TDWTF Forums

Now that we have sufficiently beaten Go into the ground, what about Dart?

El_Heffe — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:17:45 GMT

http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-think-it-is.html

I don't get it. Why do we need this?

Coming Soon...

Alex Papadimoulis — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:48:00 GMT

Is this good or bad?

Vanders — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:47:11 GMT

The BBC currently have an "Inflation Calculator" this is supposed to be able to tell you how much inflation has affected you during your working life. You put in a few basic details about yourself and your income and it calculates your personal inflation and charts it. I think I broke it:

Apparently NaN inflation was an endemic problem in the early 1970's as well.

morbiuswilters appreciation day

Ben L. — Tue, 14 May 2013 03:11:54 GMT

The CRC32 of "morbiuswilters" is 0x927DA996. Therefore, morbiuswilters appreciation day will be held 2457708950 seconds after the unix epoch, or 20471118165550 in RFC2550 format.

I hope this is enough advance notice.

A quick experiment in dumb (Chrome)

blakeyrat — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:11:09 GMT

See that file icon behind my Chrome titlebar there? Grab your copy of Chrome on Windows, and position the window title over a icon similarly.

Now, click your mouse to the left of the right edge of the icon, and drag your window around. Works like a charm.

Now, click your mouse to the right of the right edge of the icon, and drag yo-- what's that? You can't drag the window from there?

WTF.

Requirements

snoofle — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:00:27 GMT

We process our customers by breaking their entire record sets into fairly large batches of records. We also allow individual interactive users to update their own records. If you happen to be running the batch for customer X and a client of customer X happens to interactively try to update their own records, and the timing is just right, one or the other will be delayed due to the records being locked.

About a month ago I got a requirement to reduce our batch size from 2500 to 1000 so as to reduce potential db lock issues with our interactive users (who only cause a single record to be updated). As part of that change, it was announced that the batches would take slightly longer to run because we'd be doing more batches, and by extension more queries and bringing back less data from each one (that is, we'd be lowering our economies of scale). Since batch performance was not an issue, there would be no real impact. All was approved and deployed.

This week, we got a complaint from those same folks that our batches were now taking too long to run; and that the SLA's they had offered our batch users two weeks ago (when they fucking KNEW about the slower performance at their own request) were now being exceeded, and we should increase the batch sizes as much as possible!

Pray tell, and what will we do about the increased collisions that are now going to be much more visible to our interactive users?

Oh don't worry about them; we never promised THEM an SLA.

You can almost hear the Looney Tunes theme playing...

Android browsers vs TDWTF

Zemm — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:37:20 GMT

I was debating whether to post this in Side Bar or General Discussion...

I like to read a few sites on the bus/train during my commute to/from work. For the last few months I've been using my Nexus 4, since having a handheld device is a lot more convenient than the iPad and netbook I previously used. TDWTF has been fine until the last Chrome update, which has made the forums basically unreadable:

So, I thought, let's try Firefox. Yes! Just like how the previous Chrome rendered it, making the font size readable again:

Until I scroll down...

I did some searches and it appears this is now by design? I was getting the "random font size" but really on the thread list page: paragraphs of text were generally readable. And to add insult to injury, one of the suggestions was to set the text zoom. This did nothing to TDWTF font size but made mobile-optimised versions of sites have massive fonts.

Edit: fixed images and added links!

Remember Jeff S?

Ben L. — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:35:10 GMT

I was reading some forum archives from 2008 and I kept seeing posts from this guy:

Jeff S:
Just claiming something is a "joke" doesn't mean you are not responsible if it is distasteful or offensive; consider someone making racist comments (which morbius's stuff bordered on) and then saying "hey everyone, no big deal, I was joking, it's ok!"
Come on, morbius, you're better than that. You've shown you can be funny without resorting to "jokes" like that.
Ender -- please don't bother replying his comments in this thread, but definitely report posts like this if it becomes a consistent problem.

Can anyone give me some context? Was Jeff S the American version of Nagesh?

what the fuck

Ben L. — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:54:36 GMT

I've been running this and there are no bugs.

Just to recap:

Valve authoring tools (vrad shown)
Wine
NO BUGS

DAFUQ?

Fibonacci Algorithm

Nagesh — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:01:21 GMT

One question that is always ask for interview in India by my company is write algorithm to generate fibonacci algorithm. This is easy with three variables:

int a = 0;
int b = 1;
int c = a + b;
int a = b;
int b = c;

and this can be utilize in loop to print out the series. You can go till the int value is exhausted by compiler.

Nagesh add one variation to it. Maybe smart coder on this site can solve quick. How can I give number and get the fibonacci number in that position. Example: Tell me how to find the 17th fibonacci sequence.

anyone up for this chalenge?

Epic context menu

joe.edwards — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:19:28 GMT

I was trying to copy and share a link from TDWTF forums and my context menu seemed... longer than usual.

(Yes, that's a scroll arrow at the bottom.)

architecture (no, not the x86 kind)

Ben L. — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:59:19 GMT

I'm making a Left 4 Dead 2 map. Because I felt like it. Today, I built the skybox. If you know how Source Engine skyboxes work, skip the next paragraph.

Source Engine maps are split up into two parts: a 1:1 scale playing area, which is detailed but small; and a 1:16 scale skybox which has much less detail, but can be very large. How large? The citadel from Half-Life 2 is 8431 feet tall. That's over a mile for those of you who are bad at math. The skybox is not accessed directly by the player, but polygons with the texture tools/toolsskybox are replaced with a view from the player's location in the skybox (divide by 16, shift to the sky_camera entity).

Here's my skybox:

That makes the view from the zombie-only rooftop in the first area look like this:

The zombie-only area about halfway through the map has this view:

However, the human players will not be able to access those areas. Instead, this is what they'd see from the starting area:

And halfway through:

How can I modify the structure of the building to make the human view more interesting?

Community server profile date format selection.

eViLegion — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:46:00 GMT

... you're not even allowed to chose ISO 8601.
The drop down lists a number of date formats, including YEAR-MONTH-DAY with no leading zeros, but no ISO 8601.

THE BAD IDEAS THREAD

Ben L. — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:47:18 GMT

A library, but instead of books, you can borrow soup.

A filesystem that only allows one file, for use with the hardware port of SSDS.

Shoelaces that double as a keychain so it's easier to unlock doors.

A forum thread where we can post ~~hilariously~~ bad product ideas.

A database engine that uses Malboge instead of SQL.

IP over photocopiers.

A 65 bit processor.

How the heck does Google Reader do it?

blakeyrat — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:49:39 GMT

I'm guessing the answer is "millions of dollars worth of servers", but bear with me here.

So Google Reader is closing down because Google is evil and horrible and wants to discourage me from ever using their products ever again. Fine. I've made my peace with this. Those idiots.

I looked into creating my own little personal Google Reader clone as a result, figuring I could host it on Amazon AWS and maybe if it turned otu any good in 6-10 months I could actually productize it and put some ads on it or sell access or something. I quickly coded up a quick and dirty app that could basically make web API calls to load RSS feeds and shove them back at the client. I came up with a database scheme to download and store the RSS items for quick access (and historical searching). So far so good, and it works... kinda.

Issue 1: I'm having: my Google Reader list is about 150 feeds. When I make my API call, the poor server has to ping 150 other servers to get the most recent feed items. Now there's a few ways I could optimize this; for example if the database says the last feed refresh was less than 5 minutes ago, don't bother to do a new fetch and just serve up what's in the DB already. But doing this with 150 feeds is simply not going to be sustainable in the long run.

Any ideas on how Google's doing that work and returning the goddamned data so goddamned quickly? I was thinking you should "shard" databases so that, for example, users created before 5/1/2013 get database A and users after 5/1/2013 are on database B, which if managed correctly could keep the load manageable. But the disadvantage is they can't share the same data warehouse of downloaded feed items, so you have a ton of duplicate data, and of course the hosting would quickly become expensive.

Issue 2: Keeping track of read and unread items. How do you do this so the storage of your "unread list" isn't insane? My solution is that instead of storing a database row for each item you've read (which is obviously unsustainable), what you could do is just keep track of the *range* of read items in each feed-- for example for CNN.com's feed, you might say "this user has read every item from 1/1/2013 to 5/1/2013". You'd allow multiples so you could say, "this user has read every item from 1/1/2013 to 3/1/2013, and every item from 4/1/2013 to 5/1/2013". This data could be passed directly to the front-end which could mark read and unread using it.

But how to handle items the user specifically marks are unread (or "stars" for that matter)? My idea is that you could have a separate unread list that would contain exceptions to the main list. So your dialog with the DB would be like "this user has read every item from 1/1/2013 to 5/1/2013 except items 2031, 2034 and 2055". (Except the numbers would be the GUIDs assigned to the feed items.

Is this the best way of doing it? Can you think of a better way?

Issue 3: Obviously feeds can be updated even when nobody's logged-in to the site or reading the site. The problem is feeds only return the last X items, so if you don't check regularly you could miss items, which is no good. Due to this I know I need some kind of server-side process to periodically check feeds to ensure my own database has the full list of items. What would be a good algorithm to determine how often to check feeds? I was thinking just finding the average time between feet posts, then the number of posts returned with each fetch, then basically just multiplying that out so you're checking "twice as often" as needed to get every post. On average.

Does that sound reasonable? It runs the risk of missing items, but, eh, so does the entire RSS protocol anyway so I don't see that as such a huge deal.

Yet another Go thread

Arnavion — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:50:36 GMT

A while ago, I mentioned I'd ported a hobby project from CoffeeScript to Go. Since this is now the DailyWhatTheGo forums, I've been meaning to post my own experience. Here you go, in no particular order of importance: (I've used C-like pseudocode to illustrate the concepts except where the syntax is the point of the WTF)

Exceptions aren't thrown in the traditional sense. They're returned. (Technically you _can_ throw them, but this is a bad practice and, for example, you won't write a library that threw exceptions because your caller won't expect it to.) So a function that wants to call 3 functions in serial would look like
```
result1, err = func1()
if (err != null)
	return err

result2, err = func2(result1)
if (err != null)
	return err

result3, err = func3(result2)
if (err != null)
	return err
```
and so on. There are no C macros like Windows has for HRESULT's, so no way to avoid writing this.
Go is supposed to force you to check for exceptions (in the same spirit as Java's checked exceptions). Functions can have multiple return values and it is convention to return a tuple of (result, error) where one and only one is non-null. There is also a syntax for destructured assignment.
```
result, err = someFunctionThatCouldFail()
if (err == null)
	return err; // Bubble up exception
// else result is valid. Use it...
```
Writing
```
result = someFunctionThatCouldFail()
```
is a compiler error. So in this way, the programmer is kinda forced to not ignore exceptions. Good. However, if someFunctionThatCouldFail doesn't actually have a return value but can still throw an exception, then you'd call it as
```
err = someFunctionThatCouldFail()
```
Go allows you to ignore the return value in this case, which means the lazy programmer could just as well write
```
someFunctionThatCouldFail()
someOtherFunction()
```
and this would call someOtherFunction() regardless if someFunctionThatCouldFail() succeeded or not. And here I thought the days of On Error Resume Next were behind us. This language has it on by default!
Continuing with exceptions, C# exceptions have a string message and a stack trace. Java exceptions have a string message and a stack trace. Go exceptions have a string message. No stack trace. Just the equivalent of a ToString(). So even if you do bubble your "someFunctionThatCouldFail() failed!" exception all the way to your topmost catch-all error handler/logger, it's going to have no idea where the exception actually came from. You could of course put some form of source line information manually in the message, but that still doesn't give you a stack trace of where it was called from. Good luck debugging!
Go comes with a few libraries to help you get a basic HTTP server started. You set up a server and register handlers on certain URLs; pretty standard stuff. One of the available handlers is a static files handler. But it's totally untweakable:
- It has a hard-coded mapping of file extension to Content-Type.
- You can't tell it to not serve certain file types.
- You can't control the output. It renders a flat series of <a> tags without any surrounding <html> or <body> or any other HTML.
When sending a response from an HTTP server, in most other libraries, you either have the freedom to set the status code and the headers in any order, or you have to set the status code first and the headers second. In Go's http module, you have to set the headers first and the code second.
Another touted benefit of Go: You can compile binaries for all platforms from any platform! Except on Windows, it wants gcc to compile for Linux. Oops!
Go has pointers. Go has interfaces. A type T can implement interfaces. A pointer to T, T*, ... can implement interfaces. Any interfaces it wants. Totally unrelated to what are implemented by T. In fact, this is how the Exception interface works, it's implemented by pointers, not by actual types. That is, if you have a custom exception type MyException, then it's not MyException that implements the Exception class's ToString(), it's MyException*
Related to the above, Go sometimes allows you to write foo.bar where you actually should write (*foo).bar Only sometimes, though. So if you want to be sure, you'd probably write it as the latter all the time just to be consistent.
Want to initialize a variable? foo := bar
Want to assign a variable a new value? foo = bar
The compiler knows perfectly well when you assign a value to an uninitialized variable, so this annoying difference is totally cosmetic and pointless.
(Yes, I know it's significant if you want to make a new variable to shadow one in an outer scope. Personally I'd rather that shadowing wasn't allowed at all. I've never come across any instance in all my software dev life where shadowing was _necessary_.)
On the subject of classes, there aren't any. There are structs. Remember how in C, you don't define member functions on a struct? Instead you define them outside and usually put the struct type as the first parameter? That's how it's done in Go too.
Similarly, Go doesn't have constuctors. The convention to have a constructor for a type Foo is to make a static NewFoo method. Of course, this doesn't prevent the caller from ignoring it and calling new Foo() themselves, so when looking at API docs, always remember to check if a NewFoo method exists or not first! And if you're writing a class, better throw any guarantee that your object will be in a consistent state out of the window!
Function overloading isn't allowed either. I sure hope you only need one set of parameters for your constructor!
No generics either.
There's a printf (format string, varargs). There's a println (single string). There's no println that takes a format string and varags, so you have to write "\n" in all of your println's, since 99% of the usages of println are for writing lines.
Just like the C++ STL, there's no rational thought put behind when something should be a member function and when something should be a static function on the type. So methods like string.Contains are actually static methods on the strings type.
Speaking of strings, how do you append a character to a string? First you have to call a method to convert the character to a string. Then you call a method to append the new string to the original string.
Go is supposed to enforce strict whitespacing via compiler errors, and some of them indeed are. Good. (This isn't about the gofmt tool.) But a lot of them aren't. Bad. It's very inconsistent on what it does think is an error and what isn't.
Windows is pretty much a third-class citizen right now. For example, a function that takes in a path string and returns the path after resolving all symlinks returns the input path unmodified on Windows. Looking at the source commits, there is a commit that claims to have fixed it but actually didn't. Of course, one of the touted benefits of Go is that you can compile binaries for all platforms from any platform! I'll just compile a binary for Linux and test there. Oh wait. On Windows, it wants a gcc to be able to compile for Linux. Oops!

Now Go does have a lot of nice features. It compiles very fast, and the channels are very nice. Unfortunately the language is full of warts that totally make it unworkable, and the attitude of the zealots on the mailing list (basically the only place apart from the API docs where you can get any answers) makes it difficult for me to bother. I may be wrong on some of these because I only spent a week or so on this before giving up, so I'll be happy to be corrected.

I'm not even sure what to call this

Ben L. — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:33:01 GMT

I just... don't even...

This email had a X-Notes-Item header, so I guess this can be another "bash Lotus Notes" thread.

Kilobits and PDFs

SamC — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:21:23 GMT

A recent WTF is eerily similar to a story I told some time back..
This is probably pure coincidence, or perhaps someone I told the story to decided to pass it on, but the WTFery is there, all the same-

The job was pretty simple, I just needed to install ~~patches~~ a PDF reader on two machines in what happened to be adjacent apartments.

The first one had a 128 kilobit ~~satellite~~ DSL connection. I started the download there, only to discover it was not only much slower than advertised, but also rather flaky.
As I soon found out, the other apartment had sprung for a more expensive 256k line.
So, I did the smart thing, and decided to tackle that one first, then simply transfer the file over the 2.4 giga-~~bit~~ hertz Wifi network.
This much better than halved the download time, as that line was newer and transmitting ~~5 × 5~~ ok-ish.

An hour of wasting time later, the download finally finished. I quickly installed Adobe Reader, then connected the machine temporarily to the other apartment's (unencrypted, of course) network. I went to copy the file, and... it was GONE!

Turns out, Adobe installers delete themselves after running. I ended up having to download the file again, negating much of the time savings.

Are you getting fewer spam emails these days?

El_Heffe — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:58:59 GMT

A few years ago I set up a Gmail account for the sole purpose of giving it out to anyone I don't know personally. Things like online purchases, registering for forums, etc For a long time I've been averaging 200+ spam emails a week at that address, which probably isn't a lot compared to some people, but I live a boring life.

Fortunately, thanks to Gmail's excellent spam filters, I never see the spam, although I do occassionaly take peek just to see what's in there and click on the "Delete all spam now" link. Several days ago I noticed that there were only 3 spam emails in there, and today, there were none. Huh? WTF? Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, I want all spammers to die a horrible violent death, but it seems very unusual that everything would just suddenly stop.

The Pipe

snoofle — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:27:45 GMT

We have 64 heavy duty production servers, each with 16-3.2GHz cores, each of which is running a thread of our application to crunch data. Some threads read, some crunch data and some write results. In production, for each core there is an I/O "pipe" through which I/O to the network (and by extension the databases on the SANs) is performed.

We also have 12 light duty demonstration environment servers, each with 16-2.1GHz cores, where our application also runs. When it's being used by one user to demonstrate some screen, it runs smoothly. However, the sales drone tried to show how well our software could perform and tried to do a load test in that environment.

He ran the scripts to launch 1024 instances of our application on these 12 servers. They groaned, but eventualy got everything running. Then he tried to impose a load by kicking off a large job which would spawn off load that would grind each of the application instances. The CPU load dropped to near zero across the entire environment. The network load in no way increased. The SANs were very lightly loaded.

The customer raised an eyebrow. The drone called us. We called the SA's who ran their monitors. It turns out there is only one I/O "pipe" for this entire environment (co$t); it was like 1024 lanes of traffic merging into a single lane tunnel; everything was blocked waiting on I/O.

The drone was told you can't do that in this environment. "But we can do it in production!" Yes, but you have a lot more hardware there. "So why don't we have the same hardware here?" Sure, no problem, you get the purchase order approved and we'll buy it and set it up. "So, how long do you think it will take this operation to complete?"

Apparently the customer had more of a head for I/O than the drone and bit his tongue to keep from getting hysterical.

I made a gif appropriate for all occasions!!!

blakeyrat — Mon, 20 May 2013 04:06:22 GMT

It is here:

Here is 27 of them:

Attack of the Scripts

witchdoctor — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:03:38 GMT

Previously I described the WTF that is the version control system in the research-focused institute where I work and mentioned our interesting way of passing a real-time video stream between processes using DBUS and shared memory.

Another "interesting" feature of our large application is the offline image processing. A lot of the offline image processing features in our application work like this:

1 The user selects a range of images from the video

2 The application loads those images one by one from disk and converts them from JPG format to uncompressed PPM files written to a temp folder.

3 The application creates a text file with a list of the just created image files (different format for different functions)

4 Then a shell script (some are csh, some are bash, some are even dash) is called, some of them with up to 5 parameters and the path to the image list

6 The shell scripts calls multiple pre-built binaries to process the images. This is also the reason for the use of ppm, the binaries can't read anything else

7 The output from the script is loaded by the application and converted to png, then written to the output directory

8 Temporary files created in step 2 are cleaned up

The pre-built binaries from step 6 are built from code that is not in source control but owned by the researchers who wrote them. The shell scripts and accompanying programs need to be manually put in the application's binary directory during deployment.

In some places in the code because we don't seem to be getting the source code for those programs any time soon another developer has started rewriting the content of the shell scripts in C++ so we at least no longer depend on 3 different unix shells at the same time.

I'm looking forward to the coming Windows port with a kind of morbid fascination (deadline is Sep 2013).

Iron Man is now powered by Oracle

jamesn — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:54:41 GMT

You know what really grinds my gears about Iron Man 3?

Jarvis: "Sir, the Oracle cloud has completed your computations"

What a load of crap. See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf

Google

gu3st — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:07:22 GMT

Todays great announcement from Google which will affect virtually everyone that uses Google Apps in any enterprise situation is their decision to go full retard.

Today they've decided to merge all of their communication platforms (Talk, Google+ Hangouts) all into one. Unfortunately they chose Google+ Hangouts as the one to merge everything into which causes some stupid problems, especially for larger organizations that really don't want their users having Plus accounts.

The other part of this announcement that has made things much more difficult is that they're dropping XMPP support as well. So it's not like you can just suck it up, create a G+ profile but continue to use Trillian/Pidgin/other XMPP compatible clients... you are forced to use either their iOS/Android application or Chrome extension.

Yes, you must use a extension to their browser, there are no native applications for desktop OS's.

They did go full retard.

I must be new here, but...

drurowin — Fri, 03 May 2013 07:28:50 GMT

Seriously, what is wrong with these forums? I've been working in a mixed C#/Common Lisp shop for a while, and this is just worse than even our homegrown ticketing system someone wrote in ASP.Net in a drunken evening. Is there a bug tracker I can submit problems with the site to, or perhaps submit my assistance for porting the forums to something... functional? I've been working on writing a forums package using Clack and Caveman for Lisp; would that be useful to anyone?