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The billing application was slow. And not slow in the taking-30-seconds-to-start-up sense, but slow in the ridiculously-freaking-slow sense. Loading an invoice took between ten and fifteen minutes. Updating a line item on an invoice took up to a minute. And saving the invoice back to the database took even longer than loading it in the first place. Clearly, things couldn't stay this way – a minimum of 25 minutes to update a single invoice was completely unacceptable. They needed an expert. They needed... The Optimizer.

"Thank goodness this bicycle I'm borrowing still works after Y2K," Robin Sheat notes, "I can't even imagine the programmer-hours required to bring it up to spec."

Back in 1998, at the Department of Informatics at the University of Umeå in Sweden, the professors had decided that instead of the final exam being solely a regurgitation of knowledge gleaned from text books and lectures, it would be a good idea for students to venture out into the real world to complete their bachelor's degrees. In teams of two, they would spend time with a local business, learn how Information Technology fit in with their daily work, and present it back to the professors.

The bar for entry into CodeSOD is pretty straight forward: professionally-developed code that elicits that certain What The— reaction. Though there have been a few exceptions over the years, generally speaking, student code, hobbyist code, and amateur code need not apply. That said, I'd like to try something a little different today. Today's example is not technically professionally-developed, it's a Stupid Coding Trick.

It was fall of 1995 and everyone was gearing up for the 1996 tax season. After years of maintenance of a DOS-based tax application, TaxQuik -- as we'll call the company -- had to get with the times. New, spunky companies were building tax software for Windows with fancy GUIs, integrated help and even Internet-enabled features, while TaxQuik was still in the text-based stone age of DOS.

Go ahead Michael Fulker, make your move. I'll count to one.

Diego G. lives in Argentina and is working with a developer from the USA on a PHP project. Recently they were discussing the merits of handling the communication from the backend to the frontend via XML or JSON. The system used XML elsewhere already, but for the new work it looked like it'd be quicker and easier to work with JSON in the PHP pages.

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: A Crapton of Candy).

Having worked in support for years, Ben has amassed quite the compendium of quick stories.

"I work for a software development house that creates business software, maintaining legacy MFC applications," Graf writes. "We recently received an issue where a filter-toggle wouldn't switch back and forth, never changing from its default value. It's was a small utility function, rarely used, so we were a bit surprised to see it come up. Taking a quick glance at the code revealed the following:

This year’s Corporate Technology Expo was no different than the ones for years previous. Various departments gathered in the company’s large, wood-paneled group meeting hall and highlighted their top projects and initiatives that were completed during the past year. There was everything from the ASP-to-ASP.NET upgrade of the customer portal to the enterprise-wide implementation of COGNOS 7. The scene was a three-hour, seemingly unending procession of PowerPoint slides with enough laser pointers to take down an incoming ICBM.

“Just give me a damn status!” growled Murray, the aging IT project manager who everyone thought would have been retired by now. In fairness, the fifty-nine year old’s job performance hadn’t waned one bit through his decades-long tenure at Bell Labs. In fact, some would even say that in his later years, he traded some of his trademarked ferocity for geniality. “Dammit,” Murry barked two seconds later at Tom Limoncelli, one of the developers sitting around the conference table, “I don’t have all day! Give me a status!”

I don't know, Dexter, I don't see anything weird about getting $50 fast cash...

-rw-r--r--. If that looks familiar to you, skip this and the next paragraph.

“I recently started on a new contract,” Vedran R writes, “and the experience has been rather… interesting. The project I’ve been assigned to is a VB .NET 1.1 web application, and the code is rather… bad. Now, I know that developers make all kinds of compromises because of lack of time or experience but this is just… well, here’s some of the code.”

A few years ago, researchers at Harvard University and UC Berkeley published a rather interesting study about phishing. After running a usability study to see how well people can detect phishing attempts, they found that: 23% of the study's participants did not look at the address bar, status bar, or the security indicators 68% proceeded without hesitation when presented with popup warnings about fraudulent certificates 90% were fooled by good phishing websites. Neither education, age, sex, previous experience, nor hours of computer use showed a statistically significant correlation with vulnerability to phishing.

"I saw this sign in the window of an empty storefront," Jason Sullivan wrote, "and I can't decide if the biggest WTF is using poster board, stencils and multiple colors of what appears to be chalk in their quest of 'moving technology forward', or the fact that they apparently made a mistake while putting the 'N' in consulting and just decided to use a bit of masking tape to correct it, rather than flip the board over and start again."

Despite being considered a small player in the insurance field, Mike I.'s company writes $1.1 billion in premiums annually and has carved itself a nice niche in the area of non-standard automobile insurance. Non-standard is for drivers who are rejected due to things like too many speeding tickets, fender benders or DUIs. Like all other insurance companies, Mike's relies on complex custom software to quote and write its policies.

I can think of several ways to improve the code below from Jeff S., or at least to reduce its line count by two or three.

Tore S. had it made. He landed an enviable position that many of his fellow students had been gunning for – an evening/night shift as a Unix admin and general support for a large company that let him work from home. And you know what that means: equal time given to work and dancing around in your PJ's Risky Business-style. He could sleep and get paid for it, so long as he kept his cell phone on and would wake up and answer if/when it rang. Then he'd have to VPN into the network, do his thing, and then carefully weigh the decision to have another one-man dance party or go back to sleep. (Sleep usually won.)

"I took this with my cell phone at the gas station," T. Bare writes, "I think there's something wrong with their rounding... unless there invented a new increment of the dollar that I'm unaware of."

"I'm currently in the process of customizing the firmware for a RAID controller used in some of my company's products," jspenguin wrote, "The LCD Controller Module (LCM) is written in PHP and, as it turns out, an LCM is not quite what PHP was designed for. In addition to abusing exec() all over the place, they poorly re-implement functions that are built-in to PHP."