Articles

Today's tale comes from Evan Wade...

Ben Siemon was pleasantly surprised to find comments in some code he came across...

Originally posted by an anonymous reader...

Chris wanted me to show you this urgent message. I hope you're sitting down for this.

As you probably have guessed, I spend a whole lot of time running The Daily WTF when going through submissions, writing articles, and sending out free stickers. While I do this primarily for fun and hobby, it does tend to interfere with my day job at Inedo and, as a result, I tend to earn much less than I could otherwise. But I don’t mind. All I have to do is sacrifice a few, small things. Things like a decent lunch.

Everything was lined up for some seasonal specials at Chotchkie's (as we'll call it), a mid-size chain of family restaurants. Starting just in time for the weekend on Friday, there would be specials on Pizza Shooters, Shrimp Poppers, and Extreme Fajitas.

"I wonder if it's possible to change the text of the sensibility of the message," pondered Adam, "if the message having sensibility cannot have text... or something like that."

"This is how you set up the monitoring?" Shawn G. looked down at the system in disbelief. There was a watchdog connected to a power relay to ensure that it was always running. The power relay sat right next to the power switch in a sealed environmental enclosure.

"Some years ago I was looking for a job and did a lot of online résumé form filling," Gustavo S. writes.

Through the much of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cambridge-based Thinking Machines was ahead of its time. As innovators in parallel computing, they developed a massive, 65,536 processor supercomputer known the Connection Machine. Visually, it made Cray’s distinctive look seem like a piece of outdated furniture, and was even stunning enough to star as the “impressive blinky-light server” in Jurassic Park.

"Between 11AM and 2PM tomorrow, we have a -93% chance of rain, followed by 113% chance later in the day," Matt writes. "Quite a shift over 6 hours."

Originally posted by "Corona688"...

"While exploring a rather large PHP codebase at my new job," Anthony C writes, "I kept coming across a rather curious pattern from the previous developers:

Jacob S. apparently wandered away from the line and wasn't even in the right city anymore.

"Welcome aboard, Colin!" Colin P. gave his boss a firm handshake, excited about his first day on the job. He'd be a member of the team that worked on an application that ran on a managed information appliance. "I'll set you up with Mike, who can show you the ropes."

"I'm as much a fan of Java Generics as the next guy," writes Jim Bethancourt, "why bother with writing all that type-specific code for common collections (or - gasp - losing type safety) when one can simply go  HashMap<String, SomeObject>."

Let's All Reinvent the Wheel... Again (from K.D.)

"I have this feeling most of the day while I'm on support," writes M, "but I've never thought to try telling people."

Where are my keys? Cam S. had checked under every couch cushion, in every jacket pocket, under every bed, everywhere for his keys. While checking the kitchen counter for the third time, he glanced at the oven clock. 8:35. Even if the skies had opened up right that minute and his keys descended on a golden platter, he'd still be at least ten minutes late for work.

"Not too long ago," Jess writes, "I adopted an application that needed 'a rather minor change' to its functionality. Naturally, when I started, the project owner had no idea what file or directory the functionality was in, so he gave me access to the server and sent me off. After wading through a number of oddly named directories trying to find where the site was even located, I finally found the index file I had hoped would set me in the right direction."

Tsk, tsk. After all the requests to plz email me teh codez, and the Daily WTF community's failure to recognize student initiative, "MonkeyCode" posted a similar story in the sidebar...

"Ummm," Matt wrote, "if you say so..."

Originally posted by "DrillSgtK"...

According to Wikipedia, caching is a method of storing a collection of data for which the time it takes to compute said data is longer than the time it takes to retrieve from the cache. Also, the concept of caching was invented by Mr. T. I suspect that last part may have been added by Wikipedia vandals, though...

François captured this brief video of his answering machine bug for our first-ever video Error'd.