I am TRWTF
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See title. That is all.
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ok, Spartacus.
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have you written book on contact aliens in 30 days?
this person has.Manu S: books, biography, latest update
Follow Manu S and explore their bibliography from Amazon.com's Manu S Author Page.
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I wrote a novel once but that was a fair old amount of WTF in itself. But it wasn't TRWTF. The RWTF there was that I wrote it in HTML in a text editor because that was more reliable than using Word while still preserving the formatting I wanted to use.
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Dude, you are TRWTF.
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If only you knew how much.
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Aw, I'm just kidding. But seriously, use LaTeX next time.
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I wrote two short stories in Hindi and they became instant superhits, mostly because they were the kind of stories that are banned in India and they were very funny.
Mocking someone else religion
is not a good thing
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As it happens, I was using my own half-assed CMS to store it in (in an Access database no less). But that was many years ago and was done so I could work on it both at home and at college on a free ASP (Classic) hosting, even before I learned PHP and as a result the whole thing needed a web based front.
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Out of curiousity, when was this, more-or-less?
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This would have been... 2002. I was still in college, and it was my first homemade database driven website of any kind. The auth backend was terrible, but didn't have any issues like session fixation and no sideline XSS issues other than the fact it was dealing with raw HTML but 'under an admin login'. I have learned many lessons since then! The secondary WTF is that I went to PHP a year later and never looked back.
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Yeah, 2002 is kind of wtf-y, but if you were in school and were learning, good for you!
As far as wtf stories goes, the first language I ever learned was Perl. So of course, the first web app I ever made used CGI.pm, and had a similar list of wtfs as yours. We have to start somewhere. :)
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Yeah, 2002 is kind of wtf-y, but if you were in school and were learning, good for you!
As far as wtf stories goes, the first language I ever learned was Perl. So of course, the first web app I ever made used CGI.pm, and had a similar list of wtfs as yours. We have to start somewhere.
I'm dealing with a Perl/CGI web app right this second, haha. Oh wait, it's 2014. That's not funny.
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There's more WTFs to that. This was 'college' in the UK, which is 'further education', i.e. 16-19 year old stuff, and I took Computing "A" (Advanced) Level. Class of 18 or 19, all aged around 17 and only 2 out of the class have any idea about programming, let alone good programming.
I'd messed around with QBASIC and various other stuff over the years, so picking up a copy of Visual Basic 5 (Control Creation Edition) a couple of weeks before the class started, I was able to hammer out some stuff that wasn't entirely terrible. I'd probably look back and cringe now, but it wasn't terrible. (I had some sane ideas, like validation of several form elements by having each form element calling a master validation function for the form at onchange, so I only wrote one set of validation rules. It just seemed logical to me.)
So when I rocked up to the class and already knew the bulk of the syllabus - I should have taken the hint. My problem at that point was not about lacking knowledge, it was the fact it was haphazard and self taught and, I suppose, unsystematic. I already understood the point about not accepting user content without doing something to validate it (my stuff has, historically, never had XSS issues beyond cases where it's supposed to accept unfiltered content by design, though that's well into WTF territory but we won't go there; I learned that from a book from 1983 with type-in listings for the ZX Spectrum, I find it sad that such a fundamental rule still hasn't been learned)
I mean, I knew about lists and stacks and so on even then, but I didn't necessarily know what they were called. I understood the concepts well enough though.
The real WTF of that class was when the teacher had to do a one hour quick start to HTML. He decided that I should lead the class because I knew it better than he did. Hmm.
Learning ASP Classic wasn't on the syllabus at all. I was just fed up maintaining my terrible teenage humour website by hand and wanted to do something with databases since that would be easier if it dealt with navigation and whatnot for me. I adapted to it fairly quickly because I was using a subset of VB at that point but egad I hated it.
See, to me even then, declaring variables before use, and being meaningful with typing made a lot of sense to me. I disliked that part of VBS for ASP. But the thing that really annoyed me most of all?
I grew up with BASICs on various machines. 80s child, yo. So something like this would not only be absolutely normal, it would be meaningful and unambiguous:
FOR i = 1 TO 10 FOR j = 1 TO 10 ... NEXT j NEXT iVBS/ASP Classic did not like specifying the variable for a NEXT. At least it didn't then. I never understood why because that always seemed like good practice even if the language parser didn't specifically need it anyway (some did, some didn't)
Interestingly enough I learned PHP/MySQL by porting and sane-ing up the CMS in 2003, but at that point I was able to run a localhost version separate to the live version (something I couldn't as readily do otherwise) and just ended up removing the 'admin interface' and just doing it all by DB dumps via phpMyAdmin since it was write-once-read-many content. It still wasn't much better but despite doing 'pretty URLs' and thus accepting textual content identifiers, I still never had any XSS or SQL injection issues with it
Which is more than I can say for other software, which is where I mused when starting this topic. Some of you here will have seen the fact I've been involved with SMF the forum software, and I've been around in various degrees of involvement for 5 years - it was 5 years ago this month I started to get meaningfully involved. Paying them back for giving me free software. Doing support, customisations, and eventually ending up doing development.
But I'm at the stage where I will never end up coding for them again, but it's one WTF of management after another and I'm the WTF because I can't let go. For some goddamn reason I can't just let it go and leave them to either succeed by a miracle or leave them in their own pool of WTF.
Only today I reported a pair of XSS vulnerabilities lurking in the bowels of the admin panel. I'm fairly sure there's been there for 10 years. And I found myself actively considering not telling them. I mean, no-one's ever exploited either before, and it would take a little social engineering to do so, but it's not like it's a lot of social engineering to make happen. And I found myself debating with myself about professional ethics. Do I do the right thing and tell them about it or do I leave them to it? And of course, professionalism won the day. $deity knows why.
I wish I didn't care. I wish I could let it go but for some reason I can't. Therefore self::$isWTF = true;
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Mocking someone else religionis not a good thing
But... but... I can't do it any other way!
Filed Under: Making fun of minorities is total no-no.
Double negatives are a total no-no.
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I am TRWTF.
I've been complaining about freaking Unicode for days now. Because I did install the freaking Symbola font, and it still didn't work!
Except it did... on my work computer. Turns out that using apt-get on one of your computers doesn't magically install it on all computers you use. Weird.
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The RWTF there was that I wrote it in HTML in a text editor because that was more reliable than using Word while still preserving the formatting I wanted to use.
Funny that you should say that. I wrote letters in vi with html as markup for a while and printed them from the browser. I had even created a <table> structure that fitted a window envelope.
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I'm dealing with a Perl/CGI web app right this second, haha.
Same here, although some parts of it are AJAX-driven by now.But I don't mind too much. I quite like Perl. Apart from the fact that Perl related job offers seem to be on the decline which means that if I want to improve my skill set, I have to do it in my spare time.
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It's too bad @blakeyrat isn't here for this. The resulting flamewar would have been entertaining.
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The resulting flamewar would have been
entertainingtedious.Horses for courses, of course, of course.
Filed Under: I'm the tediousest of the tedious
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Same here, although some parts of it are AJAX-driven by now.
But I don't mind too much. I quite like Perl. Apart from the fact that Perl related job offers seem to be on the decline which means that if I want to improve my skill set, I have to do it in my spare time.
I wish I was that lucky. The site I'm working on is older than AJAX.
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I wish I was that lucky. The site I'm working on is older than AJAX.
Wow, that's old.
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The site I'm working on is older than AJAX.
Again, same here. Some of the code at my place hasn't been touched in more than ten years or so.So far, the only real web app (fully AJAX driven) is the booking plan for landlords (I work at a portal advertising holiday homes). But I hope that I will be able to transform the whole landlord's admin section into an AJAX driven web app one day. :-)
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Yeah, the gap between the site and new technology is so wide, that it should be rewritten, but it's in heavy use, so it's not like there's much I can do, especially since I'm not being paid. So I'm converting the Perl to Python, updating minor things like adding client-side validation, jQuery watermarks, etc. Then I'll convert the text DB to MySQL. But it's small changes, just enough to make the users happy.
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FOR i = 1 TO 10
FOR j = 1 TO 10
...
NEXT j
NEXT iAll you lose is the compiler check:
[code]
FOR i = 1 TO 10
FOR j = 1 TO 10
...
NEXT 'j
NEXT 'i
[/code]
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Which is more than I can say for other software, which is where I mused when starting this topic. Some of you here will have seen the fact I've been involved with SMF the forum software, and I've been around in various degrees of involvement for 5 years - it was 5 years ago this month I started to get meaningfully involved. Paying them back for giving me free software. Doing support, customisations, and eventually ending up doing development.
But I'm at the stage where I will never end up coding for them again, but it's one WTF of management after another and I'm the WTF because I can't let go. For some goddamn reason I can't just let it go and leave them to either succeed by a miracle or leave them in their own pool of WTF.
That's the interesting thing about coding for a community or a company. You are your code, but your code does not belong to you.
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All you lose is the compiler check:
Which is pretty much everything in this case. I mean, if you cared in the first place. Even just NEXT is a bit better than a closing curly brace, though.
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Which is pretty much everything in this case. I mean, if you cared in the first place. Even just NEXT is a bit better than a closing curly brace, though.
I'm not saying that it isn't a lot, but if it's marked correctly (big if), then it gives your code much better readability.
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I'm not saying that it isn't a lot, but if it's marked correctly (big if), then it gives your code much better readability.
Yes, it's just the comments are notorious for getting out of sync with code. Especially when you're trying to rely on them for something like this.
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Yes, it's just the comments are notorious for getting out of sync with code. Especially when you're trying to rely on them for something like this.
True. And modern IDEs should at least highlight the corresponding FOR statement when you hover over NEXT.
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I was writing half the CMS in Notepad because that was the only tool I had access to on several of the college computers. Which, despite this being 2001-2002, were still running NT4.
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I was writing half the CMS in Notepad because that was the only tool I had access to on several of the college computers. Which, despite this being 2001-2002, were still running NT4.
So then I guess compiler checks weren't even an option at that point.
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Did I mention, Visual Basic Script for ASP Classic? Compiling... I've heard of it :P
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Classic ASP was quick way of dishing out a webpage.
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That was what I used to use before I went to PHP in 2003. I still feel I made the right move.
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That was what I used to use before I went to PHP in 2003. I still feel I made the right move.
I had to edit one asp page recently and the programmer in Ireland had forgot to use the
Server.HTMLEncodein one file. Simple fix. I am still wondering why they are using classic ASP site. I suppose they want that because it is an investment.
Ajax - Wikipedia
