Yitzchak was going through some old web code, and found some still in-use JavaScript to handle compatibility issues with older Firefox versions.

if ($.browser.mozilla && $.browser.version.slice(0, 1) == '1') { … }

What a marvel. Using JQuery, they check which browser is reported- I suspect JQuery is grabbing this from the user-agent string- and then its version. And if the version has a 1 in its first digit, we apply a "fix" for "compatibility".

I guess it's a good thing there will never be more than 9 versions of Firefox. I mean, what version are they on now? Surely the version number doesn't start with a "1", nor has it started with a "1" for some time, right?

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Time Lord Jason H. has lost control of his calendar. "This is from my credit card company. A major company you have definitely heard of and depending upon the size of the area you live in, they may even have a bank branch near you. I've reloaded the page and clicked the sort button multiple times to order the rows by date in both ascending and descending order. It always ends up the same. May 17th and 18th happened twice, but not in the expected order." I must say that it is more fun when we know who they are.

 

A job hunter with the unlikely appelation full_name suggested titling this "[submission_title]" which seems appropriate.

 

"The browser wars continue to fall out in HTML email," reports Ben S. "Looking at the source code of this email, it was evidently written by & for Microsoft products (including <center> tags!), and the author likely never saw the non-Microsoft version I'm seeing where only a haphazard assortment of the links are styled. But that doesn't explain why it's AN ELEVEN POINT SCALE arranged in a GRID."

 

"The owl knows who you are," sagely stated Jan. "This happens when you follow someone back. I love how I didn't have to anonymize anything in the screenshot."

 

"Location, location, location!" crows Tim K. who is definitely not a Time Lord. "Snarky snippet: Found while cleaning up miscellaneous accounts held by a former employee. By now we all know to expect how these lists are sorted, but what kind of sadist *created* it? Longer explanation: I wasn't sure what screenshot to send with this one, it just makes less and less sense the more I look at it, and no single segment of the list contains all of the treasures it hides. "America" seems to refer to the entire western hemisphere, but from there we either drill down directly to a city, or sometimes to a US state, then a city, or sometimes just to a country. The only context that indicates we're talking about Jamaica the island rather than Jamaica, NY is the timezone listed, assuming we can even trust those. Also, that differentiator only works during DST. There are eight entries for Indiana. There are TEN entries for the Antarctic."

Well.
In this case, there is a perfectly good explanation. TRWTF is time zones, that's all there is to it. These are the official IANA names as recorded in the public TZDB. In other words, this list wasn't concocted by a mere sadist, oh no. This list was cooked up by an entire committee! If you have the courage, you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about time at the IANA time zones website

 

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Dan's co-workers like passing around TDWTF stories, mostly because seeing code worse than what they're writing makes them feel less bad about how often they end up hacking things together.

One day, a co-worker told Dan: "Hey, I think I found something for that website with the bad code stories!"

Dan's heart sank. He didn't really want to shame any of his co-workers. Fortunately, the source-control history put the blame squarely on someone who didn't work there any more, so he felt better about submitting it.

This is another ASP .Net page, and this one made heavy use of GridView elements. GridView controls applied the logic of UI controls to generating a table. They had a page which contained six of these controls, defined like this:

<asp:GridView ID="gvTaskMonth1" runat="server" CssClass="leadsGridView" AutoGenerateColumns="False" OnRowDataBound="gvTaskMonth1_RowDataBound"> ... </asp:GridView> <asp:GridView ID="gvTaskMonth2" runat="server" CssClass="leadsGridView" AutoGenerateColumns="False" OnRowDataBound="gvTaskMonth1_RowDataBound"> ... </asp:GridView> <asp:GridView ID="gvTaskMonth3" runat="server" CssClass="leadsGridView" AutoGenerateColumns="False" OnRowDataBound="gvTaskMonth1_RowDataBound"> ... </asp:GridView>

The purpose of this screen was to display a roadmap of coming tasks, broken up by how many months in the future they were. The first thing that leaps out to me is that they all use the same event handler for binding data to the table, which isn't in-and-of-itself a problem, but the naming of it is certainly a recipe for confusion.

Now, to bind these controls to the data, there needed to be some code in the code-behind of this view which handled that. That's where the WTF lurks:

/// <summary> /// Create a roadmap for the selected client /// </summary> private void CreateRoadmap() { for (int i = 1; i < 7; i++) { switch (i) { case 1: if (gvTaskMonth1.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth1, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod1.Text), "1"); } break; case 2: if (gvTaskMonth2.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth2, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod2.Text), "2"); } break; case 3: if (gvTaskMonth3.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth3, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod3.Text), "3"); } break; case 4: if (gvTaskMonth4.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth4, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod4.Text), "4"); } break; case 5: if (gvTaskMonth5.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth5, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod5.Text), "5"); } break; case 6: if (gvTaskMonth6.Rows.Count > 0) { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth6, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod6.Text), "6"); } break; } } }

Ah, the good old fashioned loop-switch sequence anti-pattern. I understand the motivation: "I want to do the same thing for six different controls, so I should use a loop to not repeat myself," but then couldn't quite figure out how to do that, so they just repeated themselves, but inside of a loop.

The "fix" was to replace all of this with something more compact:

private void CreateRoadmap() { InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth1, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod1.Text), "1"); InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth2, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod2.Text), "2"); InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth3, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod3.Text), "3"); InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth4, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod4.Text), "4"); InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth5, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod5.Text), "5"); InsertTasks(gvTaskMonth6, DateTime.Parse(txtDatePeriod6.Text), "6"); }

That said, I'd recommend not trying to parse date times inside of a text box inside of this method, but that's just me. Bubbling up the inevitable FormatException that this will generate is going to be a giant nuisance. It's likely that they've got a validator somewhere, so it's probably fine- I just don't like it.

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Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Carmen, embarked on her IT career with an up-and-coming firm that developed and managed eCommerce websites for their clients. After her new boss Russell walked her around the small office and introduced her to a handful of coworkers, he led her back to his desk to discuss her first project. Carmen brought her laptop along and sat down across from Russell, poised to take notes.

Russell explained that their newest client, Sharon, taught CPR classes. She wanted her customers to be able to pay and sign up for classes online. She also wanted the ability to charge customers a fee in case they cancelled on her.

"You're gonna build a static site to handle all this," he said.

Carmen nodded along as she typed out notes in a text file.

"Now, Sharon doesn't want to pay more than a few hundred dollars for the site," Russell continued, "so we're not gonna hook up an endpoint to use a service-provided API for payments."

Carmen glanced up from her laptop, perplexed. "How are we gonna do it, then?"

"Via email," Russell replied smoothly. "The customer will enter their CC info into basic form fields. When they click Submit, you're gonna send all that to Sharon's business address, and also CC it to yourself for backup and recovery purposes."

Carmen's jaw dropped. "Just ... straight-up email raw credit card data?"

"Yep!" Russell replied. "Sharon knows to expect the emails."

Her heart racing with panic, Carmen desperately cast about for some way for this to be less awful. "Couldn't ... couldn't we at least encrypt the CC info before we send it to her?"

"She's not paying us for that," Russell dismissed. "This'll be easier to implement, anyway! You can handle it, can't you?"

"Yyyes—"

"Great! Go get started, let me know if you have any more questions."

Carmen had plenty of questions and even more misgivings, but she'd clearly be wasting her time if she tried to bring them up. There was no higher boss to appeal to, no coworkers she knew well enough who could slip an alternate suggestion into Russell's ear on her behalf. She had no choice but to swallow her good intentions and implement it exactly the way Russell wanted it. Carmen set up the copied emails to forward automatically to a special folder so that she'd never have to look at them. She cringed every time a new one came in, reflecting on how lucky Sharon and her customers were that the woman supporting her website had a conscience.

And then one day, a thought came to Carmen that really scared her: in how many places, in how many unbelievable ways, was her sensitive data being treated like this?

Eventually, Carmen moved on to bigger and better things. Her first project most likely rests in the hands of Russell's newest hire. We can only hope it's an honest hire.

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We've talked about ASP .Net WebForms in the past. In this style of development, everything was event driven: click a button, and the browser sends an HTTP request to the server which triggers a series of events, including a "Button Click" event, and renders a new page.

When ASP .Net launched, one of the "features" was a lazy repaint in browsers which supported it (aka, Internet Explorer), where you'd click the button, the page would render on the server, download, and then the browser would repaint only the changed areas, making it feel more like a desktop application, albeit a laggy one.

This model didn't translate super naturally to AJAX style calls, where JavaScript updated only portions of the page. The .Net team added some hooks for it- special "AJAX enabled" controls, as well as helper functions, like __doPostBack, in the UI to generate URLs for "postbacks" to trigger server side execution. A postback is just a POST request with .NET specific state data in the body.

All this said, Chris maintains a booking system for a boat rental company. Specifically, he's a developer at a company which the boat rental company hires to maintain their site. The original developer left behind a barnacle covered mess of tangled lines and rotting hull.

Let's start with the view ASPX definition:

<script> function btnSave_Click() { if (someCondition) { //Trimmed for your own sanity //PostBack to Save Data into the Database. javascript:<%#getPostBack()%>; } else { return false; } } </script> <html> <body> <input type="button" value=" Save Booking " id="btnSave" class="button" title="Save [Alt]" onclick="btnSave_Click()" /> </body> </html>

__doPostBack is the .NET method for generating URLs for performing postbacks, and specifically, it populates two request fields: __EVENTTARGET (the ID of the UI element triggering the event) and __EVENTARGUMENT, an arbitrary field for your use. I assume getPostBack() is a helper method which calls that. The code in btnSave_Click is as submitted, and I think our submitter may have mangled it a bit in "trimming", but I can see the goal is to ensure than when the onclick event fires, we perform a "postback" operation with some hard-coded values for __EVENTTARGET and __EVENTELEMENT.

Or maybe it isn't mangled, and this code just doesn't work?

I enjoy that the tool-tip "title" field specifies that it's "[Alt]" text, and that the name of the button includes extra whitespace to ensure that it's padded out to a good rendering size, instead of using CSS.

But we can skip past this into the real meat. How this gets handled on the server side:

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load '// Trimmed more garbage If Page.IsPostBack Then 'Check if save button has been Clicked. Dim eventArg As String = Request("__EVENTARGUMENT") Dim offset As Integer = eventArg.IndexOf("@@@@@") If (offset > -1) Then 'this is an event that we raised. so do whatever you need to here. Save() End If End If End Sub

From this, I conclude that getPostBack populates the __EVENTARGUMENT field with a pile of "@", and we use that to recognize that the save button was clicked. Except, and this is the important thing, if they populated the ID property with btnSave, then ASP .Net would automatically call btnSave_Click. The entire point of the __doPostBack functionality is that it hooks into the event handling pattern and acts just like any other postback, but lets you have JavaScript execute as part of sending the request.

The entire application is a boat with multiple holes in it; it's taking on water and going down, and like a good captain, Chris is absolutely not going down with it and looking for a lifeboat.

Chris writes:

The thing in its entirety is probably one of the biggest WTFs I've ever had to work with.
I've held off submitting because nothing was ever straight forward enough to be understood without posting the entire website.

Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand it, but I do hate it.

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Eddie's company hired a Highly Paid Consultant to help them retool their systems for a major upgrade. Of course, the HPC needed more and more time, and the project ran later and later and ended up wildly over budget, so the HPC had to be released, and Eddie inherited the code.

What followed was a massive crunch to try and hit absolutely hard delivery dates. Management didn't want their team "rewriting" the expensive code they'd already paid for, they just wanted "quick fixes" to get it live. Obviously, the HPC's code must be better than theirs, right?

After release, a problem appeared in one of their sales related reports. The point-of-sale report was meant to deliver a report about which items were available at any given retail outlet, in addition to sales figures. Because their business dealt in a high volume of seasonal items, every quarter the list of items was expected to change regularly.

The users weren't seeing the new items appear in the report. This didn't make very much sense- it was a report. The data was in the database. The report was driven by a view, also in the database, which clearly was returning the correct values? So the bug must be in the code which generated the report…

If POSItemDesc = "Large Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Large Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "Small Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Small Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "2x2 Hanging Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "2x2 Hanging Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "1x1 Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "1x1 Sign" End If '.........Snipping more of these........ If POSItemDesc = "Light Thief" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Light Thief" End If If POSItemDesc = "Door Strike" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Door Strike" End If

First, it's worth noting that inside of the results grid display item, the HPC named the field FColumn12, which is such a wonderfully self documenting name, I'm surprised we aren't all using that everywhere. But the more obvious problem is that the list of possible items is hard-coded into the report; items which don't fit one of these if statements don't get displayed.

At no point, did the person writing this see the pattern of "I check if a field equals a string, and then set another field equal to that string," and say, "maybe there's a better way?" At no point, in the testing process, did anyone try this report with a new item?

It was easy enough for Eddie to change the name of the column in the results grid, and replace all this code with a simpler: grdResults.Columns.FromKey("POSItem").Header.Caption = POSItemDesc, which also had the benefit of actually working, but we're all left puzzling over why this happened in the first place. It's not like the HPC was getting paid per line of code. Right? Right?

Of course not- no HPC would willingly be paid based on any metric that has an objective standard, even if the metric is dumb.

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... London!
This week, we're showcasing some multiple submissions from two regular participants who fell into the theme. Everybody else is just going to have to wait for their turn next week.

Frist up it's Daniel D. "I wanted to see events for the dates I would be in London. Is Skiddle (the website in question) telling me I should come to London more often?" They're certainly being very generous with their interpretation of dates.

 

But wait, there's more! Daniel follows with a variation: "Skiddle here again - let's choose June 7th to June 14th, but Skiddle knows better and sets the dates to June 6th to June 13th."

 

"I was not aware the Berlin to London route passes through Hawaii (which is Mokulele'shome turf)" chuckles our old friend Michael R. He seems to believe it's an Error'd but I think the real WTF is simply the Byzantine tapestry of partnerships, resellers, rebranding, whitelabeling and masquerades in the air transport biz.

 

"Maybe it's just a Monday morning thing," he reports from the airport.

 

But Monday had everybody troubled, and Michael was already thinking of Friday. "I am so sure I took the Circle Line just last Friday. And the other lines have the option Monday-Friday/Saturday/Sunday." I hope there isn't a subtext here.

 

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One of the key points of confusion for people unfamiliar with Java is the distinction between true object types, like Integer, and "primitive" types, like int. This is made worse by the collection types, like ArrayList, which needs to hold a true object type, but can't hold a primitive. A generic ArrayList<Integer> is valid, but ArrayList<int> won't compile. Fortunately for everyone, Java automatically "boxes" types- at least since Java 5, way back in 2004- so integerList.add(5) and int n = integerList.get(0) will both work just fine.

Somebody should have told that to Alice's co-worker, who spends a lot of code to do some type gymnastics that they shouldn't have:

try { ps = conn.prepareStatement(SQL_GET_LOT_WORKUP_STATUSES); ps.setLong(1, _lotId); rs = ps.executeQuery(); while (rs.next()) { result.add(new Integer(rs.getInt(1))); } } finally { CloseUtil.close(ps,rs); } // instatiate a the array _workupStatuses = new int[result.size()]; // convert the integers to ints for (int h=0; h<result.size(); h++) { _workupStatuses[h] = ((Integer)result.get(h)).intValue(); }

This runs a query against the database, and then iterates across the result to populate a List type with integers, and right away we're getting into confused territory. rs.getInt returns an int primitive, which they manually box with new Integer, and stuff into the List. And look, I wouldn't really call that a WTF, but it's what they do next that leaves me scratching my head.

They initialize a private member, _workupStatuses to a new array of ints. Then they copy every integer from the result collection into the array, first by casting the get return value to Integer, then by pulling off the intValue.

In the end, this whole dance happens because Java ResultSet types open cursors on the database side and thus don't have the capacity to tell you how many rows they returned. You need to iterate across each record until it runs out of results. That's why they populate an intermediate list. Then they can check the size and create an array, but that itself is a big why. I'm not going to say that using arrays in Java is an instant anti-pattern, but it's always something to be suspicious of, especially when you're holding result sets. It's probably a premature optimization: the key performance distance is on insertions where an ArrayList may need to resize and copy its internal backing store.

My suspicion, however, is that this code falls into the category of "C programmer forced to do Java". They're comfortable with an array of integers, which is covers 90% of the data types you use in C but a dynamic, complicated data structure is horrifying to them. So they use it when they absolutely have to, and then throw it away as quickly as they can to get back to what they're familiar with.

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Today's short function comes from Janusz, and it's anything you want it to be:

public static function isAnything($data) { return true; }

Honestly, I'm surprised that it was made static. Sure, static is the correct choice for this function, at least if we're describing anything about this function as "correct". I'm still surprised. It's got an accurate name given its behavior, it's scoped correctly. It still shouldn't exist and I have no idea what lead to it existing, but that's not surprising.

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A recent code-review on a new build pipeline got Sandra's attention (previously). The normally responsible and reliable developer responsible for the commit included this in their Jenkinsfile:

sh ''' if ! command -v yamllint &> /dev/null; then if command -v apt-get &> /dev/null; then apt-get update && apt-get install -y yamllint elif command -v apk &> /dev/null; then apk add --no-cache yamllint elif command -v pip3 &> /dev/null; then pip3 install --break-system-packages yamllint fi fi find . -name '*.yaml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true find . -name '*.yml' -exec yamllint {} \\; || true '''

So the goal of this script is to check to see if the yamllint command is available. If it isn't, we check if apt-get is available, and if it is, we use that to install yamllint. Failing that, we try apk, Alpine's package manager, and failing that we use pip3 to install it out of PyPI. Then we run it against any YAML files in the repo.

There are a few problems with this approach.

The first, Sandra notes, is that they don't use Alpine Linux, and thus there's no reason to try apk. The second is that this particular repository contains no Python components and thus pip is not available in the CI environment. Third, this CI job runs inside of a Docker image which already has yamllint installed.

Now, you'd think the developer responsible would have known this, given that this very merge request also included the definition of the Dockerfile for this environment. They'd already installed yamllint in the image.

Sandra writes:

This kind of sloppiness is also wildly out of character for him, to the point where my first thought was that it was AI-generated - especially since this was far from the only WTF in the submitted Jenkinsfile. Thankfully, it didn't pass code review and was sent back for intensive rework.

Finally, while the reality is that we'll always need to resolve some dependencies at build time, things like "tooling" and "linters" really belong in the definition of the build environment, not resolved at build time.

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Frederico planned to celebrate the new year with friends at the exotic international tourist haven of Molvania. When visiting the area, one could buy and use a MolvaPass (The Most Passive Way About Town!) for free or discounted access to cultural sites, public transit, and more. MolvaPasses were available for 3, 7, or 365 days, and could be bought in advance and activated later.

Still outside the country the week before his trip, Frederico had the convenience of buying a pass either online or via an app. He elected to use the website, sitting down before his home PC and entering the address into his web browser. Despite his fiber internet connection, he sat on a white screen for several seconds while the GoMolva Tourist Board website loaded. He then clicked the obvious Buy Now button in the top-right corner. After several more seconds, he was presented with a page requiring him to create an account.

Frederico did so, specifying his email address and a 16-character password suggested by Bitwarden. He then received a confirmation link in his email inbox. Upon clicking that, he was presented with an interface where he could add MolvaPasses to a shopping cart. He selected one 3-day pass and paid with PayPal. The website redirected him to the proper screen; he entered his PayPal credentials and confirmed the payment.

From there, he was redirected to a completely white screen. After waiting several seconds, a minute ... nothing changed. PayPal sent him a receipt, but there was no confirmation from the GoMolva Tourist Board website.

Frederico decided to refresh the page. This time, he saw the default Apache screen on CentOS.

His jaw almost hit the floor. They were still using CentOS, despite the fact that it'd been abandoned? Horrified, he bailed on that tab, desperately opening a fresh one and manually entering the URL again.

Finally, the page loaded successfully. Frederico was still logged in. From there, he browsed to the My Passes section. His 3-day MolvaPass was there, listed as Not activated.

This was exactly what Frederico had hoped he would see. With a sigh of relief, he turned his attention away from his laptop to his phone. For the sake of convenience, he wanted to download the MolvaPass app onto his phone. Upon doing so, he opened it and entered his username and password on the initial screen. After clicking Login, the following message appeared: The maximum length of the password is 15 characters.

Frederico's blood froze. How was that possible? There'd been no errors or warnings when he'd created his login. Everything had been fine then. Heart pounding, Frederico tried logging in again. The same error appeared. He switched back to his computer, where the site was still open. He browsed to My Account and selected Change Password.

A new screen prompted him for the old password, and a new one twice. He hurriedly filled in the fields and clikced the Change Password button.

A message appeared: Your MolvaPass has been successfully activated.

"What?!" Frederico blurted out loud. There was nothing to click but an OK button.

A follow-up message assured him, Password has been successfully changed.

As terror bolted down his spine, an expletive flew from his mouth. He navigated back to My Passes. There beside his newly-purchased pass was the big green word Activated.

"I only changed the password!" he pleaded out loud to a god who clearly wasn't listening. He forced a deep breath upon his panicked self and deliberated what to do from there. Support. Was there any way to get in touch with someone who could undo the activation or refund his money? With some Googling, Frederico found a toll-free number he could call from abroad. After he rapidly punched the number into his phone, a stilted robot voice guided him through a phone menu to the "Support" option.

We're getting somewhere, Frederico reassured himself.

"FoR MoLvaPaSs suPpOrt, uSe ThE cOnTaCt FoRm oN tHe GoMoLvA WeBzOnE." The robot hung up.

Frederico somehow refrained from hurling his phone across the room. Turning back to his PC, he scrolled down to the website footer, where he found a Contact us link. On this page, there was a contact form and an email address. Frederico filled out the contact form in detail and clicked the Submit button.

A new message appeared: Unable to send the request, try again later.

Frederico rolled his eyes toward the heavens. Somehow, he managed to wait a good five minutes before trying again—in vain. Desperately, he took his detailed message and emailed it to the support address, hoping for a quick response.

Minutes crawled past. Hours. Nothing by the time Frederico went to bed. It wasn't until the next morning that a response came back. The entire message read: The MolvaPass should have been activated once you reached Molvania, not before.

Consumed with soul-burning fury, Frederico hit Caps Lock on his keyboard. MAYBE MY PREVIOUS EMAIL WAS TOO LONG OR DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND?? ALL I DID WAS CHANGE THE PASSWORD!!!!

Several hours later, the following reply: The change of pw is not related to the activation of the pass.

Frederico directed his rage toward escalating the matter. He managed to track down the company that'd built the GoMolva website, writing to their support to demand a cancellation of the MolvaPass and a full refund. A few hours later, their reply asked for his PayPal transaction code so they could process the request.

In the end, Frederico got his money back and resolved to wait until he was physically in Molvania before attempting to buy another MolvaPass. We can only hope he rang in the new year with sanity intact.

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High-roller Matthew D. fears Finance. "This is from our corporate expense system. Will they flag my expenses in the April-December quarter as too high? And do we really need a search function for a list of 12 items?"

 

Tightfisted Adam R. begrudges a trifling sum. "The tipping culture is getting out of hand. After I chose 'Custom Tip' for some takeout, they filled out the default tip with a few extra femtocents. What a rip!"

 

Cool Customer Reinier B. sums this up: "I got some free B&J icecream a while back. Since one of them was priced at €0.01, the other one obviously had to cost zero point minus 1 euros to make a total of zero euro. Makes sense. Or probably not."

 

An anonymous browniedad is ready to pack his poptart off for the summer. "I know {First Name} is really excited for camp..." Kudos on getting Mom to agree to that name choice!

 

Finally, another anonymous assembler's retrospective visualisation. "CoPilot rendering a graphical answer of the semantics of a pointer. Point taken. " There's no error'd here really, but I'm wondering how long before this kind of wtf illustration lands somewhere "serious".

 

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Nina's team has a new developer on the team. They're not a junior developer, though Nina wishes they could replace this developer with a junior. Inexperience is better than whatever this Java code is.

Object[] test = (Object[]) options; List<SchedulePlatform> schedulePlatformList = (List<SchedulePlatform>)((Object[])options)[0]; List<TableColumn> visibleTableCols = (List<TableColumn>)((Object[])options)[1];

We start by casting options into an array of Objects. That's already a code stench, but we actually don't even use the test variable and instead just redo the cast multiple times.

But worse than that, we cast to an array of object, access an element, and then cast that element to a collection type. I do not know what is in the options variable, but based on how it gets used, I don't like it. What it seems to be is a class (holding different options as fields) rendered as an array (holding different options as elements).

The new developer (ab)uses this pattern everywhere.

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Many nations have some form of national identification number, especially around taxes. Argentina is no exception.

Their "CUIT" (Clave Única de Identificación Tributaria) and "CUIL" (Código Único de Identificación Laboral) are formatted as "##-########-#".

Now, as datasets often don't store things in their canonical representation, Nick's co-worker was given a task: "given a list of numbers, reformat them to look like CUIT/CUIL. That co-worker went off for five days, and produced this Java function.

public String normalizarCuitCuil(String cuitCuilOrigen){ String valorNormalizado = new String(); if (cuitCuilOrigen == null || "".equals(cuitCuilOrigen) || cuitCuilOrigen.length() < MINIMA_CANTIDAD_ACEPTADA_DE_CARACTERES_PARA_NORMALIZAR){ valorNormalizado = ""; }else{ StringBuilder numerosDelCuitCuil = new StringBuilder(13); cuitCuilOrigen = cuitCuilOrigen.trim(); // Se obtienen solo los números: Matcher buscadorDePatron = patternNumeros.matcher(cuitCuilOrigen); while (buscadorDePatron.find()){ numerosDelCuitCuil.append(buscadorDePatron.group()); } // Se le agregan los guiones: valorNormalizado = numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().substring(0,2) + "-" + numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().substring(2,numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().length()-1) + "-" + numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().substring(numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().length()-1, numerosDelCuitCuil.toString().length()); } return valorNormalizado; }

We start with a basic sanity check that the string exists and is long enough. If it isn't, we return an empty string, which already annoys me, because an empty result is not a good way to communicate "I failed to parse".

But assuming we have data, we construct a string builder and trim whitespace. And already we have a problem: we already validated that the string was long enough, but if the string contained more trailing whitespace than a newline, we're looking at a problem. Now, maybe we can assume the data is good, but the next line implies that we can't rely on that- they create a regex matcher to identify numeric values, and for each numeric value they find, they append it to our StringBuilder. This implies that the string may contain non-numeric values which need to be rejected, which means our length validation was still wrong.

So either the data is clean and we're overvalidating, or the data is dirty and we're validating in the wrong order.

But all of that's a preamble to a terrible abuse of string builders, where they discard all the advantages of using a StringBuilder by calling toString again and again and again. Now, maybe the function caches results or the compiler can optimize it, but the result is a particularly unreadable blob of slicing code.

Now, this is ugly, but at least it works, assuming the input data is good. It definitely should never pass a code review, but it's not the kind of bad code that leaves one waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

No, what gets me about this is that it took five days to write. And according to Nick, the responsible developer wasn't just slacking off or going to meetings the whole time, they were at their desk poking at their Java IDE and looking confused for all five days.

And of course, because it took so long to write the feature, management didn't want to waste more time on kicking it back via a code review. So voila: it got forced through and released to production since it passed testing.

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Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:

The new GlobalCon support website is not working. Appears to have been taken over by ChatGPT. The entire support team is blocked by this.

Instead of feeling any sense of urgency, Craig snorted out loud from perverse amusement.

"What was that now?" The voice of Nellie, his coworker, wafted over the cubicle wall that separated them.

"Urgent ticket from the offshore team," Craig replied.

"What is it this time?" Nellie couldn't suppress her glee.

"They're dead in the water because the new support page was, quote, taken over by ChatGPT."

Nellie laughed out loud.

"Hey! I know humor is important to surviving this job." A level, more mature voice piped up behind Craig from the cube across from his. It belonged to Dana, his manager. "But it really is urgent if they're all blocked. Do your best to help, escalate to me if you get stuck."

"OK, thanks. I got this," Craig assured her.

He was already 99.999% certain that no part of their web domain had gone down or been conquered by a belligerent AI, or else he would've heard of it by now. To make sure, Craig opened support.globalcon.com in a browser tab: sure enough, it worked. Martin had supplied no further detail, no logs or screenshots or videos, and no steps to reproduce, which was sadly typical of most of these escalations. At a loss, Craig took a screenshot of the webpage, opened the ticket, and posted the following: Everything's fine on this end. If it's still not working for you, let's do a screenshare.

Granted, a screensharing session was less than ideal given the 12-hour time difference. Craig hoped that whatever nefarious shenanigans ChatGPT had allegedly committed were resolved by now.

The next day, Craig received an update. Still not working. The entire team is still blocked. We're too busy to do a screenshare, please resolve ASAP.

Craig checked the website again with both laptop and phone. He had other people visit the website for him, trying different operating systems and web browsers. Every combination worked. Two things mystified him: how was the entire offshore team having this issue, and how were they "too busy" for anything if they were all dead in the water? At a loss, Craig attached an updated screenshot to the ticket and typed out the best CYA response he could muster. The new support website is up and has never experienced any issues. With no further proof or steps to reproduce this, I don't know what to tell you. I think a screensharing session would be the best thing at this point.

The next day, Martin parroted his last message almost word for word, except this time he assented to a screensharing session, suggesting the next morning for himself.

It was deep into the evening when Craig set up his work laptop on his kitchen counter and started a call and session for Martin to join. "OK. Can you show me what you guys are trying to do?"

To his surprise, he watched Martin open up Microsoft Teams first thing. From there, Martin accessed a chat to the entire offshore support team from the CPO of GlobalCon. The message proudly introduced the new support website and outlined the steps for accessing it. One of those steps was to visit support.globalcon.com.

The web address was rendered as blue outlined text, a hyperlink. Craig observed Martin clicking the link. A web browser opened up. Lo and behold, the page that finally appeared was www.chatgpt.com.

Craig blinked with surprise. "Hang on! I'm gonna take over for a second."

Upon taking control of the session, Craig switched back to Teams and accessed the link's details. The link text was correct, but the link destination was ChatGPT. It seemed like a copy/paste error that the CPO had tried to fix, not realizing that they'd needed to do more than simply update the link text.

"This looks like a bad link," Craig said. "It got sent to your entire team. And all of you have been trying to access the support site with this link?"

"Correct," Martin replied.

Craig was glad he couldn't be seen frowning and shaking his head. "Lemme show you what I've been doing. Then you can show everyone else, OK?"

After surrendering control of the session, Craig patiently walked Martin through the steps of opening a web browser, typing support.globalcon.com into the header, and hitting Return. The site opened without any issue. From there, Craig taught Martin how to create a bookmark for it.

"Just click on that from now on, and it'll always take you to the right place," Craig said. "In the future, before you click on any hyperlink, make sure you hover your mouse over it to see where it actually goes. Links can be labeled one thing when they actually take you somewhere else. That's how phishing works."

"Oh," Martin said. "Thanks!"

The call ended on a positive note, but left Craig marveling at the irony of lecturing the tech support lead on Internet 101 in the dead of night.

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It's a holiday in the US today, so we're taking a long weekend. We flip back to a classic story of a company wanting to fill 15 different positions by hiring only one person. It's okay, Martin handles the database. Original - Remy

A curious email arrived in Phil's Inbox. "Windows Support Engineer required. Must have experience of the following:" and then a long list of Microsoft products.

Phil frowned. The location was convenient; the salary was fine, just the list of software seemed somewhat intimidating. Nevertheless, he replied to the agency saying that he was interested in applying for the position.

A few days later, Phil met Jason, the guy from the recruitment agency, in a hotel foyer. "It's a young, dynamic company", the recruiter explained,"They're growing really fast. They've got tons of funding and their BI Analysis Suite is positioning them to be a leading player in their field."

Phil nodded. "Ummm, I'm a bit worried about this list of products", referring to the job description. "I've never dealt with Microsoft Proxy Server 1.0, and I haven't dealt with Windows 95 OSR2 for a long while."

"Don't worry," Jason assured, "The Director is more an idea man. He just made a list of everything he's ever heard of. You'll just be supporting Windows Server 2003 and their flagship application."

Phil winced. He was a vanilla network administrator – supporting a custom app wasn't quite what he was looking for, but he desperately wanted to get out of his current job.

A few days later, Phil arrived for his interview. The company had rented smart offices on a new business park on the edge of town. He was ushered into the conference room, where he was joined by The Director and The Manager.

"So", said The Manager. "You've seen our brochure?"

"Yeah", said Phil, glancing at the glossy brochure in front of him with bright, Barbie-pink lettering all over it.

"You've seen a demo version of our application – what do you think?"

"Well, I think that it's great!", said Phil. He'd done his research – there were over 115 companies offering something very similar, and theirs wasn't anything special. "I particularly like the icons."

"Wonderful!" The Director cheered while firing up PowerPoint. "These are our servers. We rent some rack space in a data center 100 miles away." Phil looked at the projected picture. It showed a rack of a dozen servers.

"They certainly look nice." said Phil. They did look nice – brand new with green lights.

"Now, we also rent space in another data center on the other side of the country," The Manager added.

"This one is in a former cold-war bunker!" he said proudly. "It's very secure!" Phil looked up at another photo of some more servers.

"What we want the successful applicant to do is to take care of the servers on a day to day basis, but we also need to move those servers to the other data center", said The Director. "Without any interruption of service."

"Also, we need someone to set up the IT for the entire office. You know, email, file & print, internet access – that kind of thing. We've got a dozen salespeople starting next week, they'll all need email."

"And we need it to be secure."

"And we need it to be documented."

Phil was scribbled notes as best he could while the interviewing duo tag teamed him with questions.

"You'll also provide second line support to end users of the application."

"And day-to-day IT support to our own staff. Any questions?"

Phil looked up. "Ah… which back-end database does the application use?" he asked, expecting the answer would be SQL Server or perhaps Oracle, but The Director's reply surprised him.

"Oh, we wrote our own database from scratch. Martin wrote it." Phil realized his mouth was open, and shut it. The Director saw his expression, and explained. "You see, off the shelf databases have several disadvantages – the data gets fragmented, they're not quick enough, and so on. But don't have to worry about that – Martin takes care of the database. Do you have any more questions?"

Phil frowned. "So, to summarize: you want a data center guy to take care of your servers. You want someone to migrate the application from one data center to another, without any outage. You want a network administrator to set up, document and maintain an entire network from scratch. You want someone to provide internal support to the staff. And you want a second line support person to support the our flagship application."

"Exactly", beamed The Director paternally. "We want one person who can do all those things. Can you do that?"

Phil took a deep breath. "I don't know," he replied, and that was the honest answer.

"Right", The Manager said. "Well, if you have any questions, just give either of us a call, okay?"

Moments later, Phil was standing outside, clutching the garish brochure with the pink letters. His head was spinning. Could he do all that stuff? Did he want to? Was Martin a genius or a madman to reinvent the wheel with the celebrated database?

In the end, Phil was not offered the job and decided it might be best to stick it out at his old job for a while longer. After all, compared to Martin, maybe his job wasn't so bad after all.

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Underqualified Mike S. is suffering a job hunt. "I could handle uD83D and uDC77 well enough, but I am a little short of uD83C and the all important uDFFE requirement."

 

Frank forecasts frustration. "The weather app I'm using seems to be a bit confused on my location as I'm on vacation right now." It would be a simple matter for the app to simply identify each location, if it can't meaningfully choose only one.

 

Marc Würth is making me hungry. Says Marc "I was looking through my Evernote notes for "transactional" (email service). It didn't find anything. Evernote, though, tried to be helpful and thought I was looking for some basil (German "Basilikum")."

 

"To be from or not from be," muses Michael R. Indeed, that is the question at Stansted Shakespeare airport.

 

That is not the King," Brendan commented. "I posted this on Discord, and my friend responded with "They have succeeded in alignment. Their AI is truly gender blind." Not only gender-blind but apparently also existence-blind as well. I think the Bard might have something quotable here as well but it escapes me. Comment section is open.

 

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Mark sends us a very simple Java function which has the job of parsing an integer from a string. Now, you might say, "But Java has a built in for that, Integer.parseInt," and have I got good news for you: they actually used it. It's just everything else they did wrong.

private int makeInteger(String s) { int i=0; try { Integer.parseInt(s); } catch (NumberFormatException e) { i=0; return i; } i=Integer.parseInt(s); return i; }

This function is really the story of variable i, the most useless variable ever. It's doing its best, but there's just nothing for it to do here.

We start by setting i to zero. Then we attempt to parse the integer, and do nothing with the result. If it fails, we set i to zero again, just for fun, and then return i. Why not just return 0? Because then what would poor i get to do?

Assuming we didn't throw an exception, we parse the input again, storing its result in i, and then return i. Again, we treat i like a child who wants to help paint the living room: we give it a dry brush and a section of wall we're not planning to paint and let it go to town. Nothing it does matters, but it feels like a participant.

Now, Mark went ahead and refactored this function basically right away, into a more terse and clear version:

private int makeInteger(String s) { try { return Integer.parseInt(s); } catch (NumberFormatException e) { return 0; } }

He went about his development work, and then a few days later came across makeInteger reverted back to its original version. For a moment, he wanted to be mad at someone for reverting his change, but no- this was in an entirely different class. With that information, Mark went and did a search for makeInteger in the code, only to find 39 copies of this function, with minor variations.

There are an unknown number of copies of the function where the name is slightly different than makeInteger, but a search for Integer.parseInt implies that there may be many more.

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Frank inherited some code that reads URLs from a file, and puts them into a collection. This is a delightfully simple task. What could go wrong?

static String[] readFile(String filename) { String record = null; Vector vURLs = new Vector(); int recCnt = 0; try { FileReader fr = new FileReader(filename); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr); record = new String(); while ((record = br.readLine()) != null) { vURLs.add(new String(record)); //System.out.println(recCnt + ": " + vURLs.get(recCnt)); recCnt++; } } catch (IOException e) { // catch possible io errors from readLine() System.out.println("IOException error reading " + filename + " in readURLs()!\n"); e.printStackTrace(); } System.out.println("Reading URLs ...\n"); int arrCnt = 0; String[] sURLs = new String[vURLs.size()]; Enumeration eURLs = vURLs.elements(); for (Enumeration e = vURLs.elements() ; e.hasMoreElements() ;) { sURLs[arrCnt] = (String)e.nextElement(); System.out.println(arrCnt + ": " + sURLs[arrCnt]); arrCnt++; } if (recCnt != arrCnt++) { System.out.println("WARNING: The number of URLs in the input file does not match the number of URLs in the array!\n\n"); } return sURLs; } // end of readFile()

So, we start by using a FileReader and a BufferedReader, which is the basic pattern any Java tutorial on file handling will tell you to do.

What I see here is that the developer responsible didn't fully understand how strings work in Java. They initialize record to a new String() only to immediately discard that reference in their while loop. They also copy the record by doing a new String which is utterly unnecessary.

As they load the Vector of strings, they also increment a recCount variable, which is superfluous since the collection can tell you how many elements are in it.

Once the Vector is populated, they need to copy all this data into a String[]. Instead of using the toArray function, which is built in and does that, they iterate across the Vector and put each element into the array.

As they build the array, they increment an arrCnt variable. Then, they do a check: if (recCnt != arrCnt++). Look at that line. Look at the post-increment on arrCnt, despite never using arrCnt again. Why is that there? Just for fun, apparently. Why is this check even there?

The only way it's possible for the counts to not match is if somehow an exception was thrown after vURLs.add(new String(record)); but before recCount++, which doesn't seem likely. Certainly, if it happens, there's something worse going on.

Now, I'm going to be generous and assume that this code predates Java 8- it just looks old. But it's worth noting that in Java 8, the BufferedReader class got a lines() function which returns a Stream<String> that can be converted directly toArray, making all of this code superfluous, but also, so much of this code is just superfluous anyway.

Anyway, for a fun game, start making the last use of every variable be a post-increment before it goes out of scope. See how many code reviews you can sneak it through!

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Combining Java with lower-level bit manipulations is asking for trouble- not because the language is inadequate to the task, but because so many of the developers who work in Java are so used to working at a high level they might not quite "get" what they need to do.

Victor inherited one such project, which used bitmasks and bitwise operations a great deal, based on the network protocol it implemented. Here's how the developers responsible created their bitmasks:

private static long FFFFFFFF = Long.parseLong("FFFFFFFF", 16);

So, the first thing that's important to note, is that Java does support hex literals, so 0xFFFFFFFF is a perfectly valid literal. So we don't need to create a string and parse it. But we also don't need to make a constant simply named FFFFFFFF, which is just the old twenty = 20 constant pattern: technically you've made a constant but you haven't actually made the magic number go away.

Of course, this also isn't actually a constant, so it's entirely possible that FFFFFFFF could hold a value which isn't 0xFFFFFFFF.

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