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Programming Confessions Thread

  • Matches

    Can you get me server hardware reasonably priced? =D

    5 Polygeekery 1 Reply
  • Polygeekery
    Grade A Premium Asshole

    Ha! I knew that would be one of the first questions. Honestly, what we cannot use ends up going to NFP's for inflated valuations that I get to write off. Most server hardware can be used though. We keep expanding out datacenter presence and despite occasionally getting servers for free, we still have to buy them.

    Server hardware is cheap if you find the right deal on the used market. Keep an eye on eBay and have the cash ready to snatch up the right deal. A year ago I picked up a few M1000e's full of blades (M610's maxed on processor and RAM) for less than $5K/per, IIRC. That is WAY more than enough to start a good sized SaaS business.

    Hell, you can pick up an R710 with 24GB of RAM for < $600 right now on eBay.

    Dell Poweredge R720 (4625613) Server for sale online | eBay

    Dell Poweredge R720 (4625613) Server for sale online | eBay

    Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Dell Poweredge R720 (4625613) Server at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

    1 Matches 1 Reply
  • Matches

    Yeah, I bought a dell poweredge 2950 and filled up the bays with 15k drives. It should do me good for the near future. I like to dream big though. I'm building my own mini data warehouse, up to 14.5tb possible storage for my personal business. Someday I'll be to big data size!

    1 Polygeekery 1 Reply
  • Polygeekery
    Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Matches said:

    I'm building my own mini data warehouse, up to 14.5tb possible storage for my personal business.

    Nevermind the PM I just sent you then. 😄

    0 Matches 1 Reply
  • Matches

    It's not wrong, but at my size self hosting is much cheaper for the HA stuff since it's within arms distance all day every day. But mid size hosted solutions are very nice, enterprise is a toss up on your infrastructure.

    0 Polygeekery Yamikuronue 2 Replies
  • Polygeekery
    Grade A Premium Asshole

    If you ever have any questions, feel free to IM me. I am no guru, but if I can help you avoid some mistakes that I have made I would be happy to do so.

    0
  • Yamikuronue
    I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @Matches said:

    self hosting

    I am redic sad that my new internet prevents me from hosting anything in my living room anymore :(

    0 HardwareGeek 1 Reply
  • HardwareGeek

    That's one of the reasons I still haven't gotten around to getting an interwebz since I moved. (That and money.) I really miss my old ISP.

    0 ben_lubar 1 Reply
  • ben_lubar

    How are you posting on here if you don't have access to the interwebs?

    1 HardwareGeek 1 Reply
  • HardwareGeek

    Work; it's currently lunch time. Sometimes the library or other public WiFi hotspot.

    0
  • ben_lubar

    Confession: Switching to XML made my software easier to update. I'm so sorry.

    Aug 13, 2015

    update jbovlaste · BenLubar/jbo@80a8c51

    update jbovlaste · BenLubar/jbo@80a8c51

    Contribute to BenLubar/jbo development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Aug 14, 2015

    update jbovlaste · BenLubar/jbo@400028a

    update jbovlaste · BenLubar/jbo@400028a

    Contribute to BenLubar/jbo development by creating an account on GitHub.

    4 A 1 Reply
  • A

    XML is a generally good standard.

    It's just abused by people who mistakenly believe it's always the best way of representing data.

    6
  • PleegWat
    Java Dev

    Confession: Today I worked around a bug by adding the following (anonimized) SQL statement:

    UPDATE table SET ID=ID WHERE 1=0
    3 accalia 1 Reply
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    @PleegWat said:

    Confession: Today I worked around a bug by adding the following (anonimized) SQL statement:

    UPDATE table SET ID=ID WHERE 1=0
```</blockquote>

.... okay, now i want to know what sort of bug you could be working around with that noop sql....
    4 Jaloopa 1 Reply
  • Jaloopa
    kills Dumbledore

    @accalia said:

    @PleegWat said:
    Confession: Today I worked around a bug by adding the following (anonimized) SQL statement:

    UPDATE table SET ID=ID WHERE 1=0
```</blockquote>

.... okay, now i want to know what sort of bug you could be working around with that noop sql....</blockquote>

I've seen my share of weird SQL weirdness, but am failing to think of a situation where that would be required.

Also, bonus bug when quoting code with a language hint
    1 accalia PleegWat 2 Replies
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said:

    Also, bonus bug when quoting code with a language hint

    it's discourse.... it's bugs all the way down....

    3 DogsB 1 Reply
  • DogsB
    Notification Spam Recipient

    I just spent a day converting a csv into an excel sheet....

    Whoops hit wrong reply. Sorry!

    1 accalia 1 Reply
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    @DogsB said:

    Whoops hit wrong reply. Sorry!

    .... why sorry?

    0
  • tufty

    I have been proof of Greenspun's 10th Law…

    [spoiler]… and I did it in Lisp.[/spoiler]

    0
  • PleegWat
    Java Dev

    @Jaloopa said:

    @accalia said:
    @PleegWat said:
    Confession: Today I worked around a bug by adding the following (anonimized) SQL statement:

    UPDATE table SET ID=ID WHERE 1=0
```</blockquote>

.... okay, now i want to know what sort of bug you could be working around with that noop sql....</blockquote>

I've seen my share of weird SQL weirdness, but am failing to think of a situation where that would be required.</blockquote>

That table (and most other configuration tables in our DB) have an out-of-transaction after-each-statement trigger to update a table holding a modification time. I'm updating the mod time again at the end of the transaction because we're running into cases where the modification time update is seen before the actual change.

The current trigger was originally in-transaction, but that caused deadlocks. We've got a proper fix planned after the upcoming release but we're not sure what that needs to look like and what implications it will have so we needed a stopgap fix.
    4
  • FrostCat
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Confession averted****strong text: today, in an effort to minimize the scope of major changes to a report, I almost wound up writing to an alternate data stream. (For raisins, this program works by writing plain text to a file, then calling another program that reads in the file and also uses a ComponentOne ActiveX to print a form behind the file. The change involved the report going from always using the same single form layout to sometimes using a second one, and I needed a way to pass "which form goes with which page".

    0
  • C

    And I had actually taught Java to my classmates when I was studying higher diploma.

    Oh, what have I done to my classmates...

    0
  • C

    You know what? Every web developers have done something like that.

    The difference is just on two things: How many websites are of that quality, and whether he/she is still making sites of that quality.

    1
  • anotherusername

    @scudsucker said:

    anyone who is foolhardy enough to add a CSS rule for "left" can suck it.

    But it is a rule on a <br> tag - how wrong can it get?

    Well, a .left class would (or at least could) change the rendering of a <br> element if it contained rules for clear:left or float:left, for one thing...

    most other values for clear and float, or position:absolute, position:fixed, display:none, some values of font-size, font-size-adjust, line-height, margin, ... did I miss anything? (probably)

    0
  • Vaire

    @boomzilla said:

    O(nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo)

    I know this is ancient, but I wanted to say, I both: almost fell out of my chair reading this laughing, and I am sooooo stealing this ;)

    6 Arantor 1 Reply
  • Arantor

    I've also seen O(mg) and O(hell no)

    7 Vaire ben_lubar 2 Replies
  • Vaire

    Stolen :yoinkSoundEffect:

    0
  • ben_lubar

    Well, real (non-Perl-extended) regular expressions are O(n) where n is the length of the input stream. Anything that can be represented as an LR grammar is O(n^3) or better, and if it can't be represented by an LR grammar, you probably can't write it as a regular expression of any kind.

    0 dkf 1 Reply
  • dkf
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    Well, real (non-Perl-extended) regular expressions are O(n) where n is the length of the input stream.

    Once a regular expression is compiled, it should be O(n) to match; there's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't happen with most REs that people care about, but capturing groups and backreferences are some of the most problematic pieces. The process of converting a regular expression into a deterministic finite automaton (or even an NFA) can be a bit expensive itself.

    RE engines are… non-trivial unless you restrict to an extremely simple subset.

    1 ben_lubar 1 Reply
  • ben_lubar

    Yeah, but you only have to compile the regular expression once, or at worst, once per program run.

    0 dkf 1 Reply
  • dkf
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    Yeah, but you only have to compile the regular expression once, or at worst, once per program run.

    Yes, but the cost of that might be extreme. 😦

    0
  • flabdablet

    Confession: I wrote this.

    #   define morse   (((((((0
#   define di      * 2) 
#   define da      * 2 + 1)     /* pay no attention */
#   define dit     * 4 + 1)     /* to the man behind */
#   define dah     * 4 + 3)     /* the curtain */
#   define _       * 2)
#   define ascii   * 256 +

    static const uint16 morse_table[] =
    {
        morse   dit  _   _   _   _   _   _  ascii 'e',
        morse   dah  _   _   _   _   _   _  ascii 't',
        morse   di  dit  _   _   _   _   _  ascii 'i',
        morse   di  dah  _   _   _   _   _  ascii 'a',
        morse   da  dit  _   _   _   _   _  ascii 'n',
        morse   da  dah  _   _   _   _   _  ascii 'm',
        morse   di  di  dit  _   _   _   _  ascii 's',
        morse   di  di  dah  _   _   _   _  ascii 'u',
        morse   di  da  dit  _   _   _   _  ascii 'r',
        morse   di  da  dah  _   _   _   _  ascii 'w',
        morse   da  di  dit  _   _   _   _  ascii 'd',
        morse   da  di  dah  _   _   _   _  ascii 'k',
        morse   da  da  dit  _   _   _   _  ascii 'g',
        morse   da  da  dah  _   _   _   _  ascii 'o',
        morse   di  di  di  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'h',
        morse   di  di  di  dah  _   _   _  ascii 'v',
        morse   di  di  da  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'f',
        morse   di  da  di  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'l',
        morse   di  da  da  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'p',
        morse   di  da  da  dah  _   _   _  ascii 'j',
        morse   da  di  di  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'b',
        morse   da  di  di  dah  _   _   _  ascii 'x',
        morse   da  di  da  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'c',
        morse   da  di  da  dah  _   _   _  ascii 'y',
        morse   da  da  di  dit  _   _   _  ascii 'z',
        morse   da  da  di  dah  _   _   _  ascii 'q',
        morse   di  di  di  di  dit  _   _  ascii '5',
        morse   di  di  di  di  dah  _   _  ascii '4',
        morse   di  di  di  da  dah  _   _  ascii '3',
        morse   di  di  da  da  dah  _   _  ascii '2',
        morse   di  da  di  da  dit  _   _  ascii '\n', /* AR, end of message */
        morse   di  da  da  da  dah  _   _  ascii '1',
        morse   da  di  di  di  dit  _   _  ascii '6',
        morse   da  di  di  di  dah  _   _  ascii '-',  /* BT, pause */
        morse   da  da  di  di  dit  _   _  ascii '7',
        morse   da  da  da  di  dit  _   _  ascii '8',
        morse   da  da  da  da  dit  _   _  ascii '9',
        morse   da  da  da  da  dah  _   _  ascii '0',
        morse   da  di  di  da  dit  _   _  ascii '/',
        morse   di  di  di  da  di  dah  _  ascii '\f', /* SK, end of contact */   
        morse   di  di  da  da  di  dit  _  ascii '?',
        morse   di  da  di  da  di  dah  _  ascii '.',
        morse   da  da  di  di  da  dah  _  ascii ','
    };
    20 Maciejasjmj S 2 Replies
  • Maciejasjmj

    Well, it's not worse than the rectangle literal thing someone posted a while ago. Or Boost::Spirit.

    Except how on Earth does it even work? How do you do useful lookups on this table?

    3 flabdablet 1 Reply
  • S

    Dude, you even missed the uppercase letters...
    <yes i know..

    0 C 1 Reply
  • AlexMedia

    I encoded my name in hexadecimal and created a GUID for it. I now use that GUID instead of a randomly created GUID when a batch job creates something in my database.

    1
  • flabdablet

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    how on Earth does it even work? How do you do useful lookups on this table?

    Confession: like this.

    #   define WORDS_PER_MINUTE    5    /* slow code (eyes are slower than ears) */

#   define DITS_PER_DAH        3    /* standard relative timings */
#   define DITS_PER_SPACE      7
#   define DITS_PER_WORD       50

#   define TICKS_PER_SECOND    1048576  /* time base runs from external 4MHz clock / 4 */
#   define SECONDS_PER_MINUTE  60

#   define TICKS_PER_DIT       ((TICKS_PER_SECOND * SECONDS_PER_MINUTE) / (DITS_PER_WORD * WORDS_PER_MINUTE))
#   define TICKS_PER_DAH       (DITS_PER_DAH * TICKS_PER_DIT)
#   define TICKS_PER_SPACE     (DITS_PER_SPACE * TICKS_PER_DIT)

    uint32 ref_time;
    int ch;
    EPPC *eppc_p = EPPC_P;
    uint8 *keypad_p = (uint8 *) CPLD_ADDRESS_KEYPAD;

    eppc_p->pio_pddat = PDDAT_D15;  /* set PD15 latch to 1 to turn UA LED off */
    eppc_p->pio_pddir = PDDIR_DR15; /* set PD15 data direction register for Output */

    ref_time = get_TBL();
    if (message_p == NULL) message_p = "SOS";

    --message_p;
    while ((ch = tolower(*++message_p)) != '\0')
    {
        if (ch == ' ')
        {
            ref_time += TICKS_PER_SPACE - TICKS_PER_DAH; /* generate a full space between words */
        }
        else
        {
            const uint16 *morse_p = morse_table;
            uint32 count = NUM_ITEMS (morse_table);

            --morse_p;
            do
            {
                uint32 morse_code = *++morse_p;

                if ((char) morse_code == ch)
                {
                    for (morse_code >>= 8; morse_code != 0x80; morse_code = (morse_code << 1) & 0xff)
                    {
                        feed_watchdog();
                        if ((*keypad_p & CPLD_FIELD_KEYPAD_ESC) == 0) return;
                        wait_until (ref_time);
                        eppc_p->pio_pddat = 0; /* turn UA LED on */
                        ref_time += (morse_code & 0x80) ? TICKS_PER_DAH : TICKS_PER_DIT;

                        wait_until (ref_time);
                        eppc_p->pio_pddat = PDDAT_D15; /* turn UA LED off */
                        ref_time += TICKS_PER_DIT; /* generate a dit space after each flash */
                    }
                    ref_time += TICKS_PER_DAH - TICKS_PER_DIT; /* generate a dah space between characters */
                    break;
                }
            }
            while (--count);
        }
    }

    This is what happens when you make an assembly language programmer use a C compiler. It's not pretty. But the generated code is tiny.

    4
  • C

    Morse code is not case sensitive. 😛

    0 S 1 Reply
  • S

    View raw on my post ;)

    1
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    This Horrible abomination lives in a production database...

    CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[IsValidPhone] (
	@number AS NVARCHAR(80),
	@country AS NVARCHAR(80)
) RETURNS INT
BEGIN
	DECLARE @cleaned AS NVARCHAR(80);
	SET @cleaned = 	REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
			REPLACE(
				REPLACE(@number, 
				'|', 'F'),
				'\', 'F'),
				'}', 'F'),
				'{', 'F'),
				'0','|'),
				'1','|'),
				'2','|'),
				'3','|'),
				'4','|'),
				'5','|'),
				'6','|'),
				'7','|'),
				'8','|'),
				'9','|'),
				'(','{'),
				')','{'),
				'-','{'),
				'+','}'),
				' ','|'),
				'x','\')
	RETURN CASE
		WHEN @number IS NULL THEN 0
		WHEN LEN(@number) < 1 THEN 0
		WHEN LEN(@number) > 30 AND ISNULL(@country, 'USA') <> 'USA' THEN 2
		WHEN LEN(@number) > 21 AND ISNULL(@country, 'USA') = 'USA' THEN 2
		WHEN LEN(@number) < 7 THEN 4
		WHEN @cleaned LIKE '%[^|{}\]%' THEN 8
		WHEN @cleaned LIKE '%\%\%' THEN 16
		WHEN @cleaned LIKE '_%}%' THEN 32
		WHEN @cleaned LIKE '%\|||||||%' THEN 64
		WHEN @cleaned LIKE '%\%[^|]%' THEN 128
		ELSE 0 
	END
END
GO

    I created it to run a report on the quality of our data in our CRM almost a year ago, i was supposed to delete it after the report was run as it's horribly inefficient, but i forgot to..... now several reports use it.... and are complaining about performance issues....

    :headdesk:

    oh woe is me! for i am undone by my own hubris!

    12 Jaloopa loopback0 dkf 3 Replies
  • Jaloopa
    kills Dumbledore

    Mein Gott! I've seen some bad sql in my time but that is something else

    4 accalia 1 Reply
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    @Jaloopa said:

    Mein Gott! I've seen some bad sql in my time but that is something else

    well..... it's really only three statements in that function....

    that's somehting, right?

    i mean it is something.....?

    0
  • loopback0
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
    REPLACE(

    No DECODE?

    5 PleegWat accalia 2 Replies
  • PleegWat
    Java Dev

    I was thinking that, but that's only for entire strings.

    0
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    .... EUGH! that's PL/SQL!

    no!

    do not want!

    this is t-sql.... and if there's an equvalent to DECODE for tsql i havent found it. (but i would like to know about it if there is)

    1 loopback0 1 Reply
  • loopback0
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    that's PL/SQL!

    Huh?

    @PleegWat said:

    that's only for entire strings.

    Ah, yeah, goood point.

    0
  • dkf
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    That's curious. It produces various powers of two, but never the value 1…

    1 Tsaukpaetra 1 Reply
  • Tsaukpaetra
    Notification Spam Recipient

    @dkf said:

    but never the value 1…

    I presume 1 is reserved for The user entered the phone number in the exact format requested, but said format wasn't being checked here.

    0 accalia 1 Reply
  • accalia
    FoxDev

    @Tsaukpaetra said:

    @dkf said:
    but never the value 1…

    I presume 1 is reserved for The user entered the phone number in the exact format requested, but said format wasn't being checked here.

    actually the original version only returned 0 for valid or 1 for invalid. i retired 1 when i made it give a reason.

    as for why powers of two instead of counting up (it's not a flag field) .... i dunno, maybe i was feeling humorous?

    3 dkf 1 Reply
  • dkf
    Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    i dunno, maybe i was feeling humorous?

    Sounds cromulent.

    4
  • fwd

    When I was a couple years into my professional career I was assigned to the development of a project for a company that was doing research on animal genetic engineering. It was an intranet site that was basically all record keeping stuff. They had paper worksheets to fill out for every step of their process, with references to previous steps and all that, and you were supposed to be able to follow the chain from beginning to end. This project had been ongoing for several years. It was in pretty bad shape, but actively used by the company.

    The problem was the process would regularly change so the previous relationships between types of records were not valid going forward. In order to "fix" the problem of not being able to pull up old records due to FK violations, I wrote scripts to move data around. Looking back that was probably a bad thing to do as it probably screwed the integrity of the records in the system, since the records didn't necessarily reflect what had taken place. I think this was especially bad because all this stuff had to be maintained for like FDA review. I was sole developer and didn't know enough to see the problem at the time. I've never run into this situation again, but I often think about it and wonder what the right design would have been for that system where the data model regularly changes.

    I was on that for a year and a half or so before that company finally bailed on my company and hired someone else to deal with it.

    Various wtf's that I'm remembering:

    • VB.Net 1.1 project
    • The original developer wanted something like .net 2's master pages and it ended up that every page was a user control loaded onto a common page. It was a disaster, everything was a postback and handling user actions was a mess.
    • I was the 4th(?) developer to be responsible for this
    • project manager was incompetent. she was let go I believe after the time period expired that would have allowed her to sue for wrongful termination resulting from sleeping with the boss. also she is very likely the worst driver I have ever ridden with. was honestly scared.
    • there was a "spec" that was two binders full of absolutely nothing useful
    • our contact at the company communicated stream-of-consciousness style. She literally wrote emails saying one thing followed by "I mean" then a second thing, instead of erasing the first incorrect thing.
    • changes to db records had to be tracked. This was done in the same table by writing the deleted record back into the table with a parent id after the update happened.
    9
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