The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Underwhelmed

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2025-12-16

Our anonymous submitter was looking for a Microsoft partner to manage his firm's MSDN subscriptions; the pile of licenses and seats and allowed uses was complex enough to want specialists. In hopes of quickly zeroing in on a known and reputable firm, he tracked down the website of a tech consultancy that'd been used by one of his previous employers.

When he browsed to their Contact Us page, filled out the contact form, and clicked Submit, the webpage simply refreshed with no signs of actually doing anything. After staring at the screen for a moment, wondering what had gone wrong, Subby noticed the single quotes used within his message were now escaped. Clicking Submit a few more times kept adding escape characters, with no submission ever occurring. So he amended his message to remove every it's, we're, and other such contraction.

4 comments - Last comment @ 07:42

Duplicate Reports

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-15

Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.

This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:

19 comments - Last comment @ 03:17

Anonymice

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-12-12

Three blind anonymice are unbothered by the gathering dark as we approach the winter solstice. Those of you fortunate enough to be approaching the summer solstice are no doubt gloating. Feel free, we don't begrudge it. You'll get yours soon enough. Here we have some suggestions from a motley crew of three or four or maybe more or fewer.

Mouse Number One is suffering an identity crisis, whimpering "I don't really know who I am anymore and I really hoped to have this information after modifying my profile."

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-13

Tis the Season(al Release)

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-11

We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.

Jessica writes:

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:47

The Modern Job Hunt: Part 2

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2025-12-10

(Read Part 1 here)

By the 10-month mark of her job search, Ellis still lacked full-time employment. But she had accumulated a pile of knowledge and advice that she wished she'd started with. She felt it was important to share, in hopes that even one person might save some time and sanity:

9 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-13

The Article

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-09

When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:

public static void addToListInMap(final Map theMap, final String theKey, final Object theValue) {
	List theList = (List) theMap.get(theKey);
	if (theList == null) {
		theList = new ArrayList();
		theMap.put(theKey, theList);
	}
	theList.add(theValue);
}

27 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-12

The Magic Array

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2025-12-08

Betsy writes:

I found this snippet recently in a 20-year-old RPG program.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-12

A Horse With No Name

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-12-05

Scared Stanley stammered "I'm afraid of how to explain to the tax authority that I received $NaN."

14 comments - Last comment @ 2025-12-08