The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Calculated Security

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2019-02-28

Carl C spent some time in the late 1980's at a software firm that developed avionics and global positioning systems for military and civilian customers. In their employ, he frequently visited Schlockdeed Corp, a customer with a contract to develop a new generation of jet fighters for the US military. Due to the top secret nature of their work, security was a big deal there.

Whenever Carl entered or left the facility, he had to pass through the security office to get clearance. They would thoroughly inspect his briefcase, jacket, lunchbox, and just about everything short of a full cavity search. Despite the meticulous nature of daily inspections at Schlockdeed, some of their "security measures" bordered on the absurd.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-10

A Switch for Grenk

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-02-27

Let’s say you’ve got a project object in your code. A project might be opened, or it might be closed. In either case, you want to register an event handler to change the status- closed projects can be opened, opened projects can be closed. Now imagine you’re Antonio’s co-worker, Grenk.

No, this time, it’s not a matter of streams. Today, it’s ternary abuse, of the “why is this even here” sort.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-24

Beyond Brillant

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2019-02-26

We've all had cow-orker's who couldn't do their jobs. Some people have even had the privilege of working with Paula.

Jarad should be so lucky.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-08

What's The Floating Point?

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2019-02-20

There are a number of gotchas that trip up new programmers: the difference between declaring a variable and initializing it, the need for semicolons to terminate lines at times, and off-by-one errors, to name a few. All of us in the industry have met genius self-taught programmers who can put together extensive, well-architected applications in their sleep—but all of us have also met self-taught juniors who barely grasp the basics and think that's all they'll ever need. There's a reason degrees and formal training exist, after all.

54 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-06

The Three-Month Itch

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-02-18

It was March 2016, and Ian was in need of a job. Fairly early into his search, he was lucky to find a tiny startup in need of someone with Python architecture and design skills. By "tiny," we mean that there were only three other developers working for Jack, the founder.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-06

A Backup Pipeline

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-02-13

“Um… can you come take a look at something for me?”

Pat looked up from happily hacking away at some new features to see Milton hovering at the edge of the cubicle.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-08

Set the Flux Capacitor for 12/30/1899

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-02-05

I mentally think of the early 2000s as "the XML Age". XML was everywhere. Everyone wanted to put XML into their applications. Java was the XML king, using XML for everything. People were starting to ask themselves, "do we need the big expensive RDBMS, when we can just use XML instead?"

In other words, just like JSON today, but worse. Tomislav A inherited one such database- a clunky pile of XML documents with only the vaguest hint of a schema to them, and a mix of valuable, useful data, and a mountain of crap. With the assumption that all data validation was happening in the application layer, the database was mostly "garbage in, garbage sits there forever and can never be deleted because it might be important".

46 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-17

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