The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Bit of Power

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-25

Powers of two are second nature to a lot of programmers. They're nearly inescapable.

Equally inescapable are programmers finding new ways to do simple things wrong. Take Sander's co-worker, who needed to figure out, given a number of bits, what's the largest possible value you could store in that number of bits. You or I might reach for our language's pow function, but boy, in C++, that might mean you need to add an include file, and that sounds hard, so let's do this instead:

39 comments - Last comment @ 09:43

A Lack of Progress

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-23

Progress bars and throbbers are, in theory, tools that let your user know that a process is working. It's important to provide feedback when your program needs to do some long-running task.

Hegel inherited a rather old application, written in early versions of VB.Net. When you kicked off a long running process, it would update the status bar with a little animation, cycling from ".", to "..", to "...".

42 comments - Last comment @ 10:28

Self-Documented

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-22

Molly's company has a home-grown database framework. It's not just doing big piles of string concatenation, and has a bunch of internal checks to make sure things happen safely, but it still involves a lot of hardcoded SQL strings.

Recently, Molly was reviewing a pull request, and found a Java block which looked like this:

35 comments - Last comment @ 2021-02-25

The Timing is Off

by Remy Porter in Error'd on 2021-02-19

Drew W discovers that the Daytona 500 is a different kind of exciting than we ever thought.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2021-02-23

Spacious Backup

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-18

Today's anonymous submitter works on a project which uses Apache Derby to provide database services. Derby is a tiny database you can embed into your Java application, like SQLite. Even though it's part of the application, that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be backed up from time to time.

Our submitter was handed the code because the backup feature was "peculiar", and failed for reasons no one had figured out yet. It didn't take too long to figure out that the failures were triggered by not having enough space on the device for a backup. But they definitely had a enoughFreeSpaceForBackup check, so what was going wrong?

27 comments - Last comment @ 2021-02-23

Shorely a Bad Choice

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-17

"This was developed by the offshore team," is usually spoken as a warning. There are a lot of reasons why the code-quality from offshore teams has such a bad reputation. You can list off a bunch of reasons why this is true, but it all boils down to variations on the Princpal-Agent Problem: the people writing the code (the agents) don't have their goals aligned with your company (the principal).

Magnus M recently inherited some C# code which came from the offshore team, and it got principal-agented all over.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2021-02-23

Optimized

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-02-16

In modern times, there's almost no reason to use Assembly, outside of highly specific and limited cases. For example, I recently worked on a project that uses a PRU, and while you can program that in C, I wanted to be able to count instructions so that I could get extremely precise timings to control LEDs.

In modern times, there's also no reason to use Delphi, but Andre found this code a few years ago, and has been puzzling over it ever since.

39 comments - Last comment @ 01:32

The Therac-25 Incident

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2021-02-15

A few months ago, someone noted in the comments that they hadn't heard about the Therac-25 incident. I was surprised, and went off to do an informal survey of developers I know, only to discover that only about half of them knew what it was without searching for it.
I think it's important that everyone in our industry know about this incident, and upon digging into the details I was stunned by how much of a WTF there was.
Today's article is not fun, or funny. It describes incidents of death and maiming caused by faulty software engineering processes. If that's not what you want today, grab a random article from our archive, instead.

When you're strapping a patient to an electron gun capable of delivering a 25MeV particle beam, following procedure is vitally important. The technician operating the Therac-25 radiotherapy machine at the East Texas Cancer Center (ETCC) had been running this machine, and those like it, long enough that she had the routine down.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2021-02-25