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Sadly, this happens all too often!
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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next article I'll write. I think I'll develop a CCaptchaToOCR class. Publication date set for April 1. 
Chris Meech
I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar]
I agree with you that my argument is useless. [Red Stateler]
Hey, I am part of a special bread, we are called smart people [Captain See Sharp]
The zen of the soapbox is hard to attain...[Jörgen Sigvardsson]
I wish I could remember what it was like to only have a short term memory.[David Kentley]
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...inhale deeply...hold breath...
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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Dave, you've made my day. That's the funniest sh*t I've seen in quite sometime. I can imagine how you must have felt 
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. - Cicero
ப்ரம்மா
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Shades of Pinky and the Brain with that one. I wonder if he burted out "NARF!" after creating his responses?
Phil
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Or maybe he's trying to test his CAPTCHA-ing algorithm?
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Somehow, I seriously doubt it.
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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You know, I think this[^] one sets a record for the longest post in the programming forums, weighing in at 25K.
It's not so much Hall of Shame, but instead qualifies as  . Does anyone else here think that he works on a governmnet contract?
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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You've got to admit that he's thorough. Long winded, but thorough.
Dave Kreskowiak wrote: Does anyone else here think that he works on a governmnet contract?
I suspect that he works in a consultancy where success is counted as each member of staff producing their own bodyweight in documentation. He's got at least an arm there.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Pete O`Hanlon wrote: I suspect that he works in a consultancy where success is counted as each member of staff producing their own bodyweight in documentation. He's got at least an arm there.
This reminds me of the Post-Communist European government that required 8 meters of documentation[^]
--
Marcus Kwok
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: Does anyone else here think that he works on a governmnet contract?
I resent that.
--
CleaKO The sad part about this instance is that none of the users ever said anything [about the problem].
Pete O`Hanlon Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about users?
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Are you kidding? I resemble that! 
I'm quite familiar with the documentation that you get on some of these systems that, while printed on hundreds of pounds of dead trees, doesn't tell you a damn thing about what the system does or how it does it!
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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I resent your impuning those of us who do provide useful documentation.
--
CleaKO The sad part about this instance is that none of the users ever said anything [about the problem].
Pete O`Hanlon Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about users?
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There's nothing wrong with concise and useful documentation. But he included 25 pounds of it to ask the vaguest of questions:
help me in getting the output.
Isn't that what every single question here is ultimately about, getting the correct output?
Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP - Visual Basic
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That was the question!? Wow I got completely lost before I ever understood that! Still interesting stuff - it sounded like it would make a good article!
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One thing is for sure... No one should ask him to provide more detail...
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First you get the Windows Installer dialog displayed for ages apparently doing nothing then you get the "Configuring Visual Studio 2003" dialog for ages. Combined time is about 15 minutes. Then you get a message asking if you want to install Visual Studio 2003 SP1! Well,I'd never have guessed!
(IIRC VS 2005 SP1 behaves similarly. However, I've not noticed it as I've only ever installed it from the command prompt in quiet mode.)
Kevin
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See old regular Heath Stewart's blog[^] for why this is. Basically it boils down to Windows Installer having a damn stupid piece of code in it which loads the entire patch into a contiguous block of virtual memory before trying to run signature validation over it.
What it should be doing is either memory-mapping the file or reading a small block at a time. This is what deserves 'WTF' status.
Presumably they assumed that patches would be small, not 500MB in the case of VS2005.
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I appreciate that this isn't directly a coding WTF, but it's related and I'm sure many people have done something similar, so I thought I'd share it anyway.
Many years ago I was developing on a Solaris machine. One day in the middle of an intense period of coding I realised that the C runtime library on my machine was several years old. 'Gosh', I thought, 'Id better update that. It's bound to make me more productive'.
So I downloaded the C library source and compiled it. Being Unix there was no real installation method so I took it upon myself to just copy the runtime over the existing one (excuse the command-line usage but I'm sure you get the meaning - ls is dir and mv is move).
cp newruntime.so /usr/lib/oldruntime.so
cp: failed, file is in use
Oh. A problem. In a moment of temporary insanity I thought 'I bet that moving it would work. But I should be careful and keep the old library, just in case'.
mv /usr/lib/oldruntime.so /usr/lib/oldruntime.so.backup
mv successful
Great! Let me just have a look to check:
ls
ls: dynamic library c-runtime failed to load
Maybe some extra arguments will do the trick...
ls -la
ls: dynamic library c-runtime failed to load
Crap. Better try and restore the old version...
mv /usr/lib/oldruntime.so.backup /usr/lib/oldruntime.so
mv: dynamic library c-runtime failed to load
A perfectly idiotic way to hose a machine due to versionitis!
Exact messages have been changed for brevity.
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your toe after shooting yourself in the foot like that?  Could you restore from a backup tape, or something like that.
Chris Meech
I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar]
I agree with you that my argument is useless. [Red Stateler]
Hey, I am part of a special bread, we are called smart people [Captain See Sharp]
The zen of the soapbox is hard to attain...[Jörgen Sigvardsson]
I wish I could remember what it was like to only have a short term memory.[David Kentley]
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I shiftily passed it on to IT support saying it had 'mysteriously stopped working', whereupon they somehow divined the problem, booted from an install CD, and managed to have that 'ahh programmers' look while putting the original library back in place.
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OK - I'm just QAing some code, and I've come across the following (variable names changed to protect the innocent):
bool isValue = (instance.Variable == 1 ? true : false); <Ironic>I can only assume that this is to protect from that other non-nullable boolean condition of "maybe(ish)".</Ironic>
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: variable names changed to protect the innocent
What innocent?
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Without knowing the 'typeness' of instance.Variable, what makes this code particularly shameful? 
Chris Meech
I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar]
I agree with you that my argument is useless. [Red Stateler]
Hey, I am part of a special bread, we are called smart people [Captain See Sharp]
The zen of the soapbox is hard to attain...[Jörgen Sigvardsson]
I wish I could remember what it was like to only have a short term memory.[David Kentley]
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