The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Part Version

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-28

Once upon a time, there was a project. Like most projects, it was understaffed, under-budgeted, under-estimated, and under the gun. Death marches ensued, and 80 hour weeks became the norm. The attrition rate was so high that no one who was there at the start of the project was there at the end of the project. Like the Ship of Theseus, each person was replaced at least once, but it was still the same team.

Eric wasn’t on that team. He was, however, a consultant. When the project ended and nothing worked, Eric got called in to fix it. And then called back to fix it some more. And then called back to implement new features. And called back…

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-13

Waiting for the Future

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-26

One of the more interesting things about human psychology is how bad we are at thinking about the negative consequences of our actions if those consequences are in the future. This is why the death penalty doesn’t deter crime, why we dump massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and why the Y2K bug happened in the first place, and why we’re going to do it again when every 32-bit Unix system explodes in 2038. If the negative consequence happens well after the action which caused it, humans ignore the obvious cause and effect and go on about making problems that have to be fixed later.

Fran inherited a bit of technical debt. Specifically, there’s an auto-numbered field in the database. Due to their business requirements, when the field hits 999,999, it needs to wrap back around to 000,001. Many many years ago, the original developer “solved” that problem thus:

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-28

Functional IsFunction

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-22

Julio S recently had to attempt to graft a third-party document viewer onto an internal web app. The document viewer was from a company which specialized in enterprise “document solutions”, which can be purchased for enterprise-sized licensing fees.

Gluing the document viewer onto their internal app didn’t go terribly well. While debugging, and browsing through the vendor’s javascript, he saw a lot of calls to a function called IsFunction. It was loaded from a “utilities.js”-type do-everything library file. Curious, Julio pulled up the implementation.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-26

The Telltale Snippet

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-20

True! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story. - “The Telltale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe

Today’s submitter credits themselves as Too Afraid To Say (TATS) who they are. Why? Because like a steady “thump thump” from beneath the floorboards, they are haunted by their crimes. The haunting continues to this very day.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-13

It's Called Abstraction, and It's a Good Thing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-02-15

Steven worked for a company that sold “big iron” to big companies, for big bucks. These companies didn’t just want the machines, though, they wanted support. They wanted lots of support. With so many systems, processing so many transactions, installed at so many customer sites, Steven’s company needed a better way to analyze when things went squirrelly.

Thus was born a suite of applications called “DICS”- the Diagnostic Investigation Console System. It was, at its core, a processing pipeline. On one end, it would reach out to a customer’s site and download log files. The log files would pass through a series of analytic steps, and eventually reports would come out the other end. Steven mostly worked on the reporting side of things.

By Fred the Oyster

40 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-04

All the Rest Have Thirty One…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-14

Aleksei received a bunch of notifications from their CI system, announcing a build failure. This was interesting, because no code had changed recently, so what was triggering the failure?

        private BillingRun CreateTestBillingRun(int billingRunGroupId, DateTime? billingDate, int? statusId)
        {
            return new BillingRun
            {
                BillingRunGroupId = billingRunGroupId,
                PeriodStart = new DateTime(DateTime.Today.Year, DateTime.Today.Month, 1),
                BillingDate = billingDate ?? new DateTime(DateTime.Today.Year, DateTime.Today.Month, 15),
                CreatedDate = new DateTime(DateTime.Today.Year, DateTime.Today.Month, 30),
                ItemsPreparedDate = new DateTime(2017, 4, 7),
                CompletedDate = new DateTime(2017, 4, 8),
                DueDate = new DateTime(DateTime.Today.Year, DateTime.Today.Month, 13),
                StatusId = statusId ?? BillingRunStatusConsts.Completed,
                ErrorCode = "ERR_CODE",
                Error = "Full error description",
                ModifiedOn = new DateTime(2017, 1, 1)
            };
        }

67 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-20

If It's Stupid and It Works

by Remy Porter in Coded Smorgasbord on 2018-02-12

On a certain level, if code works, it can only be so wrong. For today, we have a series of code blocks that work… mostly. Despite that, each one leaves you scratching your head, wondering how, exactly this happened.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-16

How To Creat Socket?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-07

JR earned a bit of a reputation as the developer who could solve anything. Like most reputations, this was worse than it sounded, and it meant he got the weird heisenbugs. The weirdest and the worst heisenbugs came from Gerry, a developer who had worked for the company for many, many years, and left behind many, many landmines.

Once upon a time, in those Bad Old Days, Gerry wrote a C++ socket-server. In those days, the socket-server would crash any time there was an issue with network connectivity. Crashing services were bad, so Gerry “fixed” it. Whatever Gerry did fell into the category of “good enough”, but it had one problem: after any sort of network hiccup, the server wouldn’t crash, but it would take a very long time to start servicing requests again. Long enough that other processes would sometime fail. It was infrequent enough that the bug had stuck around for years, but finally, someone wanted Something Done™.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-21

PRINCESS DEATH CLOWNS

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-02-05

Adam recently tried to claim a rebate for a purchase. Rebate websites, of course, are awful. The vendor doesn’t really want you to claim the rebate, after all, so even if they don’t actively try and make it user hostile, they’re also not going to go out of their way to make the experience pleasant.

In Adam’s case, it just didn’t work. It attempted to use a custom-built auto-complete textbox, which errored out and in some cases popped up an alert which read: [object Object]. Determined to get his $9.99 rebate, Adam did what any of us would do: he started trying to debug the page.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-05