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Tokyo readers, it's been quite a while since our last Tokyo/TDWTF nomihoudai. It's always a fun time, and we've got a good group of regulars now. Here's a pic of a group of us from a past meetup:
It's Thanksgiving in the US today, so we're running a classic WTF. What are you thankful for? How about not needing to support this application. Original --Remy
A codefile whose name is prefixed with “zz” can be one of two things. It's either a file that someone wanted to get rid of but was afraid to delete, or it's an intentional naming scheme to keep the file at the bottom as part of some crude code-organization technique. There used to be a third option - the file's a part of an application commissioned by a certain American rock trio known for their beards and cheap sunglasses - but the band dropped that requirement a long time ago.
However, when Mark Arnott stumbled across "zzGeneralFunctions.asp" as part of a maintenance project he was assigned, it was pretty clear why the file existed. Its first line contained the following comment:
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:
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.
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.
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.
You may not have noticed, but in the footer of the site, there is a little banner that says:
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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 ...
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;