Curious Perversions in Information Technology
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There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production. WHERE ( some conditions) AND ( 1 = 0 OR ( 1 = 1 AND (other conditions))) The OR means that by…
The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top. Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it. If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B: I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at an ed-tech company founded by a mechanical engineering professor, Harry. Harry had spent a great deal…
We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-paste Foo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium: [...:ERROR:components/viz/service/display/display.cc:273] Frame latency is negative: -0.18 ms While this issue might be fixed by now, at least on some platforms , I think it's remarkable that someone actually wrote this message…
Today's maybe more of a "representative data sheet entry" than anything else. Every developer has the experience of reading the documentation. If you've been at this for some time, you've probably read bad documentation. Documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed. Or, my personal favorite, the brief time where Oracle tried to put all of its documentation into an Adobe Flex…
Matlab is special . Scientists and researchers love it. Programmers hate it, and not just because it uses 1-based arrays. I've worked on a number of projects where the task was "take this Matlab code and convert it to C so we can run it on an embedded CPU". Somehow, in that process, I've avoided learning much about Matlab. Andre works on a team that uses Matlab to manage experimental scenarios.…
Today's submitter John F. was migrating data from a Microsoft platform to a Microsoft platform, using Microsoft tools. Absolutely nothing could go wrong, right? Right? A few years ago, I was working on a migration. We had sold part of our business, and so we had to extract a whole bunch of customer documents and metadata to provide to the buyer. The documents were stored in SharePoint on-premises,…
Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control. There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually make a version that's any good. Build tooling is one of my go-to examples: there are no good build…
"So many zeroes! I'm in." W00H000! Kivi S. "found this ad in the wild. This must be a very large jackpot, look at all those zeroes!" "I knew it!" groused an anonymous cynic. "Yes, SignUpGenius. We all know that SUCCESS is just an illusion." Another anonymous grouch reported "I guess JustWatch has suddenly become a bit precious about their sources" "These boots are made for crashing" thundered…
Maciej works as a freelancer, and that frequently means picking up old PHP code that nobody wants to support. One project had been lingering for ages with key features missing. Specifically, it was supposed to make HTTP requests to other services on an interval, and use that to populate its data. "The old dev tried, but never got it working." It was Maciej's turn to give it a shot. $ch = curl_init…
"You submitted a pull request." Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation. "Yes?" she replied. "Okay, well, we don't do that here. You're new, so I'll let it slide, but please review the developer guide." Well, Indika had reviewed the…
Eric O was trawling through an API for handling concurrency, and found this little mismatch between the comment and the definition: /// <summary> /// private Status, because while this object needs to be able to set the status, consumers should only be able to check it, lest everything break. /// </summary> public StatusType Status { get { return _status; } set { if ( value != _status) {…
I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor. -Leila For a while I was stunned, staring at the email in front of me. I’d just told my boss I was quitting , refusing a promotion into my recently-deceased mentor Aggie’s shoes. Now, the new head of Human Resources wanted to see me. Me? A Tech Support drone with one foot out the door? Well, she…
Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh. Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an email from OnePlus this morning letting me know they have updated the planned delivery date for my…
