Articles

Originally posted by "jjeff1"...

Marten van Wezel notes, "seems like it isn't quite 'Always Coca Cola' on Piccadilly Square in London." Zoom!

"About two years ago," Simon writes, "I worked for a small telecommunications company. Turnover was fairly high, leaving not much consistency in the way applications were developed."

Excitement was in the air. It was the turn of the century and the dot-com boom was in full effect. The bubble just kept growing and growing, and it was probably invincible! The consulting company that Chris G. worked for had gotten their largest contract yet — the first they'd ever had in the seven figure range. Their goal? Build a sister site for a major investment bank that would serve news and analysis on the latest in the investment world.

"This note came along with my home piano course book," Nela mentioned, "I bet Mac users will appreciate the thoughtfulness."

Jared D.'s time at the hardware store's paint department was mostly uneventful. At 16 years old, he worked over the summer to make some extra money before starting his sophomore year of high school. Day in, day out he'd guide customers to rollers, brushes, primers, tapes, and sponges. It wasn't as boring, though, when he got to use the paint machine.

Sometimes you see some code and can feel the frustration of the original developer. Sometimes it's because of profanity-laden comments in the code, other times it's because you can tell that they were right on the brink of a major breakthrough, but gave up.

It's time once again to announce a new locale branch: The Daily WTF: Edition Française at fr.TheDailyWTF.com.

A few years ago, Rob Bateman worked as a programming lecturer at Bourenmouth University. Like many instructors, Rob put his notes, assignments, and resources on his webpage, available for all to see. It wasn't anything particularly interesting or exciting, mostly just stuff like this...

"This strange tooltip popped up while playing with some code in Dev-C++," J. K. writes. "It seems to be saying something important but unfortunately doesn't make any sense."

In April of 2004, Cleveland, OH became much more awesome. You see, that was the opening day of Notacon, the annual un-conference conference centered around technology, philosophy, and creativity. This year's event - Notacon 5 - will run April 4th thru 6th, and I have the honor of being one of the speakers.

The Green Email George Baker observed, "Some people take this 'green computing' thing way too seriously."

Thomas Nordlander writes: "The Swedish Church of Scientology's scary personality test contains some pretty awesome JavaScript validation. Consider the ingenious way that they make sure they are dealing with numbers."

Originally posted by "snoofle" ...

"It should be pretty simp--" David M cut himself off. He learned his lesson. Nothing at his new job was Pretty Simple.

When Chris walked off the platform with a computer science degree in hand, he knew one thing for sure: He'd have to start all over again in the business world. And with a dizzying smorgasbord of technologies and a whole world of concepts never broached in school, Chris knew he'd need guidance from a mentor.

"Browsing an archived article at the Herald Sun," writes Ben, "I saw a box labeled 'Also in Opinion' with the single entry WARNING WARNING - DO NOT ADD STORIES TO THIS SECTION. This is what came up when I clicked on it."

The early 1970's sure were fun. Of course, I'm not quite old enough to know that first hand – and, based on the last reader survey, neither are most of you – but, longtime reader and contributor G.R.G. certainly remembers. You see, by that time, computers were starting to become a novelty.

Submitted anonymously: "I found this in a data access layer for an application testing framework. The object has fields that are obviously meant to contain integers, doubles, and DateTime objects, but they are all strings and this is the only constructor:

Avoiding MUMPS from Joe

Stefan K., how much freaking memory do you have in your computer‽

Originally posted by "jjeff1" ...

James H. writes "If you had to programatically output a list of HTML <a> tags linking to anchors for the Alphabet like this:

In the Stargate SG-1 universe, The Replicators are an incredibly formidable AI race. Made up of small, interchangeable blocks that communicate through subspace across the galaxy, replicators can form into just about anything, from crazy little spider robots to androids to entire fricken spaceships. Worse still, the replicators consume virtually everything in their path to create more replicators, and adapt to and integrate any technology they come across. Oh yes, they make the Borg seem like kittens.

What's the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Can Word edit the unknown?

Life was good for Jeremy. He'd just landed a good job with interesting coworkers in a nice, newly-remodeled office. His cubicle was at the perfect distance between the elevators, bathroom, and snack machines. His boss respected him, his coworkers wouldn't hesitate to help him, and it was work that he genuinely enjoyed.

The value of Pi is not as 3.14159265…ish as many of us would like to believe. Legislators in Indiana once declared Pi as 3.2, 4, and 3.23. Staunch biblical mathematicians insist that it's 3. The whole thing is a mess: everyone just has to have their very own Pi.

When the H.R. director calls to rhetorically ask “can you come to my office for a chat… right now,” the conversation that follows rarely goes well. When one gets that call, goes to the office, and then finds two uniformed officers waiting, that conversation almost certainly never goes well. It sure didn’t for Steve.

Eric would've waited for a better testimonial before putting it online...

In Leon's country, most government institutions are legally obligated to disclose certain data on the internet — their structure, responsibility, public competitions, general announcements, and so on. Leon worked for a company that did government work exclusively, and during a lull in their normal projects, they noticed an unfilled niche — software designed specifically to make sharing of this information easy.

"It's not every day that you come across a hand-coded, table based parser," writes Joel Davis. "That's pretty hardcore. I figured it must have been needed for checking if millions of strings were uints in some super-important inner-loop. Obviously, there had to be a reason to avoid 'strtol', 'atoi' or even 'isdigit'..."

Originally posted by "snoofle" ...

In addition to his normal statement from Fidelity, Ed has been receiving this every month...

It's Share Your Bizarre Email day! Here's three to get started...

Pop quiz, hot shot. There are seven different true/false flags. You have only a single integer to represent them. What do you do? What do you do?

Although Brice hadn't been on the job for very long, he'd gotten pretty comfortable with leading technical interviews. He'd quickly compiled a stock set of questions that could weed out the hacks. Questions that immediately disqualify you for the position if you get them wrong: What is your first name? Name a .NET language. Questions that almost certainly disqualify you if you get them wrong: What datatype would you use to store a string of characters? Is it C sharp or C pound?

Daryl pulled this out of a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant recently...

'Maximum Number of Emails Per Hour Has Been Exceeded?' What the hell? The head of Golficionados was not pleased. He called James to get it fixed.

"It should be pretty simple," David M naïvely stated, "just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?"

When Russ started at InsuraCorp (as I'll call it), one thing was immediately apparent: There were two classes of programmers. The "rock stars," who were recruited from top universities and given first-class accommodations, like windowed offices with brand new computers and dual 21-inch LCD monitors; and the "dinosaurs," who were cramped in dimly lit cubicles each about the size of a refrigerator box. The dinosaurs were lucky if they had a fully working keyboard for their Windows 98 workstations.

"The laptops that we got at work come with the latest in state-of-the-art security," writes B. N., "unfortunately, getting the Fingerprint Recognition set up is a bit, well, challenging..."

"My company has a historical division between the IT Department and the Web Department," writes D. S. Black. "The IT Department does all the normal 'IT' stuff, while the Web folks mostly do non-technical like designing websites, creating simple databases, and configuring web servers. As a result, we've had a few web administrators who haven't quite been All There when it comes to things like reusable libraries, sensible documentation, and database design."