Off Topic: A Book Review: 2000 Insults for All Occasions (1)
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Alex Papadimoulis (191)
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One of my all-time favorite pastimes is saleing. Garage saleing, yard saleing, rummage saleing, you name it. If there’s a large pile of household junk that someone’s selling, then I’ll be there, picking through it. It’s hard to explain; there’s just something sublime about finding stuff that I definitely don’t need and then incessantly haggling over its price. Like all passionate salers, I dream that one day I’ll find that Joseph Decker original worth a ...
The .NET Bridge to Nowhere (4)
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Alex Papadimoulis (191)
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2 days, 16 hours
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For as long as The City (as I'll call it) has supplied water to its residents, it has had one big headache called "The Annual Water Survey." Like residents of all large metropolises, The City's residents want to make sure the water they drink has only a miniscule amount of the "bad stuff," such as heavy metals and pathogens, and just the right amount of the "good stuff" -- chlorine, fluoride, etc. The water survey ...
CodeSOD: Out of All the Possible Answers... (7)
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Jake Vinson (115)
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"When we interview people," cablecar wrote on the Sidebar, "we give them simple programming tasks to test their ability. The below code was an attempt to solve a problem I found on Project Euler. It's from a candidate for a senior development position with '10 years of PHP' experience. for ($i=1;$i<=99999999999;$i++) { $num = 20*$i; if ($num%19 == 0) { if ($num%18 == 0) { if ($num%17 == 0) { if ($num%16 == 0) { ...
The CEO's Sycophant (1)
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No one really liked Martin P. This is not to say that Martin was unlikeable per se, it’s just that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over his unofficial title: the CEO’s sycophant. In all fairness to Martin, he never really aspired to become the CEO’s sycophant. Or anyone’s sycophant for that matter. He simply saw a job advertisement – Windows Software Engineer – applied for it, interviewed, and accepted the offer. Little ...
Error'd: A Bit More Involved (4)
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4 days, 22 hours
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"Looking back," Nathan Redding wrote, "I really should have taken advantage of this offer. I'm not quite sure we'll see 0% interst rates with $0.00/month payments again any time soon..." Jeff was looking forward to Sprint's New and Improved login system... "You'd think looking up a ZIP code is just a simple, back-end database call," Zack wrote. "Actually, it's a bit more invovled than that and requires the help of a certain Defender of the ...
CodeSOD: Code Dendrochronology (1)
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Jake Vinson (115)
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As the seasons change and years pass, trees accumulate rings that can be used to determine the age of the tree. This is a result of seasonal growth — the inner section of each ring is formed in the early part of the rapid growth season; this wood is called "early wood" (*snicker*). Then as the temperature changes and growth slows, the darker outer portion of the ring forms ("late wood"). And who can forget ...
The Hot Room (33)
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For as long as anyone could remember, there had always been two server rooms: the Cool Room and the Hot Room. The Cool Room was exactly what you’d expect a server room at a mid-sized technology services firm to be: floor-to-ceiling racks along the walls filled with various servers, battery backups, monitors, and KVMs, all tied together with Ethernet and power cables that were neatly tucked in their trays. And, of course, it was a ...
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Lerch said:
The most hilarious and sad story I have read all week. "The Daily WTF" site always lives up to their name!
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wolfie toutomoutochan said:
hilarious!
Error'd: Unprepared For Divide_By_Zero (11)
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"All I want to do was take out some cash at the Huntsville, Alabama airport," Monty wrote, "unfortunately, I wasn't quite prepared and my brain threw a Divide_By_Zero error." "That's quite a lot of growth," Joe Butler writes, "in two weeks, no less!" "Media Monkey threw this at me a few minutes ago," Bruce wrote, "and now I'm paralyzed with uncertanty." "It's always good to see when a programmer catches exceptions," Maren writes, "it's even ...
CodeSOD: The Magic Wand of Generic (1)
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J. K.'s boss loves the term "generic." Developing a feature that prompts if one specific field is left blank, that will only be used on that page? Make it generic enough to work on any page. Working on an application that will only ever be used by the local government in Podunk, MA? Make it generic enough to be able to easily change every line of text into Swahili, just in case. He didn't know ...
CodeSOD: The Substandard Standard (5)
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Michael F. arrived to an ugly sight — an inbox full of messages with the same subject line. "ERROR: Invalid data near '<Carrier '" And that could only mean one thing. The shipping software company had released a patch to their web service. Having suffered through updates of ClearPath Logistics' software before, he knew exactly how this was going to go. First, he typed up his usual message that boils down to (and I'm paraphrasing ...
Sticking to the Method (4)
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Long before the √-button on calculators, and the now-antique slide rules and logarithm tables, people actually had to calculate square roots by hand. Like so many other pre-Computer Age tasks, square root calculation isn’t really complicated, it’s just tedious. The simplest – and, as it happens, the oldest – technique for this the Babylonian method: guess the square root of a number and then continually refine the result by taking the arithmetic mean of the ...
Error'd: dog eats man (1)
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"After dialing Lenox's toll-free number," Tim Wilde wrote, "I encountered an error message being read to me by a friendly female computer voice. At least the URL it read me was using RFC1918 IP space... though I would love to be able to visit it and find out what I was missing on the actual call!" (download mp3 file) UPDATE: Reader Brian "Benanov" Kemp shares this fun remix. Jacob reports, "there's some rather strange happenings ...
Serious Fricken Bureaucracy (13)
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If Ben E. was given three words to describe his job, he’d use bureaucracy, bureaucracy, and after filling out Form 811B-AW (Request to Use More Than Three Words Form), serious fricken bureaucracy. But alas, when one works for The State, things like serious fricken bureaucracy, vast documentation, and threats of being hired are simply par for the course. When he first started as an Application Reports Developer for The State, Ben wasn’t at all cynical. ...
Tales from the Interview: A Problem at the Personal Level & More (4)
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A Problem at the Personal Level From Shari I arrived a few minutes before my interview and, after notifying the receptionist, took a seat in the lobby and patiently waited for 2:30 to come. When the clock struck quarter to three, I inquired with the receptionist to make sure that 2:30 was the correct meeting time. While she clicked through the company calendar to verify, an employee brisked past the desk and mentioned that he ...
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Nick said:
Sounds like the interviewer had the problem at the personal level.
Error'd: Not a Good Sign (4)
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Mike W. doesn't know what this means, but is pretty sure that it isn't good. Not pictured: the File Not Found button. (submitted by Ace) Matt Fox chose the basic version to avoid the Maximize Taxes "feature." Chris bought one. Keith Garner, I hope you're OK with the WTF community knowing your password. Vitor was using CorelDRAW when suddenly Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:
Scarlet's Letter (5)
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It was the dirtiest look that Derrick had ever seen. As he stood in the foyer, paralyzed by his wife’s dagger-like glare, his mind rushed through all the things he could have possibly done wrong. Did I forget to pick up the kids? Was it someone’s birthday? Crap, it isn’t our anniversary, is it? After a few-second-long silence that lasted an eternity, Derrick nervously stammered a greeting. “Uhh, hi… honey… I’m home?” She clenched her ...
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Nuno Correia said:
hmmmm... mental note: if i've to hide something from my wife... maybe i'll be hiding the stuff near a spare tire!
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Ben Jackson said:
HAHAHAHAHA. Awesome.
CodeSOD: Constantly Expanding (8)
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Close your eyes for a moment and visualize with me. (Hopefully you have text-to-speech turned on.) I want to try some guided imagery on you. Your daily grind is over. You're no longer maintaining a huge application that your whole team hates. You're sitting alone in a peaceful meadow. There is a small mailbox here. Your computer is in front of you, and your favorite IDE is loaded up on the screen. You're starting a ...
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Helvick said:
It's things like this that made me get out of writing code - I came across a constant definition file like this in an app I was maintaining once upon a time and I still havan't recovered. What's worse is that I knew the developer and he was a nice enough bloke but I never got a sensible answer from him about why he built such monstrosities.
CodeSOD: syntax.vb (2)
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For nearly two years, Hank T. tried his best to avoid the CEE system. He even made an effort to not know what CEE stood for (though he was pretty sure it was Customer something Engagement). But alas, the inevitable happened and he was finally tasked with fixing a bug in CEE. Years ago, the CEE system was created by a developer who lived by The One Rule: there are no rules, not even The ...
Searching for the Silver Lining (2)
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"Hi, honey! How was your first day?" Jon's wife greeted him with a smile. Jon didn't look as cheerful, however — he was white as a sheet. His first day had not gone well. Day One "Jon!" Hartman barked the new employee's name as though he was a recruit on his first day at boot camp. Startled, Jon shot up out of his seat, returning a "Sir, ye- Yes?" Everything about Hartman was ex-military. His ...
Error'd: Those Responsible Have Been Sacked (9)
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From Vanessa Thomas: "Line 1110 of the source code just made my day." Rick Olson clicked "yes" because "Danger" is his middle name. Elizabeth's only thought when this popped up was "Yes. Yes, it would be." Jamie Kitson has finished sending in this screenshot. Brad got this error while trying to scroll down the page with the arrow keys. Brad, I officially give you permisison to use the arrow keys for scrolling on The Daily ...
