A ticket came in marked urgent. When users were entering data in the header field, the spaces they were putting in kept getting mangled. This was in production, and had been in production for sometime.Mike P picked up the ticket, and was able to track down the problem to a file called Strings.java. Yes, at some point, someone wrote a bunch of string helper functions and jammed them into a package. Of course, many of the functions were re-implementations of existing functions: reinvented wheels, now available in square.For example, the trim function.

Calendars today may be controlled by a standards body, but that's hardly an inherent fact of timekeeping. Dates and times are arbitrary and we structure them to our convenience.If we rewind to ancient Rome, you had the role of Pontifex Maximus. This was the religious leader of Rome, and since honoring the correct feasts and festivals at the right time was part of the job, it was also the standards body which kept the calendar. It was, ostensibly, not a political position, but there was also no rule that an aspiring politician couldn't hold both that post and a political post, like consul. This was a loophole Julius Caesar ruthlessly exploited; if his political opposition wanted to have an important meeting on a given day, whoops! The signs and portents tell us that we need to have a festival and no work should be done!There's no evidence to prove it, but Julius Caesar is exactly the kind of petty that he probably skipped Pompey's birthday every year.Julius messed around with the calendar a fair bit for political advantage, but the final version of it was the Julian calendar and that was our core calendar for the next 1500 years or so (and in some places, still is the preferred calendar). At that point Pope Gregory came in, did a little refactoring and fixed the leap year calculations, and recalibrated the calendar to the seasons. The down side of that: he had to skip 13 days to get things back in sync.The point of this historical digression is that there really is no point in history when dates made sense. That still doesn't excuse today's Java code, sent to us by Bernard.

Kleyguerth was having a hard time tracking down a bug. A _hasPicked flag was "magically" toggling itself to on. It was a bug introduced in a recent commit, but the commit in question was thousands of lines, and had the helpful comment "Fixed some stuff during the tests".In several places, the TypeScript code checks a property like so:

Usually, when we have a "Tales from the Interview" we're focused on bad interviewing practices. Today, we're mixing up a "Tales" with a CodeSOD.Today's Anonymous submitter does tech screens at their company. Like most companies do, they give the candidate a simple toy problem, and ask them to solve it. The goal here is not to get the greatest code, but as our submitter puts it, "weed out the jokers".Now our submitter didn't tell us what the problem was, but I don't have to know what the problem was to understand that this is wrong:

In the ancient times of the late 90s, Bert worked for a software solutions company. It was the kind of company that other companies hired to do software for them, releasing custom applications for each client. Well, "each" client implies more than one client, but in this company's case, they only had one reliable client.One day, the client said, "Hey, we have an application we built to handle scheduling helpdesk workers. Can you take a look at it and fix some problems we've got?" Bert's employer said, "Sure, no problem."Bert was handed an Excel file, loaded with VBA macros. In the first test, Bert tried to schedule 5 different workers for their shifts, only to find that resolving the schedule and generating output took an hour and a half. Turns out, "being too slow to use" was the main problem the client had.Digging in, Bert found code like this:

Today, Mike sends us a Java Representative Line that is, well, very representative. The line itself isn't inherently a WTF, but it points to WTFs behind it. It's an omen of WTFs, a harbinger.

Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.So Henrik went about talking over the problem with his fellow devs, working with the 3rd party support, and building test cases which could reproduce the results reliably. It took many weeks of effort, but by the end, he was confident he could prove it was the vendor's issue."Hey," Henrik said, "I think these tests pretty convincingly show that it's a problem on your side. Let me know if the tests highlight anything for you."The bug ticket vanished into the ether for many weeks. Eventually, the product owner replied. Their team had diagnosed the problem, and the root cause was that sometimes the API would get confused about record ownership and identity. It was a tricky problem to crack, but the product owner's developers had come up with a novel solution to resolve it:

Carol sends us today's nasty bit of code. It does the thing you should never do: serializes by string munging.

SQL Server Integration Services is Microsoft's ETL tool. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for describing data flows from sources to sinks, complete with transformations and all sorts of other operations, and is useful for migrating data between databases, linking legacy mainframes into modern databases, or doing what most people seem to need: migrating data into Excel spreadsheets.It's essentially a full-fledged scripting environment, with a focus on data-oriented operations. The various nodes you can drag-and-drop in are database connections, queries, transformations, file system operations, calls to stored procedures, and so on. It even lets you run .NET code inside of SSIS.Which is why Lisa was so surprised that her predecessor had a "call stored procedure" node called "move file". And more than that, she was surprised that the stored procedure looked like this:

Joe recently worked on a financial system for processing loans. Like many such applications, it started its life many, many years ago. It began as an Oracle Forms application in the 90s. By the late 2000s, Oracle was trying to push people away from forms into their newer tools, like Oracle ApEx (Application Express), but this had the result of pushing people out of Oracle's ecosystem and onto their own web stacks.The application Joe was working on was exactly that. Now, no one was going to migrate off of an Oracle database, especially because 90% of their business logic was wired together out of PL/SQL packages. But they did start using Java for developing their UI, and then at some other point, started using Liquibase for helping them maintain and manage their schema.The thing about a three decade old application is that it often collects a lot of kruft. For example, this procedure:

We all know the perils of bad date handling, and Claus was handed an annoying down bug in some date handling.The end users of Claus's application do a lot of work in January. It's the busiest time of the year for them. Late last year, one of the veteran users raised a warning: "Things stop working right in January, and it creates a lot of problems."Unfortunately, that was hardly a bug report. "Things stop working?" What does that even mean. Claus's team made a note of it, but no one thought too much about it, until January. That's when a flood of tickets came in, all relating to setting a date.Now, this particular date picker didn't default to having dates, but let the users pick values like "Start of last month", or "Same day last year", or "Same day next month". And the trick to the whole thing was that sometimes setting dates worked just fine, sometimes it blew up, and it seemed to vary based on when you were setting the dates and what dates you were setting.And let's take a look at one example of how this was implemented, which highlights why January was such a problem:

Carl was debugging a job management script. The first thing that caught his attention was that the script was called file.bat. They were running on Linux.The second thing he noticed, was that the script was designed to manage up to 999 jobs, and needed to simply roll job count over once it exceeded 999- that is to say, job 1 comes after job 999.Despite being called file.bat, it was in fact a Bash script, and thus did have access to the basic mathematical operations bash supports. So while this could have been done via some pretty basic arithmetic in Bash, doing entirely in Bash would have meant not using Awk. And if you know how to use Awk, why would you use anything but Awk?

Joseph was doing a refactoring effort, merging some duplicated functions into one, cleaning up unused Java code that really should have been deleted ages ago, and so on. But buried in that pile of code that needed cleaning up, Joseph found this little bit of code, to validate that an input was a percentage.

Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um... probably shouldn't have been found.

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.South Korea made the choice to do it themselves, with their G-Drive system (short for Government Drive, no relation to Google Drive), a government file store hosted primarily out of a datacenter in Daejeon. Unfortunately, "primarily" is a bit too apropos- last month, a fire in that datacenter destroyed data.

For C programmers of a certain age (antique), booleans represent a frustrating challenge. But with the addition of stdbool.h, we exited the world of needing to work hard to interact with boolean values. While some gotchas are still in there, your boolean code has the opportunity to be simple.Mark's predecessor saw how simple it made things, and decided that wouldn't do. So that person went and wrote their own special way of comparing boolean values. It starts with an enum:

Way back in 1964, people were starting to recgonize that computers were going to have a large impact on the world. There was not, at the time, very much prepackaged software, which meant if you were going to use a computer to do work, you were likely going to have to write your own programs. The tools to do that weren't friendly to non-mathematicians.Thus, in 1964, was BASIC created, a language derived from experiments with languages like DOPE (The Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). The goal was to be something easy, something that anyone could use.In 1977, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II all launched, putting BASIC into the hands of end users. But it's important to note that BASIC had already been seeing wide use for a decade on "big iron" systems, or more hobbyist systems, like the Altair 8800.Today's submitter, Coyne, was but a humble student in 1977, and despite studying at a decent university, brand spanking new computers were a bit out of reach. Coyne was working with professors to write code to support papers, and using some dialect of BASIC on some minicomputer.One of Coyne's peers had written a pile of code, and one simple segment didn't work. As it was just a loop to print out a series of numbers, it seemed like it should work, and work quite easily. But the programmer writing it couldn't get it to work. They passed it around to other folks in the department, and those folks also couldn't get it to work. What could possibly be wrong with this code?

The first time Z hit the captcha on his company's site, he didn't think much of it. And to be honest, the second time he wasn't paying that much attention. So it wasn't until the third time that he realized that the captcha had showed him the same image every single time- a "5" with lines scribbled all over it.That led Z to dig out the source and see how the captcha was implemneted.

Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.The way the background task was launched was this:

Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.Now, it's worth noting the route Dotan took to find the function. He navigated there from a different documentation page, which sent him to an anchor in the middle of a larger documentation page- vendorsite.com/docs/product/specific-api#specific-function.This meant that as the page loaded, his browser scrolled directly down to the specific-function section of the page. Thus, Dotan missed the gigantic banner at the top of the page for that API, which said this:

Brian (previously)found himself contracting for an IoT company, shipping thermostats and other home automation tools, along with mobile apps to control them.Brian was hired because the previous contractor had hung around long enough for the product to launch, cashed the check, and vanished, never to be heard from again.And let's just say that Brian's predecessor had a unique communication style.

Alicia recently moved to a new country and took a job with a small company willing to pay well and help with relocation costs. Overall, the code base was pretty solid. Despite the overall strong code base, one recurring complaint was that running the test suite was painfully long.While Alicia doesn't specify what the core business is, but says: "in this company's core business, random numbers were the base of everything."As such, they did take generating random numbers fairly seriously, and mostly used strong tools for doing that. However, whoever wrote their test suite was maybe a bit less concerned, and wrote this function:

Handling non-existent values always presents special challenges. We've (mostly) agreed that NULL is, in some fashion, the right way to do it, though it's still common to see some sort of sentinel value that exists outside of the expected range- like a function returning a negative value when an error occurred, and a zero (or positive) value when the operation completes.Javier found this function, which has a... very French(?) way of handling invalid dates.

Wolferitza sends us a large chunk of a C# class. We'll take it in chunks because there's a lot here, but let's start with the obvious problem:

Robert R picked up a bug in his company's event scheduling app. Sometimes, events were getting reported a day off from when they actually were.It didn't take too long to find the culprit, and as is so often the case, the culprit was handling dates with strings.

One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.A fun side effect of that: the VB6 runtime remains supported. So you can run VB6 software on modern Windows. You just can't modify that software.Greta has inherited an even more antique tech stack. She writes, "I often wonder if I'm the last person on Earth encumbered with this particular stack." She adds, "The IDE is long-deprecated from a vendor that no longer exists- since 2002." Given the project started in the mid 2010s, it may have been a bad choice to use that tech-stack.It's not as bad as it sounds- while the technology and tooling is crumbling ruins, the team culture is healthy and the C-suite has given Greta wide leeway to solve problems. But that doesn't mean that the tooling isn't a cause of anguish, and even worse than the tooling- the code itself."Some things," Greta writes, "are 'typical bad'" and some things "are 'delightfully unique' bad."For example, the IDE has a concept of "designer" files, for the UI, and "code behind" files, for the logic powering the UI. The IDE frequently corrupts its own internal state, and loses the ability to properly update the designer files. When this happens, if you attempt to open, save, or close a designer file, the IDE pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the corruption, with a "Yes" and "No" option. If you click "No", the modal box goes away- and then reappears because you're seeing this message because you're on a broken designer file. If you click "Yes", the IDE "helpfully" deletes pretty much everything in your designer file.Nothing about the error message indicates that this might happen.The language used is a dialect of C++. I say "dialect" because the vendor-supplied compiler implements some cursed feature set between C++98 and C++11 standards, but doesn't fully conform to either. It's only capable of outputting 32-bit x86 code up to a Pentium Pro. Using certain C++ classes, like std::fstream, causes the resulting executable to throw a memory protection fault on exit.Worse, the vendor supplied class library is C++ wrappers on top of an even more antique Pascal library. The "class" library is less an object-oriented wrapper and more a collection of macros and weird syntax hacks. No source for the Pascal library exists, so forget about ever updating that.Because the last release of the IDE was circa 2002, running it on any vaguely modern environment is prone to failures, but it also doesn't play nicely inside of a VM. At this point, the IDE works for one session. If you exit it, reboot your computer, or try to close and re-open the project, it breaks. The only fix is to reinstall it. But the reinstall requires you to know which set of magic options actually lets the install proceed. If you make a mistake and accidentally install, say, CORBA support, attempting to open the project in the IDE leads to a cascade of modal error boxes, including one that simply says, "ABSTRACT ERROR" ("My favourite", writes Greta). And these errors don't limit themselves to the IDE; attempting to run the compiler directly also fails.But, if anything, it's the code that makes the whole thing really challenging to work with. While the UI is made up of many forms, the "main" form is 18,000 lines of code, with absolutely no separation of concerns. Actually, the individual forms don't have a lot of separation of concerns; data is shared between forms via global variables declared in one master file, and then externed into other places. Even better, the various sub-forms are never destroyed, just hidden and shown, which means they remember their state whether you want that or not. And since much of the state is global, you have to be cautious about which parts of the state you reset.Greta adds:

Today's representative line comes from Capybara James (most recently previously). It's representative, not just of the code base, but of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Or, "you get what you measure".If, for example, you decide that code coverage metrics are how you're going to judge developers, then your developers are going to ensure that the code coverage looks great. If you measure code coverage, then you will get code coverage- and nothing else.That's how you get tests like this:

Someone wanted to make sure that invalid routes logged an error in their Go web application. Artem found this when looking at production code.

Part of the "fun" of JavaScript is dealing with code which comes from before sensible features existed. For example, if you wanted to clone an object in JavaScript, circa 2013, that was a wheel you needed to invent for yourself, as this StackOverflow thread highlights.There are now better options, and you'd think that people would use them. However, the only thing more "fun" than dealing with code that hasn't caught up with the times is dealing with developers who haven't, and still insist on writing their own versions of standard methods.

Today, Reginald approaches us for a confession.He writes:

As we enter into the latter portion of the year, folks are traveling to visit family, logging off of work in hopes that everything can look after itself for a month, and somewhere, someone, is going to make the choice "yes, I can push to prod on Christmas Eve, and it'll totally work out for me!"Over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to get a chance to get some holiday support horrors up on the site, in keeping with the season. Whether it's the absurd challenges of providing family tech support, the last minute pushes to production, the five alarm fires caused by a pointy-haired-bosses's incompetence, we want your tales of holiday IT woe.So hit that submit button on the side bar, and tell us who's on Santa's naughty list this year. [Advertisement] ProGet's got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering states "No matter what the requirements document says, what your users really wanted was Excel." This has a corrolary: "Any sufficiently advanced Excel file is indistingushable from software."Given enough time, any Excel file whipped up by any user can transition from "useful" to "mission critical software" before anyone notices. That's why Nemecsek was tasked with taking a pile of Excel spreadsheets and converting them into "real" software, which could be maintained and supported by software engineers.Nemecsek writes:

Darren is supporting a Delphi application in the current decade. Which is certainly a situation to be in. He writes:

It feels like ages ago, when document databases like Mongo were all the rage. That isn't to say that they haven't stuck around and don't deliver value, but gone is the faddish "RDBMSes are dead, bro." The "advantage" they offer is that they turn data management problems into serialization problems.And that's where today's anonymous submission takes us. Our submitter has a long list of bugs around managing lists of usernames. These bugs largely exist because the contract developer who wrote the code didn't write anything, and instead "vibe coded too close to the sun", according to our submitter.Here's the offending C# code:

Betsy writes:

When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:

We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.Jessica writes:

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:

As the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one's mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn't so cold that it hurts to breathe.Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.A long time ago, Luciano worked for a small company, along with some friends. This was long enough that you didn't rent compute from a cloud provider, but instead ran most of your intranet services off of a private server in your network closet somewhere.This particular server ran mostly everything: private git hosting, VPN, email, and an internal Jabber server for chat. Given that it ran most services in the company, one might think that they were backing it up regularly- and you'd be right. One might also think that they had some sort of failover setup, and that's where you'd be wrong.Late August 12th, the hard drive on their server decided it was time to start its own holiday. The main reason everyone noticed when it happened wasn't due to some alert that got triggered, but as mentioned, Luciano was friends with the team, which meant they used the Jabber server to chat with each other about non-work stuff.Because half the country was already closed for August, getting replacements delivered was a dubious proposition, at best. Especially with the 15th looming, which not only made shipping delays worse, but this particular year was on a Friday, marking a 3-day weekend. Unless they wanted to spend the better part of a week out of commission, they needed to find an alternative.The only silver lining was that "shipping is delayed" is the kind of problem which can be solved by spending money. By the time it was all said and done, they paid more for shipping than they paid for the drive itself, but the drive arrived by the 14th, and by the end of the day, they had the server back up and running, restored from backup.And everything was happy, until August 12th, the following year, when the new hard drive decided to die the exact same way as the previous one, and the entire cycle repeated itself.And on the third year, a hard drive also failed on August 12th. At least, by that point, they were so used to the problem that they kept spare drives in inventory. Eventually, someone upgraded them to a RAID, which at least kept the downtime at a minimum.Luciano has long since moved on to a new job, but the date of August 12th is his own personal holiday: an unpleasant one.[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

A long time ago, Joey made some extra bucks doing technical support for the neighbors. It was usually easy work, and honestly was more about being a member of the community than anything else.This meant Joey got to spend time with Ernest. Ernest was a retiree with a professorial manner, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest. Ernest volunteered at the local church, was known for his daily walks around the neighborhood, and was a generally beloved older neighbor.Ernest had been working on transfering his music collection- a mix of CDs and records- onto his computer. He had run into a problem, and reached out to Joey for help."Usually," Ernest explained, "I can get one of the kids from the local university to help me out. But with the holiday break and all..."No problem for Joey. He went over to Ernest's, sat down at the computer, and powered it up. The desktop appeared, and in the typical older user fashion, it was covered with icons. What was unusual was the names of the files and folders. Things like titwank. Or cockrot.pl and penis.pl. A few were named as racial slurs.Clearly, the college students Ernest usually hired were having a laugh at the man's expense. That must be it. Joey glanced around the room, trying to think about how to explain this, when he noticed the bookshelf.The first few books were guides on how to program in Perl. Sandwiched between them was Rogers Profanisaurous, a dictionary of profanity. Then a collection of comedy CDs by Kevin Bloody Wilson, the performer of such comedy songs as "I Gave Up Wanking," "The Pubic Hair Song," and "Dick on Her Mind"."Ah, yes," Ernest said, "you'll need to pardon my desktop. Before I retired, I was a linguist, and I think you can guess what my speciality was.""Profanity?""Profanity indeed. Now, I was hoping I could get someone to take a look at swallow.pl for me..."Joey writes:

We've talked about the For-Case anti-pattern many, many times. And while we've seen some wild variations, and some pretty hideous versions, I think we have yet to see the exact example Ashley H sends us:

The holiday season is an opportunity for employers to show their appreciation for their staff. Lavish parties, extra time off, whatever. Even some of the worst employers I've had could put together a decent Christmas party.But that doesn't mean they all go right.For example, Mike S worked for one of those early music streaming startups. One year, the company booked a Russian restaurant in the neighborhood for the party. The restaurant was a gigantic space, with a ground level and a balcony level, but the company was only 70 people, so the company perhaps overbought for the party. Everyone stuffed themselves on appetizers and when the main course came out, it ended up as extremely fishy smelling leftovers in the office kitchen.Two years later, they booked a party at the same place. But lessons were learned: they only booked the balcony. This meant the ground floor was free for someone else to book, and someone else did. Another party booked the ground floor, and they booked an extremely loud Russian pop band to play it.The band was deafening and took absolutely no breaks. And while the previous time, everyone stuffed themselves on appetizers, this time there were barely any. But there also wasn't much main course coming out either. By 10PM, Mike was starving and deaf, so he left. At about 10:15, the food came out. But by then, most of the staff had left, which meant once again, the office kitchen got stuffed with very fishy smelling leftovers.There was not a third Russian party.Rachel went to her partner's holiday party. This large tech company was notorious for spending loads of money on the party, and they certainly booked a fairly amazing venue for it. But there was confusion with the catering order; while the company shelled out for a full buffet, the caterer decided to only provide finger foods, circulated through the party by waiters carrying plates. By 9PM, the employees had figured out where the kitchen was and were lying in ambush for the waiters. The small plates of chicken tenders and crab rangoons and spring rolls never made it more than two or three steps out of the kitchen before they were picked clean.At least the company learned that lesson and stopped using that caterer. Though I think some of the wait staff may have been permanently traumatized by the corporate party version of The Most Dangerous Game.But you know, not everything is about holiday parties, or days off. Companies have plenty of other ways to make their staff happy. Little benefits and perks can go a long way. Just take a page from Doug B's company, which put this sign on the badge reader:

How many times does it take to make something a tradition? Well, this is our third installment of Christmas in the Server Room, which seems pretty traditional at this point. Someday we'll run out of Christmas movies that I've watched, and then I'll need to start watching them intentionally. I'm dreading having to sit through some adaptation of the Christmas Shoes or whatever.In any case, we're going to rate Christmas movies on their accuracy of representing the experience of IT workers. One grants it the realism of that movie where Adam Sandler fights Pac-Man, while tells us that it's as realistic as an instructional video about the Turbo-Encabulator.Home AloneA Rube-Goldberg-quality series of misunderstandings and coincidences lead to bratty child Kevin being left... home alone through the holidays, defending his home from burglars, using a series of improvised, Rube-Golberg-quality booby traps, that escalate to cartoonish violence. The important lesson, however, is that the true meaning of Christmas is family.Like most cybersecurity teams, Kevin is under-resourced, defending an incredibly vulnerable system from attackers. His MacGyvered together collection of countermeasures all work, in the film, but none of them actually address the true vulnerabilities and could all be easily bypassed by a competent attacker.Kevin's traps are very much temporary solutions. But when temporary solutions become permanent, awful things can happen.Rating:Santa ClausThis one will be familiar to any MST3k fans. Santa Claus runs a North Pole factory on child labor and whimsical inventions. Oh, also, his North Pole factory is in space. On Christmas Eve, as he tours the world to reward good boys and girls, Satan sends a demon to tempt children into mild naughtiness. Once again, the true meaning of Christmas is being with those you love, unless you're one of the children in Santa's workshop. Those kids are working on Christmas.When things get truly dire for Santa, the children junior engineers staffing his workshop recognize that they can't manage the problem, so they fetch Merlin, the original greybeard. Yes, Merlin works for Santa, which implies that Santa and King Arthur may have met, and honestly, I'd rather watch that team-up movie. In any case, "terrified juniors clinging to a senior" is actually not very realistic. These days, the kids would just ask ChatGPT what to do, and end up putting glue on pizza.Rating:Violent NightWhat happens when we combine Santa Claus with Home Alone? We get the ultimate Santa-does-a-Die-Hard movie, Violent Night. Beverly D'Angelo plays Dick Cheney, an evil matriarch who runs a private military contractor and has stolen millions from US military operations abroad. Even more evil criminals take her family hostage to steal those millions. How are the criminals more evil than Dick Cheney? They're not only thieves, they also hate Christmas!The family is all horrible people, except for Trudy, the young girl who has been good all year and still believes in Santa Claus. And that means Santa is coming to town. With grenades and sledge hammers and machine guns. The movie also features one of the "best" uses of "Santa uses Christmas magic to go up the chimney" at the end.The entire villain plan is built around breaking into a super-protected electronic safe, and without spoiling too much, there's a twist in the film where someone has already broken into the safe, which makes one wonder how stupid the villains are (pretty stupid, actually). Also, while I understand the need for narrative convenience (and the Die Hard reference), the idea that the encrypted radios used by the evil villains, and the walkie talkie toy Trudy has to talk to Santa can actually operate on the same bands is... a bit of a stretch. RF bands and allocations and where and when you can use encryption is a whole thing.Rating:Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis - Tom WaitsA sex worker in Minneapolis sends a Christmas card to Charlie, presumably a former client or supervisor of hers, updating him on her life. With each verse her life seems to be getting better- until the final verse, which reveals it's all been a charade and she needs help. Like most Tom Waits songs, it's the story of the kind of person who is pushed to the fringes of society, tragic but hopeful, and loaded with empathy.I've recently been doing a job search of my own, and part of that has been "what dates did you work at $place?" and "give us some references?" and I realized that I'm terrible about keeping tabs on these kinds of things. The idea that I could send a Christmas card to a former client from years ago is absurd. Then again, how do we even know these cards get to Charlie? We just know that she wrote them, not that Charlie got them.Rating:I Am the Antichrist - The Dream EatersTwo songs this year? Are there even any rules anymore? The lord of the damned has a poppy intro track. I suppose this shouldn't go on a Christmas list, because it likely belongs at the antipodal part of the year. Y'know. Being the Antichrist and all.Rating:Star Trek II: The Wrath of KhanAn aging Captain Kirk is haunted by a mistake of his past: Khan Noonien Singh is back for revenge. This "Horatio Hornblower in Space" riff on Trek is packed with themes: revenge, sacrifice, the frightening power of technology, and an object lesson on why you shouldn't put things in your ears. It also proves that the best, most exciting space battles aren't swooping, wooshing, pew pew pews, but tense games of cat-and-mouse.As for its Christmas connections? What greater gift can Spock give to his crew but himself? His ultimate sacrifice is what ties the movie together, and of course, it means we got this incredible Christmas ornament out of it. Of all the Christmas spirits I have ever known, his was the most human.The whole prefix-code thing is a pretty incredible security blunder. A remote back door into any Starfleet vessel, guarded only by a 5 digit code? A 5 digit code that's stored in a database on every other starship? So if an enemy captures one vessel, they can thwart the entire fleet unless everyone updates their prefix code? That's a terribly security posture! And incredibly realistic! That is likely what the future will look like. So I guess that's a credible security blunder, if we're being pedantic.I bet they store the passwords in plain text too!Rating: [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.