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It's been pretty hot lately. Probably should use a fan to cool off. Mind the trip hazards. Original. --Remy
"It's that time of year again," Robert Rossegger wrote, "you know, when the underpowered air conditioner just can't cope with the non-winter weather? Fortunately, we have a solution for that... and all we need to do is just keep an extra eye on people walking near the (completely ajar) server room door."
It's summer break time, which as always, means we dip back into classic articles. Today, we pick which table we want. Original. --Remy
"In my native language of German," writes Christian, "the word quellcode is a pretty direct translation of 'source code'."
"Unfortunately, bad code seems to cross language barriers - as does that famous three-letter explicit adjective. But occasionally I’ll find a piece of quellcode that deserves its own special, localized expletive: quäl-kot. When I stumbled across this interface in our quellcode, quäl-kot was the first thing that came to my mind."
Where did you GOTO on your vacation? Nowhere. GOTO is considered harmful. Original --Remy
Everybody knows that you should never use "goto" statements. Well, except in one or two rare circumstances that you won't come across anyway. But even when you do come across those situations, they're usually "mirage cases" where there's no need to "goto" anyway. Kinda like today's example, written by Jonathan Rockway's colleague. Of course, the irony here is that the author likely tried to use "continue" as his label, but was forced to abbreviate it to "cont" in order to skirt compiler "reserved words" errors.
As our vacation continues, we might want to maybe play some video games. What could possibly go wrong? Original --Remy
“You R haccking files on my computer~!!!” Charles Carmichael read in a newly-submitted support ticket, “this is illigle and I will sue your whoal compiny. But first I will tell every1 nevar to buy youre stupid game agin.”
The bizarre spelling and vague threats were par for the course. After all, when you market and sell a game to the general public, you can expect a certain percentage of bizarre and vague customer communications. When that game is a popular MMPORG (no, not that one), that percentage tends to hover around the majority.
When comparing your language to a snake*, be careful to not get bitten. (*Yes, I know, the name of the language is a reference to Monty Python, not snakes). Original. --Remy
"I don't have a whole lot of experience in Python," writes Jakob, "in fact, when I was hired, the only thing I knew about the language was that whitespace was important."
"Fortunately — actually, unfortunately — it doesn't take a whole lot of experience in Python to recognize that my company's codebase is... well... sub-optimal. Submitted for your approval is a method used to generate a password, found in our network security library."
We continue our summer break. Sometimes, you need to make a bad choice in your design, and you can often "fix" that, with documentation. "Don't touch the sharp pointy bit." But, not to spoil the ending, sometimes the documentation raises more questions than it answers. Original. --Remy
The year was 1993, and that meant one thing: Old Iron was finally ready for the scrap yard retirement after nearly fifteen years of faithful service to the university. Technically, the MVS-based mainframe had been well past its prime for quite a many years, but since it was used primarily as a data repository for research projects, no one seemed to mind. But what they would mind, however, was any sort of downtime in the transition to the new, UNIX -based research computer, so it was up to Todd M. Lewis to figure out how to ensure things went smoothly.
In order to give researches the opportunity to learn their way around Unix and adjust their processes for the new environment without disrupting ongoing work on Old Iron, Todd set up a migration process that would pull MVS data sets from the backup system (as not to interfere with “live” data sets users may be using) and copy them to an archive on the UNIX server. From there, users could check out copies from this archive and work with them under UNIX to hone their processes. If they screwed up the data, they could just check it out again from the archive.
We're taking our summer break, which means we reach back into the archives and find some classics. This one teaches you everything you need to know about generating XML. --Remy
XML is an absolutely wonderful innovation. It allows us to easily describe and share just about any data immaginable. Of course, there's always gotta be someone (as Tim points out) who has to go and ... well ... see for yourself ...
So, it's a holiday in the US, and I'll be honest: the way I pick my holiday posts is by hitting the "Random Article" button until something fun pops out. And this time around, it gave me something to be thankful for: that this remains "The Daily WTF" and not… something Worse Than Failure. --Remy
Final Update: thankfully this is all nothing but an embarrassing memory.
As you can probably tell by now, The Daily WTF is now named Worse Than Failure. Don’t worry – nothing else is changing – it’s still the same ole’ WTF.
