside and tried booting the PC again.The howl was even louder and angrier than before, and the same words showed on the screen before I put the computer out of its misery.So, you won't find the OS. Let's see your hard drive, then.I unplugged all the cables from the back and put the case on the floor. Slowly, I took out all the screws, and dismounted the side panel.THUMP!The mangled body of a black rat fell out of the chassis, filling the room with the rotten stench of death.I froze. I tried to scream, run, do anything at all, but I couldn't, as if something were holding me in place. I looked at the rodent—its fur marked with deep, bloody wounds, its eyes wide open with a piercing stare—and a million thoughts rushed through my mind. How did it even get there? How did it end up like this? It's as if ...As if The Machine chewed on it, a quiet voice whispered in the back of my head. Chewed on it, then spat it out like a bad dinner.Holding back a retch, I tossed the rat away and examined the computer's insides. There was no hard drive, not even a place for it, but I noticed the floppy connector dangling in front of the motherboard, probably pulled out by the poor creature struggling for its life. I plugged it back in, reassembled the case, and hooked it to the rest of the setup.Finally, I slipped the disk back into the drive, and, heart pounding, I pressed the power switch again. A fan spun up quietly, the floppy drive started buzzing ...... and finally, the DOS prompt showed up.I ran. I ran up the stairs, leaving The Machine behind me, rushing to get as far away from this place as possible. I kicked the door open and burst into the blinding light of the main shelter hall, panicked, breathing heavily and nearly falling to my knees. I looked around, squinting under the painful brightness.No one was there. Even the dogs had fallen silent. A brown paper envelope rested on a nearby desk, labeled FOR FIXING THE MACHINE in bold, black letters.A thought formed in my brain: How did they know I fixed it? And then another one: Would I be here if I hadn't?I opened the envelope with shaking hands and reached inside. A thick wad of cash in tens and twenties, almost five hundred dollars wrapped together.They could've bought a new computer with this kind of money, I thought, but something told me they would never do that.I stuffed the bills back in the envelope and prepared to leave, but as I ran my fingers over the brown paper, I felt something stiff inside. Curious, I pulled it out.A red, unlabelled, 3.5 inch floppy, just like any other.[Advertisement] Use NuGet or npm? Check out ProGet, the easy-to-use package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds and npm repositories. It's got an impressively-featured free edition, too!

Adrian K. wrote, "Why yes, Apple Developer Forum, that is EXACTLY what I meant!"

Wilson Silva was looking through some production code, and found this representative line. This particular block of Ruby code was written by someone who claimed to have “lots of programming experience”. One must wonder what that experience was.

Ishai bore the unenviable, oft-cursed title of Microsoft Support Engineer. Just about every user who ended up in his call queue was peeved from the start, having navigated half a dozen phone menu options and being stuck on hold for interminable wait times. It didn’t make for a productive support experience.There was nothing Ishai could do about it. After years in the trenches, he was used to it; customer ire was like his own personal cosmic background radiation. But no matter how many times one thinks he’s seen everything, the universe always has something more to reveal to him.His desk phone rang for the umpteenth time that day. “Tier three support, this is Ishai. How may I help you today?”Instead of the mix of frustration and relief most people had upon reaching a human, this caller started off … haughty.“I am Professor Benson. Got that? Professor Benson, not ‘Mr. Benson’ or ‘Sir’ or anything else you decide to call me. I’m a Computer Science professor at BigName University, and I’ve found a bug in the latest version of Excel.”Get in line, Ishai thought. Happily, he was free to roll his eyes without risk. “Can you explain the problem, si—uh, Professor?”“I’m performing a complex calculation.” Professor Benson rattled off the name of an obscure formula that took several variables as input, a formula Ishai had little familiarity with. “The results Excel gives back are wrong. I have no trouble working the calculation by hand, and when I do, I get the expected result.”“I see,” Ishai said. “I’ll need some time to look into this. Can you provide your callback number? I’ll get back to you with a progress update within the next week.”“The next week?” Professor Benson sniffed. “All right. I suppose I have no choice.”Ishai obtained his contact information and gratefully ended the call, but his relief was not to last. The formula turned out to be extremely complex. He needed almost the full week just to figure out what it was supposed to do. Finally, he amassed enough understanding to attempt a few calculations by hand.To his complete lack of surprise, he found his calculations matched Excel’s results every time.“I’m sorry, Professor Benson,” Ishai spoke over the phone a short while later. “It looks like everything’s working as expected.”“Well, yes,” Professor Benson replied. “In the simplistic cases you no doubt tested with, it works fine. But in more complex scenarios, it doesn’t.”Ishai frowned. “Maybe you could send me a representative sample to test with?”“Well, all right,” the professor huffed. “If you think you can handle it.”“I’ll give it my very best shot,” Ishai half-growled back.Ishai received a sample workbook from Professor Benson a short while later. Upon opening it, he had to bite back a sob. The calculations were hard enough with integers. Here, the good professor was using exponents and other values out to 7 decimals. The sort of thing that was next to impossible to calculate by hand.It took another long week of struggling, but Ishai finally completed the calculations. To his shock, Professor Benson was right. Excel was giving the wrong answer—or so it seemed at first. Since part of the formula involved raising variables to the power of other variables, every single digit counted. The professor had configured his workbook to only have 2-decimal digit precision—thus, numbers like 2.0103235 were being truncated down to 2.01 before any mathematical operations were performed. Once Ishai changed the decimal precision to 10, Excel began providing the correct answer.Relieved, and not without some measure of evil glee, he called Professor Benson and explained the issue.Instead of the slightest bit of gratitude, Professor Benson’s tone of voice froze over. “And I assume you believe this is fixed now?”“Well, nothing’s actually broken,” Ishai explained. “Excel’s behaving correctly. You just—”“’I just’ nothing!” the professor cried. “If I didn’t know about changing the precision, how can you expect anyone else to? Your implementation of the formula is flawed! I should be getting a refund from you people, or at least a medal!”“I’m sorry, but there’s no bug here,” Ishai pleaded.After another 30 minutes of unproductive bickering, Ishai finally got Professor Benson off the phone—but not before Benson had threatened to complain to his manager, his manager’s manager, all the way up to Bill Gates if he had to.Ishai slumped over his desk, nursing his temple. “Man, I gotta become a developer,” he muttered. “I bet they don’t deal with crap like this.”[Advertisement] Use NuGet or npm? Check out ProGet, the easy-to-use package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds and npm repositories. It's got an impressively-featured free edition, too!

Apo’s workplace just recently migrated their code into source control. They have eight years of code that’s been written and maintained by developers using a network share as their central repository.

"Heeey, Sean ..." Aisha's tone was cloying as she poked her head around the divider of Sean's cube, still seated on her desk chair."No," he joked, looking up from his work.She laughed, weakly. "Listen, John's sick, probably out the whole week. Can you interview this new dev candidate?"Glancing at his calendar, Sean sighed. "Sure. When will he be here?""An hour from now. Here's his code sample, good luck!" She thrust some papers into his hand and rolled away, leaving Sean dumbfounded.Great, he thought. What am I in for?Figuring he'd at least familiarize himself with the sample, toss the guy the usual softball questions, and get a feel for him, Sean flipped through the stack of printouts. Oddly enough, along with his PHP code, the candidate had submitted a SQL dump."Thoughtful of him," Sean murmured. "Weird, though ... this test data looks very real."Then he flipped over the page and found the CREATE TABLE for the USERS table. What followed were a hundred insert rows, all with passwords like "==AUWZEdZhlTT1UMaVXTWJVU"."Is that ... Base 64, reversed?" Sean wondered, flipping to the PHP code in horror. Sure enough, he found the following in "Security.php":

"For some, Google interview questions are getting more obscure," writes Ernie, "but for those of us who worked for years in fast food, all that toiling might pay off."

Emma W. was hired on by BerkTech’s QA department in preparation for a major code rewrite. A Russian company had purchased a thousand copies of BerkTech’s emponymous software package, but as it only supported English, it would require a substantial localization project to support Russian.After Emma started, it didn’t take long for her to notice some common patterns in her unit tests.“Why is the script scrubber.awk telling me a file is missing a semicolon?” she asked Danny, her supervisor. “Shouldn’t this error come from the compiler?”“No, we scrub everything before it gets to the compiler,” Danny explained. “Nothing ever reaches it without passing our best practices. That’s what scrubber.awk is for.”Curious as to what kind of pre-processing that file was performing, Emma cajoled a developer into letting her take a peek at the source code. There wasn’t just one .awk script pre-processing the C++ code.There were 107.If All You Have Is A Hammer…“Danny,” Emma asked over lunch one day, “don’t you think we rely too much on AWK for our build process?”“AWK is our build process,” he replied. “It’s like mortar, joining our bricks of C++ code. At least that’s how Rupert describes it.” Rupert was the chief code architect, and the one who first wrote BerkTech’s code decades ago.“But you don’t need AWK scripts for almost anything. Compilers can give you much more nuanced syntax errors and lexical analysis than ad-hoc scripts can.”“Yeah, but it’s Rupert’s baby. Rupert wrote the app in AWK first, using a branch of one of the old Unix-based interpreters. Later he rewrote parts of it in C++ for better performance. He’s never wanted to let go of AWK. He won’t even run the compiler from the command line. When I say everything has to be done through AWK, I mean everything.”Time CapsuleSoon after, Emma met Rupert for the first time. His office was a perfectly preserved time capsule from 1983. Books older than Emma sat on a shelf, arranged by subject, and surprisingly dust-free. Rupert seemed like he had been preserved in the time capsule, too, with a tight collared polo and polyester slacks.“Danny sent me,” Emma said. “We’ve noticed a lot of multi-byte encoding issues come up lately.”“Multi-byte?” Rupert said. “Our developers should just use regular ASCII.”“But that won’t work for localization. Our Russian translators give us our localization files in Unicode, which uses multi-byte characters for the Cyrillic alphabet. The problem is our version of AWK. It wasn’t designed for multi-byte encodings.”“AWK can handle Unicode,” Rupert said, dismissing Emma with a wave. “It can handle anything.”MutinySoon, development stalled on the localization project because of the multi-byte encoding issue, and deadlines were missed. With the top brass breathing down his neck, Rupert called an all-staff meeting at a fast food joint down the street to discuss the issue.“I know what you’re thinking,” Rupert started, “But we’re not ditching AWK.”Danny spoke first. “There’s no other way,” he said. “There are dozens, hundreds of scripting tools we can use. We can just hand off the localized strings to another tool, and AWK won’t even have to touch it.”“Not going to happen.” Rupert crossed his arms.“The installation process is taking too long!” someone else added. “We have to install our own version of AWK on every computer the application runs on!”“AWK is not a resource hog,” Rupert said, adamant. “It’s no big deal.”The complaints raged for an hour. Finally, Rupert said, “This is a waste of time. We’re not ditching AWK, and we’re not bringing in another toolset. I’ll fix the encoding issue myself.”…Everything Looks Like A NailRupert’s localization code arrived so late, Emma was forced to work nights unit-testing all the new code. By and large, everything worked as Rupert had promised. The project shipped, and soon a thousand PCs in a corporate office in Moscow had Rupert’s obscure version of AWK installed on them.Danny was uneasy, as he told Emma over lunch following the release. “You know those obfusgation coding contests? I tried looking at Rupert’s localization code. It’s more impenetrable than the samples I’ve seen for those contests. If you find anything wrong, he’s the only one who can fix it.”Emma remembered Rupert’s perfectly-preserved office. “If he can keep his code as clean as his office, maybe all of his AWK scripts will keep working for another ten years.”[Advertisement] Use NuGet or npm? Check out ProGet, the easy-to-use package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds and npm repositories. It's got an impressively-featured free edition, too!

Eliza had a co-worker who had a problem. There were users with names like “René”. Other users, using standard keyboards, wanted to search for “René”, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to type that accent, so they just searched for “Rene”.The co-worker came up with this solution:

Here at TDWTF, we’re happy to announce that Puppet Labs have renewed their sponsorship of TDWTF.DevOps and infrastructure automation are at that critical cusp, where everyone’s talking about the buzzword, and everyone knows that it’s important, but most people don’t know exactly what it means to “do DevOps”. The tools we use to build infrastructure and deploy applications are changing fast, and the complexity is increasing: and complexity means more opportunities for WTFs.

Connor was a Highly-Paid Consultant who dealt with data security and audits, making sure companies’ secrets were irretrievable by enemies, competitors, and unauthorized employees alike.He got an assignment to work with GrocerSoft, a mid-sized company which developed software mostly used by small, independent grocery stores across the nation. They’d just picked up a new client, a chain of medium-sized grocery stores with a paranoid board of directors who imagined all sorts of competitors trying to steal their Top Secret grocery inventory suppliers. As part of the new agreement, GrocerSoft’s sales team had promised annual security audits of GrocerSoft’s data.Connor arrived on-location at the GrocerSoft National Headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa one snowy winter afternoon. The doors were unlocked and no one was there to greet him. Being a security auditor, he decided to wander around for a bit. After a half hour, someone finally asked him if he was lost, and directed him to his contact’s office.His contact was a middle-aged man named Toby who worked as the CTO of GrocerSoft. Toby had worked there for decades, since well before GrocerSoft got big, and had never had another job in his life. He was also, as Connor would discover, quite clueless for someone with the title of Chief Technology Officer.Toby liked to talk. A lot. About everything. Toby took him on a grand tour of the office, showing him every irrelevant nook and cranny. “This, you see”, Toby would say while pointing, “was our first vending machine. We got our first $100K contract in 1982 and got this installed to celebrate. You know you’ve finally made it big when Pepsi brings pop to you.” He laughed loudly as if that was the funniest joke he’d ever made in his life. “It doesn’t work anymore, of course, but we keep it around as a reminder. Sometimes the new guys will try and put quarters in there!” Then Toby leaned in and conspiratorially wrapped an arm around Connor’s shoulder. “We tell ’em that helps keep the bottom line up!”Connor silently rolled his eyes and suffered through the tour as Toby continued on and on, showing him the Sacred Coffee-Stained Office Chair of Conference Room 4 that some Hollywood technical consultant had spilled his coffee on while gathering information for a grocery store shootout in a blockbuster action film. Next was the Donut Box of Miracles which had been left in the founder’s office and discovered fourteen years after his death, then plastic-wrapped and put on display for all to see. Not to mention the Plush Doll of Excellence, a stuffed alien awarded by a client in 1997 after GrocerSoft completed a trainwreck 14-month-long website development for them.Eventually they got to business. “Okay, Connor, like we told you earlier our new client, who we can’t name because of their NDA, needs to know our backups of their data are safe.” Toby lead him to the corner of an unused office and showed him a fireproof safe. “All the datatapes are in that safe. It can only be opened by a web page that only works from my computer. It’s locked down by the IT address and MAP port. And,” he pointed his finger up in a Eureka gesture, “it only works in Inter-Network Explorer, too! They say no one uses that anymore and all the hackers use Google Crohns, so that’s blocked. Real, real secure.” He leaned in and winked. “They built these specifically for the NSA to hold all the battle plans for capturing Saddam Bin Laden. Totally unbreakable! Anyways, I gotta go, going to Hawaii with the wife for the week and the plane leaves in a couple hours. Have fun trying to crack that safe!”And with a wink and a laugh, Toby stormed out, leaving Connor to do his audit.Connor returned the next morning to begin his audit. A visual examination of the safe showed no physical way for him to get in without destroying it, so he noted the make and model and set up for some Internet research. It was a DigiSafe 9000, a LAN-connected fireproof safe with a built-in web server on port 4567 that could be controlled by any PC or smartphone.Connor nmap’d the network and poked the only host with an open port 4567, but was greeted with a security error page. “Your system is not authorized to access this device! A report has been filed and may be used by the owners of this device to press charges!”He chuckled lightly and decided to visit Toby’s office next, to see if he could find a MAC and IP address to spoof on his laptop.He walked into Toby’s office, a spacious corner office on the top floor of the five-story building. It was open and the receptionist didn’t even look up as he waltzed into the CTO’s office.He sat down at the desk. It was piled high with paperwork, folders, and notebooks. The darkened monitor was plastered with dozens of sticky notes.He noticed the small workstation was on and pressed the spacebar. The screen instantly lit up and he was greeted by an unlocked Windows session! Connor grunted in disgust. At least a couple dozen applications were already open, including Internet Explorer, which he guessed was Toby’s previously-mentioned “Inter-Network Explorer.”Probably fifty tabs were open. He started clicking through them, and, not surprisingly, found the DigiSafe 9000 login page was there. It had a simple login prompt with a note that the default password was “00000000” and should be changed after the first login for security reasons.Connor eyed all the sticky notes. He saw private email passwords, shopping lists from 2011, phone numbers for women with names like Candy and Bunny, and a reminder to buy tickets for Attack of the Clones ahead of time.And one labeled “New Client Safe: 00000000”He punched in eight zeros to the login prompt and hit enter. After churning for several seconds, it showed him a simple control page with no styling. He clicked “Unlock” and after several more seconds the site showed an alert box stating “The DigiSafe 9000 has been unlocked and opened. It will re-lock when you close the door.”“Ugh,” he groaned as he sat up from the chair and headed down to the empty office with the safe. Sure enough, the safe door was wide open and inside sat a pile of writeable DVDs and several USB hard drives.Weeks later, Toby called up Connor’s employer to complain about the audit results. He seemed to think Connor’s methods were unfair because real hackers don’t read passwords from people’s notes! Toby didn’t care though. His employer got paid, he got paid, and GrocerSoft’s new client decided to store their Top Secret Supplier List with another vendor.[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!

Why is it that you hear people saying, “don’t roll your own crypto”? It can’t be that bad, right? I mean, if the code gives the correct outputs when given the correct inputs?Everything in cryptography depends upon “high quality” random numbers, and lots of them. People get into semi-informed flamewars about what “entropy” means, government agencies sneak backdoors into algorithms, performance matters, secrecy matters, and unpredictability matters. The standard which defines four randomness generators is NIST Special Publication 800–90. One of the four raised suspicions because it (Dual_EC_DRBG) was three times slower than any of the others.Joe… well, Joe sends us his own code, which “fixed” this. He made one of the others slower. Using MySQL stored procedures. Just bear in mind, with the below, that it’s still cleaner, more comprehensible, and generally saner than OpenSSL.

"Wow! Every time I tapped 'See more products', the number more than doubled," writes Stephanie F.

Once upon a time, there was a small logistics company that did most of their software development in house. In the early 2000s, they decided to get ahead of the curve, and started building software to work on mobile devices. At the time, it was risky and uncertain, but over the next few decades, the idea of using commodity mobile phones to run their warehouse management software saved the company piles of money.They grew so big that they cut the company into two parts- Inilogic, the big giant logistics company, and Initech, which made their mobile phone software. In the split, some developers went to Initech, while a few- like Mr. A- stayed with Inilogic.Mr. A happened to be sitting in on a presentation where reps from Initech were showing off their cutting edge new feature: now users would be able to actually place calls from inside the application. Unfortunately, the demo didn’t work. While the developers scrambled to figure out why, he saw this bit of code flash on the projector:

New Year's Eve is a wonderful day. Not only a time of rejoicing—meeting and partying with friends and strangers alike to celebrate making it through yet another year—but also a time of change. Between new resolutions and yesteryear's memoirs, it's the best moment to move our lives in a different, exciting, and surprising direction.For Mitch, however, that was not the case. Working for a cable TV company had taught him that when your superior called in the early evening on your day off, it meant one thing and one thing only."Hi, Boss," he sighed. "How bad is it?""Bad." The boss didn't sound too excited himself. "HBO and Showtime are down. People will want our heads on pikes if we don't bring them back up ASAP. So, I know I shouldn't be bothering you, but I've tried everyone and—""No, it's okay," Mitch said. "Just give me twenty minutes to get to the office. I think I know what the problem is, it shouldn't take long.""You're a lifesaver," the boss said with relief. "We'll talk about compensation when you're back. See you, and good luck."Mitch left the house and started his car in surprisingly high spirits. The receivers at the office had their bad moods. All he needed to do was flick a reset switch, and the channels would be broadcasting again. Given holiday overtime was six times his normal hourly salary, he felt like he'd gotten the better end of the deal.Two hours later found Mitch kicking himself for his optimism.He'd tried resetting the receivers. He'd tried replacing them with spares. He'd checked and rechecked all the cables and connections, went through the whole troubleshooting list twice—all for naught. Not only were the two premium channels still not broadcasting, but along the way, another three channels had gone down, one by one.Think, Mitch, think! he urged himself. Huddled in front of a laptop, he tried to connect to one of the failing devices over the local network, but it was just as unmoved by his pings as by his pleas. There was nothing visibly wrong with the network configuration, and other devices plugged into the same ports worked just fine, but the dead receivers stubbornly refused to work no matter what tricks he used.Mitch had no choice but to move to the next step in the troubleshooting protocol. With trembling hands, he dialed the device vendor's helpdesk number."Thank you for calling Initrode Systems, my name is Nathaniel. How can I help you?"A New Year's miracle! The monotone voice on the other side filled Mitch with hope. He'd never expected to connect to a living soul so quickly, on a holiday at that."Hello, my name is Mitch. I'm having a problem with my equipment ..." He explained his troubles in detail, noting every symptom he'd witnessed."I see," Nathaniel said. "Have you tried turning the device off and on again?"The lengthy conversation left Mitch no wiser. He went through the motions, only to hear that "the only suggestion" Initrode Systems had for him was to replace his router. Mitch couldn't fathom how a router would have anything to do with not being able to connect to devices on the same network. Nevertheless, he grumbled a thank-you to Nathaniel and hung up.One thing he'd noticed during the troubleshooting gauntlet was that right after turning on, the devices would work for a few seconds, and only then suddenly drop dead. That gave him a glimmer of an idea. He dug out a dusty Ethernet hub, switched up a few cables, and started capturing packets from the whole network, trying to find a pattern.As burst upon burst of network traffic appeared on Mitch's monitor, he finally started smiling. There was a pattern to this madness. He picked up the phone and called Paul, his colleague from IT."Mitch! Hey there, buddy, what's up? Celebrating the New Year already?""No way, how could I start without you?" Mitch joked. "Listen, Paul, sorry for the interruption, but I have a bit of a situation here at work. Think you could spare a few minutes?""Oh. I thought you were on vacation?""I was.""Well, shoot," Paul said. "I'll do my best."Mitch recapped the outage situation, then segued into his latest findings. "A few seconds after booting, some of our receivers try to send an SNMP trap to some IP, then the ICMP Destination Unreachable message pipes in and they just die. They don't work, they don't respond to pings, they don't generate any traffic.""Huh." Paul muttered something under his breath. "That's an odd response, but it's not wrong. Maybe there's a bug in the firmware? Have you called the vendor?"Mitch suppressed a flare of anger. "They've been as helpful as you'd expect.""Of course. And to think we're paying for that support ... Anyway, what was that IP?" Paul asked.After dictating the address, Mitch heard faint typing for a few seconds. Finally, Paul picked up again."Well, I don't think I can help you. The IP is for a router at our other office. I can't remote in there, and you probably won't be able to get in today either."Mitch sighed, at the end of his rope. There's one more thing I can try, he thought. "But you can remote to the router in here, right?""I can," Paul said."Can you add that IP as its secondary interface? Maybe it will play nicer with the trap?""That ..." Paul paused for a while. "Hey, that might actually work. Let me try."After a few minutes, Paul told Mitch to try resetting the receivers again. He flicked the switch and went back to his laptop, crossing his fingers.There's the trap ... there's the response ..."Bingo!" he exclaimed as the packets started to flow again and the receiver showed up as operational."Woo-hoo, we saved the New Year!" Paul cried, jubilant."It seems so, everything looks OK here. Thanks a lot, man.""Not a problem. Now hurry up and get out of there, you can still catch the ball drop on TV!""If I don't get drunk before then. See you next year!"Mitch hung up and started packing his things. Looking through the window at the first fireworks set off by impatient celebrators, he knew what his first New Year's resolution would be: Never underestimate any problem.[Advertisement] BuildMaster is more than just an automation tool: it brings together the people, process, and practices that allow teams to deliver software rapidly, reliably, and responsibly. And it's incredibly easy to get started; download now and use the built-in tutorials and wizards to get your builds and/or deploys automated!

Nobody knew how Carl kept his job. Some said he was the boss' boss' nephew, or perhaps knew some dirt on the CEO. Some said he had been threatened with termination before, but his lawyer had advised the company it was cheaper to keep him than to get rid of him. Whatever the case, Carl's eccentricities were legendary.Seeing Carl's footprints on the SVN logs for his project, Paul decided to brave the trip to his cubicle for an explanation of some rationale that eluded his understanding.Carl's cube was in a back corner, almost forgotten, half-hidden behind the coffee station—just as Carl liked it. He'd built a top to his cube out of cardboard, to keep the area dark despite the flourescant lights. Tinfoil was wrapped around the signs, to counter the "EF rays" that set off his "electrosensitivity." The air smelled faintly of roses and cough drops.As Paul knocked, Carl turned, taking off a large pair of noise-cancelling headphones before removing the earbuds nestled underneath. "What brings you to my abode?" he asked, with a wide grin that probably was meant to be casual but instead came off as just a little manic."I had some questions about your commit, ah, revision 512?"Paul tried to keep his tone light, but a shadow passed over Carl's face, and his fingers began to twist against each other, fidgeting."Ah, yes. Five twelve. Five hundred and twelve. Five hundred and ten and two. A bad number, very bad."Paul blinked. "... Right. It's just, I don't understand what you were trying to do here?" Tentatively, he held out the printout for Carl to see: