Jake Vinson

Dec 2007

What Is The Matrix?

by in Error'd on

Jason H. knows kung fu.

74 comments - Last comment @ 2008-07-10

Reverse Brute Force

by in CodeSOD on

When David was approached by a colleague for an estimate on some PHP work, David insisted that he'd need to see some of the code first. The only background David had on the project was that it was a PHP site with a MySQL backend, and a pretty sizable user base.

When David received the code, the first thing that he noticed was an unreasonably large file called namelib.php. It was apparently intended to clean up users' first names...

131 comments - Last comment @ 2009-02-20

ITAPPMONROBOT

by in Feature Articles on

At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clearly there had been some effort to clean things up a bit, but whoever put forth that effort gave up halfway through.

It wasn't pretty, but it worked for years. As time passed, though, a proprietary gateway server to communicate with credit processing agencies would crash more and more frequently. And these were bad crashes, too — the kind of crashes where the server wouldn't respond to ping and would have to be restarted manually. It wasn't really a big deal for the admin, Erik, to hit the restart button on the server when he was there, but that was only 40 hours a week. The credit union needed it to be active 24/7, but was unwilling to hire 24 hour staff in the datacenter. The problem kept getting worse and worse, so the IT manager called up a meeting.

172 comments - Last comment @ 2023-11-07

Price in Nonsense

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Some years ago, Pete, a clever coder, developed an application that tracked commissions for futures trading. Pete had long since left the company, his role now filled by Andy M.

Andy didn't have much exposure to Pete's code, aside from the occasional bug fix. Fixing bugs in Pete's code always left Andy feeling uneasy, however, as the problems were almost always a result of logic errors.

81 comments - Last comment @ 2008-06-11

Illicit Process Improvement

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Christian R. was in trouble. Despite his experience across hardware and software, desktops and server clusters, thumb drives and SANs, he hadn't found any freelance work in weeks. It was clear that he'd have to figure something out to pay the bills.

In August, Christian applied at Drab's PCs, a large retail chain focused on computer hardware and software. He'd shopped there for years and had an impressive level of knowledge about their products, so he accepted a position in Technical Sales.

105 comments - Last comment @ 2010-12-29

A Gift from Above

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When Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to us mortals, the mortals struggled to understand it. The power users of fire knew to fear and respect it, enjoying its benefits and working to minimize the risk of disaster. The newbies probably had a harder time with it.

Years ago, a network admin at Corey's company decided to extend the LISTSERV to the internal users. After all, the admin team had been using it and appreciated the flexibility it offered. Users could join a group by sending an email to it with a specific command in the subject line, and if they got tired of receiving emails from the group, they could simply remove themselves. To make it a bit easier, a page for users to manage their group memberships was built and put on the company intranet. After selling the business on the concept, documentation was sent out to various departments to walk them through basic use of the LISTSERV.

178 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-28

More Fat than Human

by in Error'd on

While 90 kilos (~200 lbs) and a 103 cm (~40") waist doesn't sound so bad, Ian, I'm more than a little concerned about your body fat percentage...

68 comments - Last comment @ 2007-12-11

Reverse Cycle-ogy

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After graduating college, Trevor didn't have much trouble finding a job. He worked in a small branch of a large company with no more than 20 people, all of whom had creative job titles that they probably chose themselves. Web scripters weren't "web scripters" — they were Solution Engineers. Some people were Systems Engineers, but they did exactly the same thing as the Solution Engineers. Trevor chose to refer to himself with the less impressive title of "programmer."

Trevor could tell that he was working with an expert team of engineers and solutionologists based on the way they talked. "We're going to leverage JavaScript interfaces, compartmentalizing and segmenting variables with integrated XML driven frameworks, all compiled with forward momentum." He'd also grown suspicious that some of the acronyms his colleagues used were made up on the spot. "The ID isn't even part of the XML DTD. Can you drop a PLC on the OC ASAP 4ME?"

98 comments - Last comment @ 2008-02-03

There is No Option to Express How I Feel

by in Error'd on

Chet couldn't find the "surprised that such a thing even exists" option:

112 comments - Last comment @ 2007-12-18
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