The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

All the Rest Have 31

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-31

Horror movies, as of late, have gone to great lengths to solve the key obstacle to horror movies- cell phones. When we live in a world where help is a phone call away, it's hard to imagine the characters not doing that. So screenwriters put them in situations where this is impossible: in Midsommar they isolate them in rural Sweden, in Get Out calling the police is only going to put our protagonist in more danger. But what's possibly more common is making the film a period piece- like the X/Pearl/Maxxxine trilogy, Late Night with the Devil, or Netflix's continuing series of R.L. Stine adaptations.

I bring this up, because today's horror starts in 1993. A Norwegian software company launched its software product to mild acclaim. Like every company, it had its ups and downs, its successes and missteps. On the surface, it was a decent enough place to work.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-01

A Base Nature

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-30

Once again, we take a look at the traditional "if (boolean) return true; else return false;" pattern. But today's, from RJ, offers us a bonus twist.

public override bool IsValid
{
   get
   {
      if (!base.IsValid)
         return false;

      return true;
   }
}

15 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-31

On the Log, Forever

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-29

Jon recently started a new project. When setting up his dev environment, one of his peers told him, "You can disable verbose logging by setting DEBUG_LOG=false in your config file."

Well, when Jon did that, the verbose logging remained on. When he asked his peers, they were all surprised to see that the flag wasn't turning off debug logging. "Hunh, that used to work. Someone must have changed something…" Everyone had enough new development to do that tracking down a low priority bug fell to Jon. It didn't take long.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-03

Trophy Bug Hunting

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-28

Quality control is an important business function for any company. When your company is shipping devices with safety concerns, it's even more important. In some industries, a quality control failure is bound to be national headlines.

When the quality control software tool stopped working, everyone panicked. At which point, GRH stepped in.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-19

What Goes Around

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-25

No obvious pattern fell out of last week's submissions for Error'd, but I did especially like Caleb Su's example.

Michael R. , apparently still job hunting, reports "I have signed up to outlier.ai to make some $$$ on the side. No instructions necessary."

8 comments - Last comment @ 2024-11-01

Join Our Naming

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-24

As a general rule, if you're using an RDBMS and can solve your problem using SQL, you should solve your problem using SQL. It's how we avoid doing joins or sorts in our application code, which is always a good thing.

But this is a general rule. And Jasmine sends us one where solving the problem as a query was a bad idea.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-25

Querieous Strings

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-23

When processing HTTP requests, you frequently need to check the parameters which were sent along with that request. Those parameters are generally passed as stringly-typed key/value pairs. None of this is news to anyone.

What is news, however, is how Brodey's co-worker indexed the key/value pairs.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-24

What the Hmm?

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2024-10-22

Our stories come from you, our readers- which, it's worth reminding everyone, keep those submissions coming in. There's nothing on this site without your submissions.

Now, we do get some submissions which don't make the page. Frequently, it's simply because we simply don't have enough context from the submission to understand it or comment on it effectively. Often, it's just not that remarkable. And sometimes, it's because the code isn't a WTF at all.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-25

Perfect Test Coverage

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-21

When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."

Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.

23 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-22

Friday On My Mind

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-18

The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.

So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-31

Ancestry Dot Dumb

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-17

Damiano's company had more work than staff, and opted to hire a subcontractor. When hiring on a subcontractor, you could look for all sorts of things. Does their portfolio contain work similar to what you're asking them to do? What's the average experience of their team? What are the agreed upon code quality standards for the contract?

You could do that, or you could hire the cheapest company.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-20

Time to Change

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-16

Dennis found this little nugget in an application he inherited.

function myTime(){
    $utc_str = gmdate("M d Y H:i:s", time());
    $utc = strtotime($utc_str);
    return $utc;
}

17 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-21

An Overloaded Developer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-15

"Oh, I see what you mean, I'll just write an overloaded function which takes the different set of parameters," said the senior dev.

That got SB's attention. You see, they were writing JavaScript, which doesn't have function overloading. "Um," SB said, "you're going to do what?"

19 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-23

Ripping Away the Mask

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-14

Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:

byte number = (byte) 11;

25 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-17

You Don't Need A Weatherman

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-11

...to know which way the wind blows. This week, it's been an ill one. Two of our readers sent us references to the BBC's reports on unusual weather in Bristol - one from the web, and one mobile. Maybe that will help you deduce the source of this error.

Frist, Graham F. shared a screenshot of the beeb's mobile app, bellowing "I know Milton is hitting the US hard right now but that's nothing compared to the 14,000 mph winds here!"

23 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-13

Idtoic Mistakes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-10

Working at a company where the leadership started as technical people has its advantages, but it can also carry costs. Arthur is in one such environment, and while it means that management and labor have a common vocabulary, the company leadership forgets that they're not in a technical role anymore. So they still like to commit code to the project. And that's how things like this happen:

if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}

14 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-14

JaphpaScript

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-09

Let's say you have a web application, and you need to transfer some data that exists in your backend, server-side, down to the front-end, client-side. If you're a normal person, you have the client do an HTTP request and return the data in something like a JSON format.

You could certainly do that. Or, you could do what Alicia's predecessor did.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-11

A Cache Exists

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-08

Ben's web firm took on a new client, and they're using a rather questionable shopping cart system. Like a lot of PHP web plugins, someone decided that they needed to "protect" their code by obfuscating it. Either that, they were obfuscating it out of shame, one or the other.

if(!function_exists("cache_exists")) {
	eval("fu" . "nction cach" . "e_exi" . "sts(\$Data) { echo base" . "64" . "_d" . "eco" . "de(\$" . "Data); }");
}

11 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-31

Try to Catch This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2024-10-07

The power of exception handling is that it allows every layer in our stack be notified of an error condition, do something about it, and pass it on if necessary.

For example, if you have a data access layer and a query fails, you may catch the exception and potentially retry there, only passing the exception up the stack after a few failures. Or, you may fail to connect, updates some internal status variables to represent that you're in an invalid state, and then pass that exception up the stack.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-08

Stop Poking Me!

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2024-10-04

I am amused to see that Warcraft III is still out there being played. I think it was my son's first PC game and maybe the second to last one I ever played regularly.

And it's Maia E. who's doing it. She reports "Warcraft III was patched into oblivion over the years, and it looks like the patches introduced some bugs into campaign quests. At least they didn't rename Thrall into (undefined)!"

20 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-07

Library Checkout

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-03

Alexander doesn't usually ask "why are you hiring for this position?" during an interview. But when a small public library is paying your rather high contracting rate, one can't help but wonder. Fortunately, the library offered their reasoning without Alexander asking: "We hired a new staff member, so we need a programmer to add them to our home page."

Alexander assumed that he was dealing with a client who couldn't figure out how to navigate their CMS, and scheduled an afternoon to do the work. It turned out to be a bit more complicated.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-31

Join or Die

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-02

Seuf sends us some old code, which entered production in 2011. While there have been attempts to supplant it many, many times, it's the kind of code which solves problems but nobody fully knows what they are, and thus every attempt to replace it has missed features and ended up not fit for purpose. That the tool is unmaintainable, buggy, and slow? Well, so it goes.

Today's snippet is Perl:

31 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-12

Feeling Free

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2024-10-01

Jason started work on a C++ application doing quantitative work. The nature of the program involves allocating all sorts of blocks of memory, doing loads of complicated math, and then freeing them. Which means, there's code which looks like this:

for( i = 0; i < 6; i++ )
{
    if( h->quant4_bias[i] )
        free( h->quant4_bias[i] );
}

34 comments - Last comment @ 2024-10-14

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