The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Pythonic Wheel Reinvention

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-31

Starting with Java, a robust built-in class library is practically a default feature of modern programming languages. Why struggle with OS-specific behaviors, or with writing your own code, or managing a third party library to handle problems like accessing files or network resources.

One common class of WTF is the developer who steadfastly refuses to use it. They inevitably reinvent the wheel as a triangle with no axle. Another is the developer who is simply ignorant of what the language offers, and is too lazy to Google it. They don’t know what a wheel is, so they invent a coffee-table instead.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-04

The Least of the Max

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-18

Adding assertions and sanity checks to your code is important, especially when you’re working in a loosely-typed language like JavaScript. Never assume the input parameters are correct, assert what they must be. Done correctly, they not only make your code safer, but also easier to understand.

Matthias’s co-worker… doesn’t exactly do that.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-26

Dictionary Definition

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-11

Guy’s eight-person team does a bunch of computer vision (CV) stuff. Guy is the “framework Guy”: he doesn’t handle the CV stuff so much as provide an application framework to make the CV folks lives easy. It’s a solid division of labor, with one notable exception: Richard.

Richard is a Computer Vision Researcher, head of the CV team. Guy is a mere “code monkey”, in Richard’s terms. Thus, everything Richard does is correct, and everything Guy does is “cute” and “a nice attempt”. That’s why, for example, Richard needed to take a method called readFile() and turn it into readFileHandle(), “for clarity”.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-17

Warp Me To Halifax

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-10

Greenwich must think they’re so smart, being on the prime meridian. Starting in the 1840s, the observatory was the international standard for time (and thus vital for navigation). And even when the world switched to UTC, GMT is only different from that by 0.9s. If you want to convert times between time zones, you do it by comparing against UTC, and you know what?

I’m sick of it. Boy, I wish somebody would take them down a notch. Why is a tiny little strip of London so darn important?

52 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-03

Whiling Away the Time

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-01-09

There are two ways of accumulating experience in our profession. One is to spend many years accumulating and mastering new skills to broaden your skill set and ability to solve more and more complex problems. The other is to repeat the same year of experience over and over until you have one year of experience n times.

Anon took the former path and slowly built up his skills, adding to his repertoire with each new experience and assignment. At his third job, he encountered The Man, who took the latter path.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-15

JavaScript Centipede

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-08

Starting with the film Saw, in 2004, the “torture porn” genre started to seep into the horror market. Very quickly, filmmakers in that genre learned that they could abandon plot, tension, and common sense, so long as they produced the most disgusting concepts they could think of. The game of one-downsmanship arguably reached its nadir with the conclusion of The Human Centipede trilogy. Yes, they made three of those movies.

This aside into film critique is because Greg found the case of a “JavaScript Centipede”: the refuse from one block of code becomes the input to the next block.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-08-26

Encreption

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-01-02

You may remember “Harry Peckhard’s ALM” suite from a bit back, but did you know that Harry Peckhard makes lots of other software packages and hardware systems? For example, the Harry Peckhard enterprise division releases an “Intelligent Management Center” (IMC).

How intelligent? Well, Sam N had a co-worker that wanted to use a very long password, like “correct horse battery staple”, but but Harry’s IMC didn’t like long passwords. While diagnosing, Sam found some JavaScript in the IMC’s web interface that provides some of the stongest encreption possible.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2023-05-17

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