Classic WTF: Smooth, Like a Factory
It's Black Friday! For those of you stuck at work (or not in the US), here's a fun classic. Smooth, Like a Factory was originally published on November 9th, 2006. Daren S knew that his days were numbered. He was a troublemaker bent on changing The Way Things Were and The Director was hot on his tail. Though Daren worked discreetly, improving his coworkers' productivity a little bit at a time, it only was inevitable that The Director would eventually find out. One does not become The Director by letting such things slide.

CodeSOD: A Random PHP Script
Some time ago when Michael was tasked with updating some of code on an old website, one file on the server caught his eye. Amid an ocean of static HTML files, it turned out that there was exactly one PHP script. Not sure what to expect, he was surprised when he discovered that the script was entirely comprised of vanilla HTML save for one line. <script type="text/javascript"> // <![CDATA[ var so = new SWFObject( "../theswf.swf?rand=<?php echo rand(100,999); ?>", "theswf", "100%", "100%", "8", "#FFFFFF"); so.addParam("

Immutable Invoices
Back in the late-1990s, the Internet Service Provider where Simon C. worked was a mere micro-sized version of what they are today. Their website's original e-commerce system only needed to sell one thing — domain names, and a limited subset of them at that — so the shopping basket and invoicing parts of the system didn't need to be all that intelligent. They simply looped through each item ordered by the customer, displayed the description and prices of each one, and worked out the totals at the end. The whole process was so s

CodeSOD: Starring The Admin
We've all been there before. You spend all this time building a kick-ass, ultra-awesome, super-sweet web application and then you realize you need to build some stupid "administration" module that needs to do the boring, run-of-the-mill things like maintain users, groups, privileges, and so on. There are several different magnitudes of complexity that can be involved with an administration module, ranging from the full-on set of tables including users, groups, roles, tasks, operations, etc., to a simple IsAdmin column on the users table. Actually, it turns out there's an even simpler way, and that Adam P's predecessor discovered and implemented i

Error'd: Protocol Droid Processing
"As much as I detest Novell GroupWise," wrote Ben P, "it is reasuring to that they use the much-loved protocol droid to process commands."   "This is the default selection on this contact form, D Traver Adolphus writes, "at least it takes some of the thought out of it."