The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Undermining the Boss

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-07-31

During the browser wars of the late 90's, I worked for a company that believed that security had to consist of something you have and something you know. As an example, you must have a valid site certificate, and know your login and password. If all three are valid, you get in. Limiting retry attempts would preclude automated hack attempts. The security (mainframe) team officially deemed this good enough to thwart any threat that might come from outside our firewall.

As people moved away from working on mainframes to working on PCs, it became more difficult to get current site certificates to every user every three months (security team mandate). The security team decreed that e/snail-mail was not considered secure enough, so a representative of our company had to fly to every client company, go to every user PC and insert a disk to install the latest site certificate. Every three months. Ad infinitum.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-05

Old Lennart

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2018-07-30

Gustav's tech support job became a whole lot easier when remote support technology took off. Instead of having to slowly describe the remedy for a problem to a computer-illiterate twit, he could connect to their PC and fix it himself. The magical application known as TeamViewer was his new best friend.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-31

When BSODs Pile Up

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-07-27

"I suppose the ropes were there to keep the infection from spreading to other screens," Stan I. wrote.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-09

An Incomparable Event

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-26

Sandra’s ongoing battles continue. She currently works for Initrovent, and is doing her best to clean Karl’s dirty fingerprints off their event-planning codebase.

Now, as it turns out, Karl wasn’t their only developer. Another previous developer was a physicist who knew their way around APL and Fortran, then decided to follow the early 2000s money and became a self-taught web developer.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2019-01-13

Finding Your Strong Suit

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-07-25

Anyone with more than a few years of experience has been called upon to interview candidates for a newly opened/vacated position. There are many different approaches to conducting an interview, including guessing games, gauntlets and barrages of rapid-fire questions to see how much of the internet the candidate has memorized.

By DavidLevinson

36 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-30

Come Work at Inedo, the Most Non-WTF Company You Know

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2018-07-24

The "Enterprise DevOps" tools market has really been taking off lately, and so has Inedo! We build market-leading tools for package management, deployment automation, and configuration automation space that aids some of the world's best companies in delivering their applications to users faster than ever.

We're looking for some great people to help us continue to grow:

Solution Architect/Consultant – work closely with our users to help them adopt DevOps best practices in their organization using our tools
Software Development Manager – lead our software development team and help develop our innovative products
Software Developer – Build and maintain our products, extensions, and internal systems while identifying bugs and issues with our customers
Content creator/writer – communicate the business value aspects of what we do to customers by working closely with our technical teams
US events manager – lead our events team and particulate in Inedo and software communities
Marketing associate – travel to various events to meet users and introduce new people to Inedo

14 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-30

You'd Need an Oracle to Understand These Docs

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-07-24

Documentation is difficult in the best of situations. I've encountered lots of bad documentation. Bad because it's unclear, inaccurate, or incomprehensible. Bad because it's non-existent. Bad because it insists on strictly using the vendor's own in-house terms, carefully chosen to be the most twee little metaphors they could imagine, but never explains those terms, thus being both incomprehensible and infuriating. "Enterprise" packages bring their own quirks and foibles, and tend to be some combination of unclear, inaccurate, or incomprehensible. Unless, sometimes, what we attribute to incompetence probably is actual malice.

An augur, sitting on the hilltop, predicting the future

I've brushed up against a lot of ERP systems in may day, ranging from the home-(over)-grown Excel spreadsheet on the network drive all the way to gigundous SAP build-outs.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-28

NoeTimeToken

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-07-23

"Have you had a chance to look at that JIRA ticket yet?"

31 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-27

Upon Reaching a Certain Age...

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-07-20

"Evidently, once you hit 55, LinkedIn thinks you'll age until your buffer overflows," writes Jonathan L.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-26

Classic WTF: Flawless Compilation

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2018-07-19

Just today I was joking with my co-workers: I had written software for which we had no viable test hardware, but the code compiled, therefore I was done. The difference is I was joking… --Remy (Originally)

Back in the heady days of Internet speculation, the giant retailer JumboStores contracted with Fred’s software company, TinyWeb, to develop the region’s first web-based supermarket. Customers would be able to assemble carts online and receive their groceries the next day.

The virtual supermarket had to communicate with JumboStores’s inventory system in real-time. The former was bleeding-edge web technology, the latter a cobweb-laden mainframe with no external point of access.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-25

Classic WTF: The Mega Bureaucracy

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2018-07-18

Part of the reason we need a summer break is because we simply don't have the organizational skills of this particular company. I wonder if they sell consulting. Original -- Remy

Photo credit: 'digicla' at Flickr At my daytime corporate-type job, if I need to even sneeze in the general direction of a production environment, I need both a managerial and customer approvals with documentation solemnly stating that I thoroughly tested my changes and swear on a stack of MSDN licenses and O'Reilly books that I am NOT going to break anything as a result of my changes. Sure, the whole thing is a pain (and admittedly, a necessary evil), but what Bruce W. has to go through beats the pants off of anything I've ever had to go through.

For the most part, Bruce loves his job. He gets to work with a lot of intelligent and motivated people. He has been developing a new system to support a new product that has the possibility of earning his division several million dollars per year and saving the corporate parent several hundred thousand dollars per year. The net effect on the corporate parent's bottom line will be quite nice. He developed a Web front end while a fellow developer put together the data feeds. The initial development work was estimated to take about six weeks; pretty good since we only had eight weeks to work with.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-23

Classic WTF: The Source Control Shingle

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2018-07-17

Our summer break continues. I once worked on a team which made "shingles"- software modules that were layered on top of a packaged product. There were a lot of WTFs in those shingles, but nothing that can compare to this once. Original--Remy

The year was 1999 and the dot-com boom was going full-throttle. Companies everywhere were focused on building revolutionary applications using nothing but top-shelf hardware and state-of-the-art software tools. Developers everywhere were trying to figure out if they should play more foosball, more air hockey, or sit back down on their Aeron and write more code. Everywhere, that is, except Boise, Idaho. Or at least, Dave's small corner of it.

At Dave's company, developers worked at a solid pace, using reliable tools, for a stable industry. They were sub-sub-contractors on a giant project commissioned by the U.S. Navy to condense naval vessel documentation. Generally speaking, the complete documentation required for a modern warship-from the GPS calibration instructions to the giant 130-millimeter cannon repair guide-is measured in tons. By condensing the documentation into the electronic equivalent, they could not only save tremendous physical space, but they could make it much easier to navigate.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-25

Classic WTF: The Virtudyne Saga

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2018-07-16

As we usually do around this time of year, it's summer break season for TDWTF. This week, we're going to rerun some old classics, starting with this legend from 2006, compiled into a single article. --Remy

The Virtudyne saga (published 2006-Oct-10 through 2006-Oct-13) is my all time favorite. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Virtudyne, one of the largest privately-financed ($200M) disasters in our industry. Like most articles published here, all names have been changed to protect the guilty, and I've worked very closely with Rob Graves (the submitter) to ensure that this presentation is as close to how it happened as possible.

Part I - The Founding

By most people's standard, The Founder was very wealthy. A successful entrepreneur since age seventeen, he built several multi-million dollar companies and amassed a fortune larger than that of most A-list Hollywood celebrities. He prided himself on having one of the largest private collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world and prominently displayed many of them in his Great Room. And it truly was a great room: having been to The Founder's mansion several times, Rob recalls that his two-story, four-bedroom home could easily fit inside the Great Room.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-18

All the Way from Sweden

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-07-13

"And to think, this price doesn't include assembly," wrote Adam G.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-21

A Symbol of Bad Code

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-12

As developers, when we send data over the network, we can usually safely ignore the physical implementation of that network. At some level, though, the bits you’re sending become physical effects in your transmission medium, whether it’s radio waves or electrical signals.

You can’t just send raw bits over the wire. Those bits have to be converted into a symbol suitable for the transmission medium. Symbols could be the dots-and-dashes of morse code, tones transmitted over a phone line, or changing duty cycles on a pulse-width-modulated signal. The number of symbols per second is the baud rate of the channel. What this means for digital transmission is that even if your channel has a potential bit rate of one gigabit per second, the actual baud rate may be different- either much larger or much smaller. For example, modems might send 4-bits per symbol, meaning a 2,400 baud modem actually can transmit 9,600 bits per second. GPS, on the other hand, can transmit 50 bits/s, but over one million symbols per second thanks to spread spectrum broadcast.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-14

Reproducible Heisenbug

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2018-07-11

Illustration of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Matt had just wrapped up work on a demo program for an IDE his company had been selling for the past few years. It was something many customers had requested, believing the documentation wasn't illustrative enough. Matt's program would exhibit the IDE's capabilities and also provide sample code to help others get started on their own creations.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-14

Is the Table Empty?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-10

Sean has a lucrative career as a consultant/contractor. As such, he spends a great deal of time in other people’s code bases, and finds things like a method with this signature:

public boolean isTableEmpty()

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-20

Walking on the Sun

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-07-09

In 1992, I worked at a shop that was all SunOS. Most people had a Sparc-1. Production boxes were the mighty Sparc-2, and secretaries had the lowly Sun 360. Somewhat typical hardware for the day.

Sun was giving birth to their brand spanking new Solaris, and was pushing everyone to convert from SunOS. As with any OS change in a large shop, it doesn't just happen; migration planning needs to occur. All of our in-house software needed to be ported to the new Operating System.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-29

Is Null News Good News?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-07-06

"The Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard knows when it's a slow news day, null happens," Bill T. writes.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-24

To Read or Parse

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-05

When JSON started to displace XML as the default data format for the web, my initial reaction was, "Oh, thank goodness." Time passed, and people reinvented schemas for JSON and RPC APIs in JSON and wrote tools which turn JSON schemas into UIs and built databases which store BSON, which is JSON with extra steps, and… it makes you wonder what it was all for.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-13

Classic WTF: Common Sense Not Found

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2018-07-04

It's the Forth of July in the US, where we all take a day off and launch fireworks to celebrate the power of stack based languages. While we participate in American traditions, like eating hot dogs without buns, enjoy this classic WTF about a real 455hole. --Remy

Mike was a server admin at your typical everyday Initech. One day, project manager Bill stopped by his cube with questions from Jay, the developer of an internal Java application.

“Hello there- thanks for your time!” Bill dropped into Mike’s spare chair. “We needed your expertise on this one.”

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-28

Flobble

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-07-03

The Inner Platform Effect, third only after booleans and dates, is one of the most complicated blunders that so-called developers (who think that they know what they're doing) do to Make Things Better.™ Combine that with multiple inheritance run-amok and a smartass junior developer who thinks documentation and method naming are good places to be cute, and you get todays' submission.

A cat attacking an impossible object illusion to get some tuna from their human

Chops,an experienced C++ developer somewhere in Europe, was working on their flagship product. It had been built slowly over 15 years by a core of 2-3 main developers, and an accompanying rotating cast of enthusiastic but inexperienced C++ developers. The principal developer had been one of those juniors himself at the start of development. When he finally left, an awful lot of knowledge walked out the door with him.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-28

An Eventful Career Continues

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-07-02

You may remember Sandra from her rather inglorious start at Initrovent. She didn't intend to continue working for Karl for very long, but she also didn't run out the door screaming. Perhaps she should have, but if she had- we wouldn't have this code.

Initrovent was an event-planning company, and thus needed to manage events, shows, and spaces. They wrote their own exotic suite of software to manage that task.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-05

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