"Side Bar" WTF

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?

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.)

Windows Phone

Zmaster — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:22:07 GMT

I'm updating a Windows Phone and Zune (like iTunes for Windows Phone) has a built-in updater to do this. After starting the procedure a note says

"Because updates are cumulative, when you install the latest update, you'll also get all the previous updates we've released if your phone doesn't have them already."

Fine, that's smart. No point to apply many updates one after another, it would take time.
Except that IT ACTUALLY JUST DID THAT, it applied 5 updates, each time rebooting the phone to connect to the bootloader. meh.

Then, while waiting i clicked the "more info" link to see if there was something special to see in an update. And i get here:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp7/basics/update-history

So, it turns out that "Windows Phone 7.8" is just a commercial name, the actual version is 7.10.something because apparently that version did already exist so they went on. WTF!

Failure to grasp the concept

Pascal — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:53:48 GMT

Telemarketer: “Hi, this is [name]. Can I interest you in a subscription to [newspaper]?”

Me: “No, thank you. I’m not interested.”

Telemarketer: “Why not? Is it too expensive? We also offer Sunday/Wednesday-only subscriptions.”

Me: “There are hundreds of free news sources online now. I get all of my news online. I just don’t need it; I’m sorry.”

Telemarketer: “But ink cartridges are expensive. Doesn’t it cost a lot more to print all your own news?”

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.

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.

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).

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.

Well, that's one way to put an email link into an html page

campkev — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:40:23 GMT

So, in my spare time, I took over maintaining a website for a local business in exchange for free service. Owner recently sent me a request to change an email link on a particular page. Pulled up page in editor, hit ctrl+f and searched for "user@example.com". No results. Odd. Started scrolling down to find it manually and came across this:

email us at: <script language=javascript>

var username = "user";
var hostname = "example.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username +
"@" + hostname + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
</script>

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

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.

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.

Comments vs. Meaning

maja — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:16:09 GMT

I found this block in our production code:

    //for counting the matching attribs for measuring how much one matches
    int counter

    /** flag to print some detailed infos */
    boolean verbose

    //the config.xml file
    File file

    //should be a log4j-Logger
    Logger logger

In addition: this is one of two groovy classes in a program consisting of 500 java classes. Questions:

What is the meaning of "how much one matches"?
Why use two different ways to denote comments?
Why do we need comments where cute names would do?
If it *should* be log4j-logger ... Is it? What if it isn't? Or maybe we are not sure what it is? What about looking at, or adapting, the import statement above?

We may disagree on the quality of Go, but...

Ben L. — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:02:16 GMT

The quality of this bug report might be something we can agree on.

full date conversion

mr_seeker — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:22:54 GMT

Got this little gem while rewriting the sql statements for usage in our own database:
to_date(to_number(to_char(to_date(@Prompt('3. End date','D',,MONO,)),'yyyymmdd')),'yyyymmdd') + 1

The owner of this code forgot that the @prompt command can automatically convert the prompt output to a date.

Go screwed over the indie game Haunts

lettucemode — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:28:41 GMT

This story is several months old, so apologies if this has been posted already. I thought about posting this in the Go discussion from last month but decided against necro'ing old threads.

A game called Haunts that raised $28,000 on Kickstarter is dead in the water. Here's the second-to-last kickstarter update:

I’ve owed you all an update for a while, but frustratingly there hasn’t been much news to report. We got off to a roaring good start with community involvement in the open source Haunts effort, but we pretty quickly ran into a software roadblock that stymied all our efforts. Resolving has proved quite a challenge. Almost as challenging was actually understanding why we were having so much trouble. As a non-programmer, I could grasp the issue in theory but I didn’t think I could explain it well. So, I asked Michael, who’s an old friend and project backer who has been working on Haunts a lot, to explain it:

“Haunts is written in Go, a new and quickly evolving programming language developed at Google to address certain programming challenges that are important to the kind of work they do. There is nothing special in Go that makes it particularly well suited to video games, but on the other hand there is nothing inherent in the language that makes it a bad choice, except for the fact that it's new and not well supported. Anyway, one of the neat features of Go is that it is designed to take advantage of distributed code development and reuse of code developed by other people. It's a slightly hacky feature, IMO, but it works.

Basically, there is no master "script" that tells the compiler how all the bits of code relate to each other. Instead, that information is embedded directly in the files themselves. So rather than, for example, specifying a folder that contains your "headers", you actually embed in your program an absolute path to github, google, or some other file-sharing repository, and the Go compiler will find the code and build it into your program. If you want to use OpenGL for rendering graphics, you can search the internet for someone who has already built a version of OpenGL for Go, and put import ("github.com/go-gl/opengl/gl") directly into your code. Viola! Thus hilarity ensues.

Because of course that's not how it really works. Instead, it makes a local copy of that external library. And if you have a local copy, you can edit it. And meanwhile, that person you copied the OpenGL code from? They are also changing their version (fixing bugs, adding features, adding bugs). Therefore there is no guarantee that your version and their version remain compatible: it takes work to maintain compatibility. So when you decide to share development of your project with other people, while "in theory" Go lets you just share the main code, which tells you where to get the imported code, in practice it takes more work than that, because we have to ensure we get the same versions. And that's where Go's feature is kinda hacky. Because it doesn't have a mechanism for doing that.

Why does this matter? Well, when the original programmer on Haunts handed off the code to the community for development, the first problem we ran into is that the code seemed to be.... wrong. We know that there is "working" version of the game, albeit buggy and incomplete. However, we can't use the source code that we have to recreate that game. Firstly, the source simply doesn't compile. It has syntax errors, so there is literally no output- nothing to "run". But the community jumped right in, fixed the problems, and got the game to compile. Now it "runs", but it's not really a game at this point. First, it's horribly slow. Second, it crashes as soon as you try to play the actual "game" (as opposed to navigating the startup menus). Now, this is the kind of thing one expects when developing a game (or any program). There is a bug (or several) that can be found and fixed, and get us back to the same point as the "original". But this is the part the community is struggling with: why? We know it once worked. So now we're in a kind of no-mans land of the original programmer not being unable to help during his transition to a new job and a new city, but none of the new volunteers with enough time to jump into the potentially very hairy problem of figuring out what is wrong in a program they didn't write, in a language they probably don't know, and with the problems potentially being in one or more of a dozen "sub-programs" that are developed by yet other people that we have no connection with.

Can it be done? Yes. The original programmer has now dug up all the original code his build was using and the community has it. Preliminary inspection reveals potentially significant differences, so we’re hopeful that we can make some real progress in the coming weeks.”

And that’s where we’re at. Not what we’d hoped, not even close, but not dead yet. Once we get this conundrum finally solved (which we will), then we’ll put out the call again and try and get things rolling forward at a good speed in the new year. Until then, Happy Holidays! Rick

So basically, the way Go handles dependencies like headers is to hardcode a path to a github repo that has the header you want then download a local copy of that header so you can edit it independently of the repo author because all Go programmers are enlightened perfect angels and this could never cause dependency problems ever.

Here's part of the most recent update, which was posted in March, 3 months after the above one:

Things are not going well. There has been no forward progress on the game, although there has been hard work put in trying to get the project back on track. Michael, a backer and friend and programmer, has been volunteering his time to dig into the code and try and see why no one has been able to get a version of the game to compile that even matches the unfinished state it was in when Jonathan (the original programmer) left.

Michael has been unable to get a working version of the game to compile. He reached out directly to Jonathan for help. When Jonathan tried to get the game working from the current code, he also failed. He could not get a version of the game to work either, even using his own computer and expertise. He has not responded to additional requests for aid or insight into solving this very huge problem.

I don’t have the technical expertise to understand exactly how that could be. Michael, who does have the technical expertise, is also at a bit of a loss, other than the fact that the shifting code base of the Go programming language combined with either changes in Lua or OpenGL libraries created some crippling incompatibility that Michael can’t track down and which apparently foiled even Jonathan’s attempt to create a working version.

Yes. Not even the original programmer, with the original files on his original dev machine, can compile the source anymore. Woohoo!

The death of PC

Ronald — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:52:32 GMT

Here is a screen capture of three Bloomberg analysts talking about the death of PC.

Sent from my PC

Quarterly Mode logic in For Loop (Java)

mikeTheLiar — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:32:25 GMT

From a recent Stack Overflow question:

Am a Academic Student, Doing a Project for Private Hospital, I need to work out one logic, i.e For a financial year, in quarterly basis i need to give an incentives to employees, For Example, Dr.AAA Date of Joining is 01/01/2012, After successfull one year ,bonus pay is eligible, so we are Planning to give bonus from this year, since its oneyear completions it should display as Year-"01"

In first Quarter am giving an bonus to an employee so in Program it should display as "1" then second quarter "2" , third quarter "3", fourth quarter "4". Once four quarters completed for that financial year, system should auto increment the year to "2" then the same four quarters should calculate. How to form a logic for this situation, am very begining in computer programing in java,can u pls help me out

We're all fucked.

The TA Rides Again!

DumbByAssociation — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:26:09 GMT

”When you say load the site in Firefox, how do you do that?” - quoth the Technical Architect.

I've blundered through the last few years believing this chap to be a fool - I'm now however thinking of sending my department manager a thank you card for laying on the entertainment...

This is what happens...

ubersoldat — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:57:57 GMT

... when you let your psychotherapist build a website:

http://www.red-psicoterapia.eu/

You don't need to know Spanish to truly appreciate and love that site. But in case you feel the need to read it in English I present you its Irish (drunk?) cousin:

http://www.network-psychotherapy.eu/

This "thing" has everything: ugly colors, iframes, gigantic qr codes, iframe navigation, cross-hair cursor, mysql errors and for some reason, it sometimes switches to German, because, the father of this seems to be there:

http://www.dyade.de/

Only thing missing (and I bet it's because they don't know how to do it) is comic sans.

Oh well, I didn't even need to see the page source to know this was gonna pop up:

meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft FrontPage 12.0"

The Wine file browser

Ben L. — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:45:09 GMT

Right, so I'm going to open this map I was working on a while ago and start working on it again. I open Hammer, Valve's map editor. I click File. I click Open....

That's not where I wanted it to open the file browser, and the file browser is terrible, but okay. I'll click my way to where I want to be (typing the name of a folder doesn't work).

What? The folder's empty? I could have sworn... Wait.

Ah, there it is.

Fuck you too, Wine.

Don't worry; we'll stall them.

KrakenLover — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:37:54 GMT

I'm the lead developer for a particular product at this company, and I'm the only one who is capable of making any significant change to it (not because I'm any more skilled than other developers, just because it was poorly designed given time constraints with no spec, is very complex, and uses a bizarre undocumented third-party API alongside an awful third-party library which handles XML communications in a "creative" way). I'm also responsible for installations, configurations, customizations, bug fixes, system discovery, cost details, support, and customer service (training) for all clients who use it.

Had this conversation with our lead sales rep:

Me: So I saw that press release you issued this morning; it says the new international version of my product is now available.

Rep: Yeah, we keep getting a lot of requests for it, so we decided to release a new version that works for companies not based in the U.S.A. I should be making a lot off of those commissions pretty quick; you did a really great job on that US version.

Me: Uh... you do know that we don't actually have an international version yet? And that I haven't even submitted an internal development estimate for the international version, that I am supporting the current version, supporting most all of our other software products, am doing cost details and discovery for half a dozen potential clients, now have the role of sales engineer and am making custom demo instances for sales reps, have recently been put in charge of build management and internal development & testing/deployment policy, am now being required to take training and seminars to "grow my skill base" (so I can be given even more responsibilities) necessitating me taking several days off at a time for training, that we've been looking for new programmers to hire for two months now and not a single applicant could actually program, and am the project lead on a major project which you negotiated which has the payment being contingent upon on-target delivery for applications that are already three weeks behind schedule with a nervous client whose entire company depends on us getting the new systems launched on a precise date so she doesn't miss her contractual obligations with her clients? Don't you think that's going to be a problem when someone actually buys this and we can't delivery anything? *takes breath*

Rep: Don't worry about any of that; I'll just make up some BS about system discovery services, charge them extra to get them to pay for the development without them knowing, and stall them for a couple weeks while you crank out the new version real quick. I also need you to spec out some new multi-company additions for it, and we have a major deal in the works for a couple hundred grand and I need to you be the point-person on that doing the systems discovery. Make sure all that discovery time is billable, so I can get it in my commission report before the end of the month.

Me: *dies a little inside*

I suppose I shouldn't have expected any differently considering the original version of the application was actively being sold to customers even though I stressed repeatedly and vehemently that what I had produced in the couple weeks I was given the first time was just a very rough, basic, proof of concept and should not actually be used in production because it would be an unmaintainable mess. I've spent the past year cleaning up the fallout from that and praying that they'll let me reprogram it all from scratch in a way that will make them no longer fully dependent on me for all non-trivial changes, among other things.

It's on the calendar, but keeps getting pushed out in favor of support for the old version, since it's now one of our best selling products, if not the best the selling in terms of adoption rate over time since release. Granted, I'm salaried here, so a product I create selling very well is the opposite of what I want, nor am I at all incentivized to that end, and whatever ego boost that might otherwise give me, the unpaid overtime for support and everything else that goes along with each sale more than negates it.

But at least the sales reps love me...

The new management is kicking a**

snoofle — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:08:57 GMT

So here at WTF-Inc, they promoted the WTF leadership into positions deep within the bowels of MegaCorp - where they can do no more harm (at least to us), and replaced them with new managers. A few changes have been made regarding hiring better quality developers, firing of incompetent DBAs, etc. Things were looking up.

We are presently attempting to grow the business by a factor of 10. This means everything needs to be able to handle an order of magnitude more transactions, data, customer interactions, reports, etc. I ground through our application and optimized everything that showed up in the profiler hot-spot list (I also removed all the sleeps and told the other app teams to fix their damn code as part of this effort); it now runs in 1/4 the time it did before. We set up some tests with SAs and DBAs to monitor stuff below our application (DB, network, I/O switches, SANs, etc). After the tests were run, one SA-in-charge announces that he didn't have the correct monitoring software installed, and so can't really tell us if the results are useful. Joy.

Yesterday, he announced that it would be three weeks before he could even look at it again as he had other work he needed to do.

I don't control his priorities, so I had to accept that at face value. However, *I* still have a deadline, so I bucked it to my boss, who pulled me in with his boss, who pulled us in with the CTO, who pulled all three of us in with the SA's boss+2, who pulled all four of us in with the SA's boss, who called the SA into the room, who said he was too busy to do this work. The top dog explained (what I already had) that growing the business was the top priority and any work pertaining to facilitating that effort should be done first.The SA said he could finish what he was doing in a week or so and then he'd get back to it. The top dog leaned in a little and insisted. The SA said he had his priorities. The top dog said that HIS priorities took precedence, and before he (the SA) chose to open his mouth again, he should strongly consider doing it his (top dog's) way.

The SA declined, insisting that he had to be able to prioritize his own work.

The CTO fired him on the spot. Then he told the SA's boss to get someone else on this immediately.

There is hope for this place yet.

I18N poetry

StephenCleary — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:43:57 GMT

This is pretty good:
Ode to a Shipping Label

Had this bug come back to me and dug further

that really other guy — Fri, 10 May 2013 22:59:32 GMT

This is from something that's getting gutted and re-written... the old system was a huge pile of fail... we called it through a web service and part of that involved passing a giant xml string....

and part of that that affected the way things looked was this little gem....
(this is c# and nullableBit is what equates to a bool?)....

nullableBit.GetValueOrDefault(false) ? "false" : "true"

I want to hold the persons head that did this and make them look at it and "Look, look what you've done".. and hit them with a rolled up something... newspaper... magazine.... steel....