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As the IT Director at a Real Estate company, most of John Sadowski’s work revolves around document management. Since many documents are still transmitted by the age-old method of facsimile, his company uses a fax-to-email service to help inject some modern technology into the realm.

This is what happens when you accidentally type in "DisplayMesageToUser()" instead of "//".

July 19th, 2004 marked a new chapter in New Portlandopolis’s rich dentistry history. It was on that day that the bitter rivalry between Dr. Rutherford, DDS; Dr. Price, DMD, DDS; Dr. Atkinson, DMD; and Dr. Strickland, DDS/DDS-PhD, had finally come to an end. Though there’s much debate on what exactly started the feud, everyone knows what brought the dentists together: the nationwide “denta-corps” that can out-price, out-service, and out-anything their small, family dental practices.

Not all of us are fortunate enough to work in "spacious, windowed private office" like the pampered developers over at Fogcreek. At my company (Inedo) for example, developers are constantly trying to figure out, do I get a chair today, or is it my turn to plug-in to the network? While I'm sure your work environments are equally less-than-ideal, not too many can compare with Baughn's experience.

In the late 1980s, Andrew Harkavy was working as a lead developer for a large hotel chain. He was responsible for 240 hotels that ran off 4 regional minicomputers. Each minicomputer served around 60 hotels, with six ports designated for each one for its terminals, printers, IT dial-in support, etc. Most of the time things worked pretty well, though the hardware was being pushed to the limit.

Errrrmmm... qué?

I am very excited to announce the launch of The Daily WTF: Wersja polska at pl.TheDailyWTF.com.

Originally posted by "military fool" ...

Last year, while watching coverage of the Tour de France, Stephan M noticed something a little strange. If he tilted his head by 90° and squinted just a bit, the profile maps showing the peaks and valleys of the mountain stage looked rather familiar. They were just like the monstrous routines written by his predecessor - the very same coder behind the Quadrasort.

Originally posted by "snoofle"...

At some point, you've probably thought to yourself "I'd love to write some code, but the keywords in my language of choice are just so pedestrian." Your vocabulary is more embiggoned than that of your colleagues. While they're content with DROPping a database object, you'd prefer to efface it. A contractor that Charles I.'s worked with was one of these elite.

“So what do you think about the opportunity,” Ben’s recruiting agent asked. He thought about it for a few moments. It wasn’t exactly what he was looking for, but then again, he had been out of work since November of 1989 – nearly three whole months – and figured he should probably get back in to the swing of things. He told the recruiter that he’d like to talk to the client and asked to schedule an interview for the following week.

Ron sent in this screen grab from what I can only assume is a soap opera intended for robots.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to review a handful of resumes, you’ve probably seen a few bad ones in the bunch. And if you’ve reviewed a whole lot of resumes, you’ve definitely seen some really bad ones. And if you’ve reviewed a whole crap ton of resumes, then chances are, some of ‘em definitely belong here.

There are a lot of reasons to reinvent software. Maybe you don't trust the person who wrote it in the first place. Maybe you wrote it back when you didn't know what you were doing, but this time you'll get it right. Or maybe you didn't know that the solution was built already, right under your nose the whole time.

When a young, entrepreneurial beautician decided to open up a tanning salon, she wanted her new business to be "high-tech." She wasn't exactly sure what that meant, let alone how to go about doing it, so she retained the services of a software consulting firm to help her get there.

How many "Translation Not Available!"s can you find?

Originally posted by "jgoewert" ...

When Doug D. was asked to investigate a data truncation issue, he figured it'd be pretty easy. He clicked through the application to test it out, and discovered that validation was only handled client side. After turning JavaScript off, he could submit text boxes with more text than would fit in the database column.

It was that time again. The Daily WTF needed yet another new look. I don’t know about you, but the pastel look wasn’t quite working for me anymore. While I could go on and on about the new “missing corners” look and gradient heading colors of the new theme, let’s take a peek into TDWTF-past at some of the old looks…

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small Souvenir. Nothing specific, per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything!

"While digging through some database code in our system," Paul L wrote in, "I noticed an interesting pattern emerge. Whenever a boolean value within a SQL result was checked, it would look something like this..."

Jared L. was feeling good. After a nightmarish stint at Initrode Global (That's One Way to Secure It), he joined the staff at CollaboSmart. His days of waking up to an ever-present sense of dread were over. And he could hardly believe that it had ended a mere two months ago.

Sure, 489°F may seem a bit warm, but you should have seen what it was like before Eugene installed the additional harddrive cooling fans ...

Today's Best-of-the-Sidebar was originally posted by "aikimark."

Another day, another bug to resolve. This time, Mark C. was tasked with figuring out why users of their behemoth, in-house disaster of an application were getting the following message from time-to-time:

"In my home county of Wake County, North Carolina", Scott "Malone" wrote in, "when you request library books from another branch, an automated telephone system will call you back when the books arrive at your local branch. However, whenever my wife reserves books, the telephone system calls up and lets 'Suzanne the 1000th Malone' know her books are ready."

Real Programmers don't buy in to that whole "User Friendly" thing...

As the only computer programmer in his family, Kim Johnsson is uniquely qualified to solve any technical problem that might come up, ranging from installing a digital camera to fixing the "blinking 12:00" on a microwave. A recent support call had him diagnosing the all-too-common "it keeps crashing with all these messages" problem on a cousin's computer. After a lot of back-and-forth, Kim was finally able to determine what one of the messages was like:

Although the .NET Framework ships with a comprehensive XML library, Sam B's coworkers aren't big fans of it. It's far too fancy, they claim. Instead, they prefer to use StringBuilders, concatenation, and IndexOf(">")-style parsing.

I'm not sure when this was posted on the side bar, but it was the warning sign at the top of the SkyJack that Robin Harrison was using to install wireless access points on the ceiling of a warehouse...

The Section 508 amendment to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act updated and extended the act beyond its original 1973 text, which simply allowed individuals with disabilities to participate in federally funded disco dancing competitions. Section 508 specifically applies to technology and electronic communication to minimize or eliminate barriers to people with disabilities. And as is wise to do with all federal mandates, Clive S. took this one seriously.

Sagar Mittal came across this message on a self-service checkout machine at a WalMart...

Originally posted to the Side Bar by Chris, following the response from "Gary" (a manager at his former company) about a question importing Word-HTML into their template system.

Forget your password? Don't worry, you can still use the original invitation password that was sent to you when your account was created!

In his college years, budding developer Troels L. wanted to get a leg up over his fellow students. He figured a job to supplement his studies would serve him well, so he looked for employment at IT firms, banks and insurance companies, but no one was hiring students. The companies only had positions available to candidates with degrees.

There's no doubt that it's a challenge keeping up with the constantly changing country lists and country names, but come on Avery... I think it's time that you update yours.

Today's Tale from the Interview comes from Scott McNair. Don't forget to submit your own interview story, from either side of the table. 

"Actually," the lead on Chris G's team said defensively, "this is a quite elegant solution for displaying data in a JSP. This way, we don't have to use the real object and can save memory."

Today is your last chance to (easily) get a WTF Sticker through the free sticker form or PayPal! After today, stickers will only be available via snail mail.

Today's Best-of-the-Sidebar was originally posted by "Yahweh" ...

"Biltmore can't log in," David's boss said in a panic, "you need to fix this. Now!"

Though Dion was a bit rusty on the physics for this question, he's pretty sure he'll be able to do fine using process of elimination...

"Wait, why do you need to shut the SQL Server down?" Henry O. didn't like where this conversation was going. "We've got a lot of people using the database right now. I'd really like to do this upgrade without shutting it down."

While working a contract at a small educational institution this past summer, Dave R. was asked to "clean up" some of the PHP code behind the institution's main web site. In particular, the IT manager asked if course listings couldn't be sorted so that courses appeared ordered by their starting dates.

Happy New Year, everyone! To kick off the New Year (and celebrate the new, new, new name), I'm giving away a whole bunch of free stickers!