The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Come Work at Inedo, the Most Non-WTF Company You Know

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2018-07-24

The "Enterprise DevOps" tools market has really been taking off lately, and so has Inedo! We build market-leading tools for package management, deployment automation, and configuration automation space that aids some of the world's best companies in delivering their applications to users faster than ever.

We're looking for some great people to help us continue to grow:

Solution Architect/Consultant – work closely with our users to help them adopt DevOps best practices in their organization using our tools
Software Development Manager – lead our software development team and help develop our innovative products
Software Developer – Build and maintain our products, extensions, and internal systems while identifying bugs and issues with our customers
Content creator/writer – communicate the business value aspects of what we do to customers by working closely with our technical teams
US events manager – lead our events team and particulate in Inedo and software communities
Marketing associate – travel to various events to meet users and introduce new people to Inedo

14 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-30

Classic WTF: The Source Control Shingle

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2018-07-17

Our summer break continues. I once worked on a team which made "shingles"- software modules that were layered on top of a packaged product. There were a lot of WTFs in those shingles, but nothing that can compare to this once. Original--Remy

The year was 1999 and the dot-com boom was going full-throttle. Companies everywhere were focused on building revolutionary applications using nothing but top-shelf hardware and state-of-the-art software tools. Developers everywhere were trying to figure out if they should play more foosball, more air hockey, or sit back down on their Aeron and write more code. Everywhere, that is, except Boise, Idaho. Or at least, Dave's small corner of it.

At Dave's company, developers worked at a solid pace, using reliable tools, for a stable industry. They were sub-sub-contractors on a giant project commissioned by the U.S. Navy to condense naval vessel documentation. Generally speaking, the complete documentation required for a modern warship-from the GPS calibration instructions to the giant 130-millimeter cannon repair guide-is measured in tons. By condensing the documentation into the electronic equivalent, they could not only save tremendous physical space, but they could make it much easier to navigate.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-25

Classic WTF: The Virtudyne Saga

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2018-07-16

As we usually do around this time of year, it's summer break season for TDWTF. This week, we're going to rerun some old classics, starting with this legend from 2006, compiled into a single article. --Remy

The Virtudyne saga (published 2006-Oct-10 through 2006-Oct-13) is my all time favorite. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Virtudyne, one of the largest privately-financed ($200M) disasters in our industry. Like most articles published here, all names have been changed to protect the guilty, and I've worked very closely with Rob Graves (the submitter) to ensure that this presentation is as close to how it happened as possible.

Part I - The Founding

By most people's standard, The Founder was very wealthy. A successful entrepreneur since age seventeen, he built several multi-million dollar companies and amassed a fortune larger than that of most A-list Hollywood celebrities. He prided himself on having one of the largest private collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world and prominently displayed many of them in his Great Room. And it truly was a great room: having been to The Founder's mansion several times, Rob recalls that his two-story, four-bedroom home could easily fit inside the Great Room.

25 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-21

Six Months of Free Monitoring at Panopta for TDWTF Readers

by Alex Papadimoulis in Sponsor Post on 2018-06-06

You may not have noticed, but in the footer of the site, there is a little banner that says:

Monitored by Panopta

4 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-07

Classic WTF: Quantum Computering

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2018-05-28

When does anything but [0-9A-F] equal "2222"? Well, it's a holiday in the US today, so take a look at this classic WTF where that's exactly what happens… -Remy

A little while back, I posted a function that generated random hexadecimal-like strings for a GUID-like string to identify events. At first, I thought it (and the rest of the system that Taka's company purchased) was just bad code. But now that I look at it further, I'm stunned at its unbelievable complexity. I can honestly say that I've never seen code that is actually prepared to run a quantum computer, where binary just isn't as simple as 1's and 0's ...

12 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-20

Classic WTF: #include "pascal.h"

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2017-09-04

It's Labor Day in the US, where to honor workers, some people get a day off, but retail stores are open with loads of sales. We're reaching back to the old days of 2004 for this one. -- Remy

Ludwig Von Anon sent in some code from the UI component of a large, multi-platform system he has the pleasure of working on. At first glance, the code didn't seem all too bad ...

procedure SelectFontIntoDC(Integer a) begin
declare fonthandle fh;
if (gRedraw is not false) then begin
   fh = CreateFontIndirect(gDC);
   SelectObject(gDC, fh);
   DeleteObject(fh);
end;
end;

30 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-08

Build Totally Non-WTF Products at Inedo

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2017-07-06

As our friends at HIRED will attest, finding a good workplace is tough, for both the employee and the employer. Fortunately, when it comes looking for developer talent, Inedo has a bit of an advantage: in addition to being a DevOps products company, we publish The Daily WTF.

Not too long ago, I shared a Support Analyst role here and ended up hiring fellow TDWTF Ben Lubar to join the Inedo team. He's often on the front lines, supporting our customer base; but he's also done some interesting dev projects as well (including a Source Gear Vault to Git migration tool).

8 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

Classic WTF: When the Query String is Just Not Enough

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2017-07-03

It's a holiday weekend in the US, as as we prepare for the 4th of July, we have some query strings that are worth understanding. (original)--Remy

As Stephen A.'s client was walking him through their ASP.NET site, Stephen noticed a rather odd URL scheme. Instead of using the standard Query String -- i.e., http://their.site/Products/?ID=2 -- theirs used some form of URL-rewriting utilizing the "@" symbol in the request name: http://their.site/Products/@ID=2.aspx. Not being an expert on Search Engine Optimization, Stephan had just assumed it had something to do with that.

A few weeks later, when Stephan finally had a chance to take a look at the code, he noticed something rather different...

15 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-04