The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Hyperlink 2.0

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2019-09-02

It's Labor Day in the US, where we celebrate the workers of the world by having a barbecue. Speaking of work, in these days of web frameworks and miles of unnecessary JavaScript to do basic things on the web, let's look back at a simpler time, where we still used server-side code and miles of unnecessary JavaScript to do basic things on the web. Original. --Remy

For those of you who haven't upgraded to Web 2.0 yet, today's submission from Daniel is a perfect example of what you're missing out on. Since the beginning of the Web (the "1.0 days"), website owners have always wanted to know who was visiting their website, how often, and when. Back then, this was accomplished by recording each website "hit" in a log file and running a report on the log later.

But the problem with this method in Web 2.0 is that people don't use logs anymore; they use blogs, and everyone knows that blogs are a pretty stupid way of tracking web traffic. Fortunately, Daniel's colleagues developed an elegant, clever, and -- most importantly -- "AJAX" way of solving this problem. Instead of being coded in HTML pages, all hyperlinks are assigned a numeric identifier and kept in a database table. This identifier is then used on the HTML pages within an anchor tag:

11 comments - Last comment @ 2019-09-05

Classic WTF: The Backup Snippet

by Alex Papadimoulis in Representative Line on 2019-07-04

It's "Independence Day" here in the US, which is the day in which developers celebrate their independence from DBAs and switch everything over to NoSQL, no matter what the cost. Or something like that, the history is a little fuzzy. But it's a holiday here, so in honor of that, here's a related story. Original --Remy

Generally speaking, Andrew tries his best to avoid the DBA team. It's not just because database administrators tend to be a unique breed (his colleagues were certainly no exception), but because of the "things" that he'd heard about the team. The sort of "things" that keep developers up at night and make them regret not becoming an accountant.

One day, while debugging an issue with their monitoring scripts, Andrew had no choice but to check with Thom, a member of Team DBA. It turned out that one of DBA's had recently updated their database backup script, but Thom wasn't really sure who did it, why it was done, or what it looked like before. So, he just sent Andrew the entire backup script.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-15

Classic WTF: The not-so-efficient StringBuilder

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-27

As our short summer break continues, this one is from waaaaay back, but it's yet another example of how seemingly simple tasks and seemingly simple data-types can be too complicated sometimes. Original--Remy

The .NET developers out there have likely heard that using a StringBuilder is a much better practice than string concatenation. Something about strings being immutable and creating new strings in memory for every concatenation. But, I'm not sure that this (as found by Andrey Shchekin) is what they had in mind ...

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-28

Classic WTF: Uncovering Nothing

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-26

As our little summer break continues, we have a tale about Remi (no relation) and a missing stored procedure. Original --Remy

Remi works on one of his country's largest Internet Service Providers, and has the fortune to be on an elite team that focuses on agile development. Or misfortune, depending on how you look at it: at his company, "agile development" actually means "we need that in two weeks".

One of Remi's first assignments was to fix an "emergency" on one of the ATM Addressing systems. Apparently, the application was coming up with incorrect routing data. After a solid day-and-a-half of digging through Visual Basic code that called SQL Server stored procedures which called VB-based COM objects which called more stored procs, Remi found a weird table ("Cal_ATM") that was referenced from an externally-linked database, and the data in that table was completely out of date.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-27

Classic WTF: Logical Tiers? That Makes No Sense!

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2019-06-24

It's that time of year when we take a short summer break, and that means we reach back into the archives for some classic WTFs that remind us of when things were better. Or worse. So much worse. Today, we find out where checkboxes come from. Original --Remy

Some developers just don't believe in "standards." I should know, I used to work with some of them. They had their own way of doing things, from reinventing the database to changing the web paradigm. I always found it ironic that these folks have a pretty good knowledge of the tools, but could never seem to figure out how to use 'em. Like Chris' predecessor, who seems to have done the equivalent of tightening screws with a voltammeter.

Ok, so I had to port over an ASP app to Coldfusion MX. It was a simple set of search pages so I didn't think it would take too long. Problem was, I couldn't find anywhere in the code where the HTML for one of the select boxes was. Silly me, I should have checked inside the SQL Server stored procedure first! And of course, this is just the tip of iceberg on this site. There were stored procedures that were used to build the actual HTML for the dynamic navigation as well.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-26

Classic WTF: I Am Right and the Entire Industry is Wrong

by Alex Papadimoulis in Best of… on 2019-05-27

It's a holiday here in the US, and today, we're reaching WAAAAY back into the archives for this holiday treat. The industry IS wrong, and I know which tool I'm making MY next web page in! (Original)--Remy

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.

Hi Chris,

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-30

Who's up for a scotch at InedoCon in Portland?

by Alex Papadimoulis in Announcements on 2019-03-27

A couple weeks back, I posted the Free Mug Day campaign: run through the quick BuildMaster tutorial, and I'll send you a free mug. Today, I have a slightly different offer: meet me at InedoCon (Portland, May 22/23) as a TDWTF delegate, and let's chat software over scotch!

Why Portland? As part of the mug campaign, I asked everyone to share their feedback/comments/advice, and I got lots of suggestions on how we can improve the software itself. That was great, and then I saw this:

2 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-28

Free TDWTF Mug Day 2019

by Alex Papadimoulis in Sponsor Post on 2019-03-06

Long time, no mug! It's been an insanely long time since we've held a Free TDWTF Mug Day. So long that I'm sure most of you have forgotten the joy that is free mug day. Here's how it works:

I've been pretty excited about BuildMaster 6.1, in part because it returns the product to my original vision of helping developers focus on writing great software instead of worrying about how to build, test, and deploy it from source code to production. Or, CI/CD as we'd call it today.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-09