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Now I hate to go off topic and post something that probably should be on slickdeals, but this Faberge egg from amazon is too good a deal to pass up. (And hell yeah that's a referral link! If it goes back up to 2.5 mil and one of you buys it, we're buying another yacht.)
(submitted by Quarnel)
For me, a trip to the company's server room was exciting. The cold air, the hum of the servers, and the rows of servers with fun blinking lights would make me feel like I was Harrison Ford in Firewall, ready to download confidential data on a MacGuyver-ified iPod. The sad reality, though, was that trips to the server room generally meant I needed one of the administrator's signatures on some stupid paperwork.
John Smith (which I think is his real name) was luckier than me. His duties often required him to be in the server room, though he didn't go into detail about his daily responsibilities in his submission. He was probably in charge of keeping Harrison Ford and iPods out of the server room.
Glenn L. was surprised to find that he was outside the continuum of supported browsers for some random web site. Perhaps it was designed for exactly IE 6.0.2000.21342 or something.
In high school I'd spend most of my time in math class playing with my calculator. It had all sorts of fancy conversion functions that were mostly accurate, and simplified work that I'd rather not do myself. One undocumented (and fun) feature was that the conversion functions weren't limited in scope, meaning that I could, for example, convert hours to milliliters or inches to degrees celcius.
I imagine that the culprit behind today's CodeSOD submission from Tony I. had the same calculator. The reason I've taken a picture is that Tony physically mailed the submission to the WTF world headquarters.
There are several types of bad code; there's lazy code, frantic code, unaware-of-a-better-way code, and aware-of-a-better-way-but-too-apathetic-to-do-it code, to name a few. Then there're amalgamations of different types of bad code.
Môshe encountered such an amalgam when his company was trying out a new delivery service. Môshe spent some time evaluating the IE-only web interface, and was curious about some JavaScript errors he was getting. Strangely, he noticed variables named dateSQL, newSQLTag, and modeSQL.
Originally published in Julalicious on July 7, 2006.
Talk about versatile, J.B. Langston was thrilled to see that Remedy's call tracking system is able to handle Xanthemedies' complaint about broken amphorae on his olive shipment from 352 BC ...
Any bets as to which John Y. should pick if he actually wants to reset to factory defaults?
"This just in: our clock has been adjusted for daylight savings time. To find out why you should be terrified by this and other things, tune in at 11:00."
(submitted by Neil W.)
It's inappropriate and immature to make fun of old people struggling with technology, which is why I won't do so here. However, old people are often forced into stumbling adorably through totally foreign (to them) technology, which is what I want to discuss today.
Victor started his IT career years ago at his university, helping a neuroscience professor keep after his lab. His work involved mundane tasks, like taking care of a small LAN, tracking down experiment results, and preparing graphs and such. At the time, his professor was 84 years young.
In general, I'd say I'm pretty happy with my name. My parents once told me that I was almost named "Cecil," which wouldn't have sat well with me (no offense to all you Cecils out there). Still, I'd choose "Cecil" over "Failed to convert to string from variant type 1 Vinson."
(submitted by Joe T.)
I'd always assumed the AAC format stood for something along the lines of "Awesome Audio Compression;" it had never even occurred to me that it had anything to do with forestry. Think about that next time you're illegally downloading music; you're not only killing Metallica, you're killing forests and bald eagles and crap. And Smokey Bear's band.
(submitted by James W.)
You may remember Tim from the sad tale of Hung, The Incidental Expert. Today, he brings us a story of the "Not Invented Here" philosophy and its ramifications.
In 1996 preperations were underway for the Olympics in Atlanta. And despite plans for Celine Dion to open the ceromony with "The Power of the Dream," people still managed to be excited. America was proud, and many profoundly American companies (e.g. those that sell apple pie, SUVs, beer, or guns) were happy to sponsor the games.
David comes from the harsh, dystopian future of 1984; a time where surveillance is unavoidable and just considering joining peepel.com is a thoughtcrime. Or maybe it's just a bug in peepel's software.
Aaron C. was noticing some slowness and occasional loss of his internet connection. I'm no expert, but I'd bet that the problem could be the 2.1 billion db noise margin on the line.
In .NET, there are generally two types of information in config files: application-specific and environment-specific. The problem with this setup, though, is managing changes to configuration parameters; it's up to the developer to remember to update config files for each environment.
Fortunately, parameters can be easily overridden using the configSource element in web.config, eliminating the need to manually change files for each deployment, not to mention reducing the risk of having to recreate a config file after accidentally overwriting one. Of course, we're talking about software development here, where the simplest solution is often ignored.
Generally I write an intro paragraph about each Error'd submission. I don't know what to say this time, though, as musiciansfriend.com has beaten me to the punch.
(submitted by Jeff D.)
It's hard for me not to editorialize (read: include streams of profanities) in my code. And the screenshot below illustrates that I'm not alone. The key difference is that I actually declare all of the functions that I intend to call. Check it out yourself if you've got IE (mouse over the drawing canvas).
(submitted by Trent G.)
You may not know this about Windows Media Player, but it knows secrets about you. It's aware of your man-crush on Sean Connery, it knows about what you did with your roommate's toothbrush, and it knows that you threw up in your tuba during 10th grade marching band practice. What you may not know is that it can only hold a finite amount of secrets, and once it hits that limit it'll start blabbing all your secrets to your iPod.
We're all seeking truth and elightenment. Some find it in Christ, some in Allah, some in Shiva, crazy celebrities in Xenu, fat goth weirdos in Satan, or the truly enlightened who've been touched by the Flying Spaghetti Monster's Noodly Appendage. Others find it in science. Maybe even in love. Well, for those of you that haven't found the truth yet, here it is:
Apr 07
private static bool GetTrue()
{
return true;
}
Originally published in Pop-up Potpourri: Sixth Time is the Charm on January 6, 2006, Shaddin sent in a strange and hurtful database connection error message.
Now we all know what it's like to be rejected, but who really is prepared to handle this type of rejection from CVS/Eclipse?
Taking a cue from Apple, Sparco has designed the simplest and most elegant calculator UI ever (click here to purchase). In fact, it does one better than Apple (who offers one button) by offering no buttons. If any readers manage to pull off a UI like this for the OMGWTF contest, I'll be impressed.
(submitted by Diego P.)
Call me a Skeptical Sally (actually, don't), but whenever I hear someone complaining of random file corruption, I don't really believe them. Of course, it's a wonderful excuse if you don't know why your code doesn't work or you just slacked off and didn't get some Word document done; maybe you've even used it a few times. Still, that doesn't change the fact that random file corruption rarely never happens.
File corruption that results from inexperience (or poor training) is the real danger. Today's story comes to us anonymously, and is about an IT guy that we'll call Ness. Ness got a call from a client, who was justifiably concerned about some major problems they were experiencing with their production database. Ness did some digging and found that the database was so corrupt that the only option he could think of was restoring from the most recent backup.
