The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Truth About Internationalization

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-03-27

Booleans. One would think that simple true and false would be sufficient to represent all the possible values. However, even more than dates, they are one of the most difficult things to master in all of computer science. There are all manner of possible values and many different ways of comparing different entities.

Compounding everything is another dimension to boolean-ness: internationalization. After all, not every language uses English spellings of true and false. In high school, they made me take French, so it'd be vrai and faux. For most of us, we'd put the language-specific spelling in an application-phrases file, cache it and pick the appropriate spelling based upon the meaning of the required phrase. However, the underlying core values of truth/falsehood would still be programming-language-specific.

Bank $Security

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-03-20

Banks. They take your money and lend it to others. They lend money deposited by other people to you, either as a car loan, mortgage, or for credit card purchases. For this privilege, you give them all of your personal information, including your social security number. Implicit in that exchange is the fact that the bank should keep your personal information confidential. Security is important. One might think that such a concept would be important to banks. One would be wrong.

To be fair, the high ranking people at the banks probably believe that all of their customer information should be - and is - secure and protected. Unfortunately, there are multiple layers of middle and lower management (that we all know all too well) that might not comprehend that point.