The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2017: The Second Factor

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2017-12-26

As this is a holiday week, per our usual tradition, we're revisiting some of the most popular articles from the year. We start with The Second Factor, a tale of security gone wrong. -- Remy

Famed placeholder company Initech is named for its hometown, Initown. Initech recruits heavily from their hometown school, the University of Initown. UoI, like most universities, is a hidebound and bureaucratic institution, but in Initown, that’s creating a problem. Initown has recently seen a minor boom in the tech sector, and now the School of Sciences is setting IT policy for the entire university.

Derek manages the Business School’s IT support team, and thus his days are spent hand-holding MBA students through how to copy files over to a thumb drive, and babysitting professors who want to fax an email to the department chair. He’s allowed to hire student workers, but cannot fire them. He’s allowed to purchase consumables like paper and toner, but has to beg permission for capital assets like mice and keyboards. He can set direction and provide input to software purchase decisions, but he also has to continue to support the DOS version of WordPerfect because one professor writes all their papers using it.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-30

Developer Carols (Merry Christmas)

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-12-25

It’s Christmas, and thus technically too late to actually go caroling. Like any good project, we’ve delivered close enough to the deadline to claim success, but late enough to actually be useless for this year!

Still, enjoy some holiday carols specifically written for our IT employees. Feel free to annoy your friends and family for the rest of the day.

Push to Prod (to the tune of Joy To the World)

12 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-03

How is an Employee ID like a Writing Desk?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-12-20

Chris D’s has a problem. We can see a hint of the kind of problem he needs to deal with by looking at this code:

FUNCTION WHOIS (EMPLOYEE_ID IN VARCHAR2, Action_Date IN DATE)
   RETURN varchar2
IS
  Employee_Name varchar2(50);
BEGIN
   SELECT  employee_name INTO Employee_Name
     FROM eyps_manager.tbemployee_history
    WHERE  ROWNUM=1 AND   employee_id = EMPLOYEE_ID
          AND effective_start_date <= Action_Date
          AND (Action_Date < effective_end_date OR effective_end_date IS NULL);

   RETURN (Employee_Name);
END WHOIS;

33 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-29

Promising Equality

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-12-18

One can often hear the phrase, “modern JavaScript”. This is a fig leaf, meant to cover up a sense of shame, for JavaScript has a bit of a checkered past. It started life as a badly designed language, often delivering badly conceived features. It has a reputation for slowness, crap code, and things that make you go “wat?”

Thus, “modern” JavaScript. It’s meant to be a promise that we don’t write code like that any more. We use the class keyword and transpile from TypeScript and write fluent APIs and use promises. Yes, a promise to use promises.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-03

The Interview Gauntlet

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-12-13

Natasha found a job posting for a defense contractor that was hiring for a web UI developer. She was a web UI developer, familiar with all the technologies they were asking for, and she’d worked for defense contractors before, and understood how they operated. She applied, and they invited her in for one of those day-long, marathon interviews.

They told her to come prepared to present some of her recent work. Natasha and half a dozen members of the team crammed into an undersized meeting room. Irving, the director, was the last to enter, and his reaction to Natasha could best be described as “hate at first sight”.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-04

ALM Tools Could Fix This

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-12-12

I’m old enough that, when I got into IT, we just called our organizational techniques “software engineering”. It drifted into “project management”, then the “software development life-cycle”, and lately “application life-cycle management (ALM)”.

No matter what you call it, you apply these techniques so that you can at least attempt to release software that meets the requirements and is reasonably free from defects.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-14

A Type of Standard

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-12-11

I’ve brushed up against the automotive industry in the past, and have gained a sense about how automotive companies and their suppliers develop custom software. That is to say, they hack at it until someone from the business side says, “Yes, that’s what we wanted.” 90% of the development time is spent doing re-work (because no one, including the customer, understood the requirements) and putting out fires (because no one, including the customer, understood the requirements well enough to tell you how to test it, so things are going wrong in production).

Mary is writing some software that needs to perform automated testing on automotive components. The good news is that the automotive industry has adopted a standard API for accomplishing this goal. The bad news is that the API was designed by the automotive industry. Developing standards, under ideal conditions, is hard. Developing standards in an industry that is still struggling with software quality and hasn’t quite fully adopted the idea of cross-vendor standardization in the first place?

32 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-19

A Case of File Handling

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-12-07

Tim W caught a ticket. The PHP system he inherited allowed users to upload files, and then would process those files. It worked… most of the time. It seemed like a Heisenbug. Logging was non-existent, documentation was a fantasy, and to be honest, no one was exactly 100% certain what the processing feature was supposed to do- but whatever it was doing now was the right thing, except the times that it wasn’t right.

Specifically, some files got processed. Some files didn’t. They all were supposed to.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-21

Calculated

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2017-12-06

A long time ago, in a galaxy right here, we ran a contest. The original OMGWTF contest was a challenge to build the worst calculator you possibly could.

We got some real treats, like the Universal Calculator, which, instead of being a calculator, was a framework for defining your own calculator, or Rube Goldberg’s Calculator, which eschewed cryptic values like “0.109375”, and instead output “seven sixty-fourths” (using inlined assembly for performance!). Or, the champion of the contest, the Buggy Four Function Calculator, which is a perfect simulation of a rotting, aging codebase.

48 comments - Last comment @ 2018-05-03

Pounding Away

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-12-04

“Hey, Herbie, we need you to add code to our e-commerce package to send an email with order details in it,” was the requirement.

“You mean like a notification? Order confirmation?”

41 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-10