What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards. This week, meet a reader who …

[Tubz]

A colleague of mine had put together a PowerPoint for the top dogs and had used various placeholder names for information for us to put information that he formatted and on the last page he had a placeholder for "any other shit that the bean counting cretins will want" and yes never removed it. Thankfully it must have been a long day and nobody noticed but our boss giving the presentation and quickly blocked the screen before switching slides.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, seen something similar on a corporate presentation by the Worldwide company President, that had supposedly been collated and reviewed by multiple C-Suite people.

I can only believe that their heads are so far up each other's arses that they cannot read.

[Doctor Syntax]

"multiple"

That's the key word. Everyone assumes they don't need to do it because someone else will.

AKA "If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job."

[Jamesit]

"AKA "If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job.""

And we all now nobody's perfect!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Pobody's nerfect.

[that one in the corner]

Ah, that explains why internal mail returned the nerfect to me, I'd addressed it to Peabody, down in Shipping.

Hope Pobody won't be upset, the nerfect's fur is looking a bit matted after a weekend in the Post Room.

[collinsl]

Well a quick wurdle with a trewling stick should sort that out before you have to nerk it's wogglers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourslef!

[Mark 85]

"No, Pobody's nerfect."

That was very common as I recall.

Decades ago someone changed the chairman of the board's office sign to "Chairman of the Bored". Luckily, he had a sense of humor and left it up until he retired.

[zuckzuckgo]

Or he just did not know how to spell board?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think the Chairman of the Board didn't know how to spell Board? That he'd look at diary entries for 'board meeting' and head to B&Q to pick up some sheets of MDF?

[Gene Cash]

As my grandfather used to say:

What happens when 2 people are in charge of feeding a horse?

The horse dies of starvation.

Grand-dad must have been a heck of an IT guy in the 1920s.

[Joe W]

I met some suits that actually would have loved for this to stay in the final presentation... :D They will have a beer with you at a company event, be totally relaxed and cool, and join stupid team games.

(Those are the ones not with their heads up their own - or often their CEO's - arse)

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

I've never understood that

In over 40 years of working in high tech, I've never understood people who put inappropriate language in code or presentations, even as placeholders. Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.") should just scream at people that it's only a matter of time before it's going to appear at the wrong time in front of the wrong audience. So just don't do it no matter how funny you think it is.

[CountCadaver]

Re: I've never understood that

Though human frustrations at drudgery and boredom have boiled over into work since time immortal (tapestries with "rude" additions - well rude by the metric of the annoyingly persistent Victorian prudish standards that still pervade - I blame the segment of the UK that adheres to the USA religious right attitude to morals alongside "I know it's not banned but better not just in case"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've never understood that

If you don’t understand that foul language is exactly as it sounds and doesn’t belong in a professional environment when presenting - then neither do you!

[ThomH]

Re: I've never understood that

I've never even really understood why people think it's funny, even given that humour is subjective. Since we live in a world where Mrs. Brown's Boys is a massive success I'm not under any misapprehensions of being in a majority.

[I don't know, stop asking me.]

Re: I've never understood that

I was lucky to encounter something like that in production code quite early in my career.

Made me think twice before doing it myself. Just be boring is sometimes best.

[jake]

Re: I've never understood that

I damn near killed an idiot who we discovered had been commenting code in Klingon[0] ... Normally, I wouldn't have cared, but the comments popped up during a surprise visit from the CEO with a couple clients in tow looking to see how their customized version of the code was coming along. The customer knew Klingon. Including the cuss-words. He found it funny, thankfully.

_{[0] The Klingon only appeared in bits of assembler embedded in C ... quite fitting, actually.}

[Pascal Monett]

Ah, PowerPoint.

As lead Notes developer in a company that was actively transiting to Sharepoint, Outlook and MSSQL (at least one good decision), I had been called upon to present the current uses of major Notes applications and the future of Notes in the company.

I dutilfully put together the memorandum of all the Notes applications being slowly decomissioned, but I just couldn't help my self and, on the last page of the page of the presentation entitled "The Future f Notes at <company name>", I used this kind of image as background with, at the bottom of the slide, the words "Any questions ?".

Even the IT director chuckled at that, so I consider it a total success.

[An_Old_Dog]

"Transiting"

Did your company take the SCSI bus while "transiting" from Lotus Notes to SharePoint, Outlook, and MSSQL?

[Anonymous Coward]

> "The Future f Notes at <company name>", I used this kind of image as background

Seeing you were f'ing Notes I was reluctant to look at the image, but then your IT director couldn't have been THAT laidback...

[CountCadaver]

Depends how much stress, frustration and hair loss Notes had caused them I suppose. I have worked with a few senior people (male and female as well as several shades in between) who would have laughed at even the most risque images if aimed at the products of certain vendors who they were incredibly glad to see the back of

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Direct link:

https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/3302021.jpg

[Anonymous Coward]

?

I have no clue why that image would be controversial.

[James O'Shea]

Re: ?

He doesn't have his pet mouse with him.

[that one in the corner]

Re: ?

Mouse?

Don't you mean rat?

SQUEAK! (and he wants you to know that isn't a pet, he is a profesional colleague)

[pirxhh]

Re: ?

https://discworld.com/management/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DW-MOUSE-Death-of-Rats-2-800px.png

I still have the first edition, obtained at the Discworld Convention in Manchester IIRC.

[James O'Shea]

Hmm. Does he speak using small caps?

[I don't know, stop asking me.]

> As lead Notes developer in a company that was actively transiting to Sharepoint, Outlook and MSSQL (at least one good decision),

Yes, moving away from Notes was a good decision.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken by someone who’s obviously only ever used the desktop client mail app.

Domino webmail was light years ahead of outlook and included multiple features like recall years before it became a thing in Exchange and outlook.

The problem with Notes wasn’t the product, it was the people who (poorly) implemented the wrong mechanism for end users.

[David Newall]

Cussing in debug prints

Shocked, I'm shocked I say, to think that would ever happen!

[SVD_NL]

Be careful where you type

I once got the suggestion from higher-ups to allow some large customers limited access to our internal ticketing system to check on project progress.

I did a quick query and showed them some of the things our engineers say in there.

Sticking with weekly reports seemed like the better option to them!

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Be careful where you type

Always a good game, search the tickets for some choice words.

When the inevitable happens and they get consumed by an LLM, there could be some interesting responses.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Be careful where you type

You mean if you don't find any you add a few?

[Excused Boots]

Re: Be careful where you type

Well of course. Normal behaviour, no?

[goodjudge]

Re: Be careful where you type

That suggestion comes up here every so often. It's a BAD idea. Just a couple of weeks ago I spotted and had to edit some very sweary engineer visit notes, where he'd been using speech-to-text to report his findings whilst - allegedly - having a separate moan with a colleague about someone else, definitely not about the customer (according to him). Of course the mic just put it all into the report and he didn't sanity check before hitting 'submit'.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Be careful where you type

I recall taking on responsibility for a some analytical lab equipment at a previous workplace, including the weekly service routines.

The machine came with a handwritten logbook that had been very dutifully filled out by the previous lab tech, a chap called Alan. It turned out I was Alan's replacement after he had been sacked by manglement.

His maintenance logs were full of things like "Furnace temperature sensor 2B broke, senior chemist insisted on buying second hand replacement. Replacement sensor fitted. Fucking surprise, sensor doesn't work. Replacement sensor stolen from other analyser in test lab B and fitted. Analyser functional with no thanks to idiotic senior chemist."

Apparently this prose would cross over into the way he spoke to anyone within earshot fairly often, which went some way to explain why he had gotten sacked.

[Shalghar]

Re: Be careful where you type

Things like this also happen in the military. When i was on guard duty as NCO i read backwards in the guards book of a really, really remote weapons and ammunition storage facility. The text i found a few months back is quite likely etched forever in my mind until alzheimer comes to the rescue.

"Gefreiter Nordhorn wurde beim Geschlechtsverkehr mit einem Schaf erwischt und sofort erschossen. Neue Wachstärke 1-9."

In translation: Private Nordhorn was cought shagging a sheep and was promptly shot. New Personnel count 1(NCO) / 9(Privates).

Of course this was forged in later on. I am somewhat sure due to the strict regulations concerning personal weapons and equipment. there would be a hell of a fuzz (and with the fuzz) if a weapon wasnt returned to the weapons storage after end of guard duty cycle and the ammo wasnt accounted for properly.

More on topic and much more in reality, we had a very emotional telephone conference concerning a machine installation at GKN/Airbus around 2010, especially emotional when it came to health and safety as well as the strangely non compliant higher ups (running around without helmets and high vis vests, things like that). What we did not know was that the customer had some of his higher ups on visit in our company in germany and the call was on hands free. Still glad we used below medium level of snarkiness and sarcasm which kept the aftermath tolerable.

[Meph]

Re: Be careful where you type

See now I find that kind of action note exceptionally helpful, since if something broke, I'd not waste my time speaking to the senior chemist for replacements. The only real mistake he made was not filtering his conversation patterns when in front of the end users.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Used very strong language to suggest users might enjoy performing a sex act."

One often suspects in these cases it's only the strong language that is objected to... ;)

[Paul Herber]

"Anonymous European Developer"

I was hoping for a(n)

"Anonymous Regomised Software Engineer"

[Excused Boots]

See what you did there!

[Anonymous Coward]

The poor sod got Regomised ?

Excuse my aphasia :(

[Shalghar]

Why not:

Anonymous

Developer

Helping

Someone

?

Thats a letter more and... oh, look, a squirrel !!!

[Caver_Dave]

Most inappropriate message

In the early days of Windows we had a program that implemented all the error checking hooks that we could find.

If the user saw a Windows error message pop up and decide to cancel rather than OK the issue, then the our pop up would appear saying "Believe the Microsoft error message!". Any subsequent keyboard or more than minimal mouse movement would return the action that cause the original Windows error message.

I have often wondered over the years whether the text was appropriate.

[doublelayer]

Re: Most inappropriate message

Appropriate in the sense of avoiding making customers angry, probably. Appropriate in the sense of proper user design, no, in my opinion. The problem is not the informality or even the command, but that it didn't tell the user what they did wrong or what they should do differently. In fact, I don't entirely understand what this even means. What my mind immediately jumped to is those times where what looks like a simple modal has an OK and a Cancel button, but I can't tell what differences to expect when selecting which one to press. I'm assuming your case was more complex than that, but since I don't know when it would appear, I would be wondering whether this was the equivalent of the abort/retry/fail situation where I was stuck in a loop until I terminated the program. If the users could do anything about the situation, then probably a better error message was possible.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Most inappropriate message

I was thinking more of how inappropriate "believe Microsoft" is - now more than ever?

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Most inappropriate message

The problem is not the informality or even the command, but that it didn't tell the user what they did wrong or what they should do differently

I've never seen a Microsoft error message that did this, so it won't surprise anyone if a product error message follows the same guidelines.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Most inappropriate message

I have someone using Outlook that is bringing up

"INVALID CREDENTIALS INTERACTION REQUIRED"

WTF does that mean?

Would a 2lb club hammer help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Most inappropriate message

It means you should try to login with an incorrect user name and/or password.

[Oliver Mayes]

One of our order forms contained a hidden tick box called "shittyTicky", invisible until one of our customers read the page source and asked about it.

Unfortunately this tick box appeared to be crucial to the website and removing or renaming it caused the whole order system to stop working, we never did figure out why since nothing referenced it.

[cookieMonster]

One of those “temporary” fixes I’d imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Just comment it as "More magic" and tiptoe quietly away.

[Anonymous Custard]

Sounds more like an FTB issue to me...

Or possibly it's just out of cheese?

GNU Terry Pratchett

[jake]

Usually that box will be ticked ...

... if the client is known to be more trouble than he's worth. In other words a client where the Boss is just looking for the final straw to fire them.

The person(s) ticking/accessing/referencing it is likely one with the power to get rid of trouble. They will rarely speak of it.

Usually it will only be visible internally; making that source accessible to the clientele is contraindicated.

Yes, there are much better ways of going about this, but when all you have is a hammer ...

_{NO! The customer is NOT always right! Sometimes firing them will save a company much money. Recommended.}

[Anonymous Coward]

> since nothing referenced it

I remember an ex-developer doing something along the lines of label="shi"+"tty"+"Tic"+"ky" to foil reference-finding until someone did finally stumble across it.

Anon for obv raisins.

[mhoulden]

There's a similarly named data structure in the Windows API. Older code was very keen on Hungarian notation which could lead to some strange results. The Windows shell includes an item ID structure. Unfortunately it came out as this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shtypes/ns-shtypes-shitemid.

[vistisen]

I saw a comment in some code" this value must be 1. We don't know why"

[Giles C]

On internal documents I tend drop easter eggs into long documents - a recently design document for the wireless network ran to 80+ pages. Halfway through the document is a reference to new SSID names (which were very silly), and the description of why roaming needed to use a common platform with a multi building campus. The reason given was "better snacks" as for why someone would move between buildings.

However I keep them clean, rather than anything too rude. Although in a previous job I did write in a document that my named boss won't have read this far.... He did and when mentioned I just said it good at least you read until the end...

[Strahd Ivarius]

It reminds me of the time at a bank where the head of implementation was complaining at a high level meeting that the dev team was providing implementation documents writing with dingbats or the like.

The head of dev answered that since it was obvious that the implementation team was not reading the documents anyway, it had been more that 6 months since he asked his team to change the font for all documents sent to implementation, and it took that time before anybody noticed it...

[Neil Barnes]

Shades of an 80's compiler (?) which included a free money voucher deep in the instruction manual... it was never claimed.

[jake]

A friend of mine included a README file in a rather popular shareware title that he wrote. It consisted of one line of text ... roughly "Congrats! If you are reading this, you have won $100! Send email to <valid address> to collect!".

In the 10 years that he had that email address (roughly his college years), he had no takers. Not one.

_{Note: This was back in the early 1980s, when $100 was actually a fair amount of money and shareware users were mostly computer literate.}

[joeldillon]

'Send email' would have been a bit of a tall order for most shareware users in the early 80s, to be fair.

[PB90210]

There was the tale a while ago of the website T&C's that included the promise of a good bottle of wine for the first person spotting that entry and it had finally been claimed

[blu3b3rry]

I worked somewhere where the company quality manual was promptly released for "read and understand" in the DMS for all employees. The DMS software would convert documents to PDF format automatically before raising them as available for signing off.

The whole thing was completely unreadable, being still in full markup redline formatting including comments. The metadata showed it had been reviewed by six of the QA team and the QA director himself...this was two days after a snotty email from said QA director grumbling about how people "obviously weren't reading documents before signing them off as understood"

[Anonymous Coward]

We regularly used to perform peer reviews on stuff destined for customers eyes.

I sent a colleague one document and made the remark "I'll know you've read it all if you find where I've put 'big horses todger'.'

I kept half an eye on him as he read through and gleaned a satisfying reaction when his expression said he'd found it.

(And no, it WAS removed before sending to the client)

[KarMann]

Would've been even better if you hadn't actually put 'big horses todger' in at all (ooh err missus), and they had to go through the entire thing looking for it, and maybe even double-check it then, before twigging that you might've misled them. Much like the 'beep beep' transmitter G'kar may or may not have drunk in 'The Gathering', for those who have followed Babylon 5.

[PB90210]

Are you sure it was deleted?

The first print run of Susie Dent:s 'Wordperfect" had to be pulped because it had been typeset from an old typo-riddled fle rather than the final proof copy

[TSM]

see also: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/66

[Anonymous Coward]

The very thing I was thinking of! Good work, sir!

[Gene Cash]

I remember a recent comment concerning buried documentation saying something like

Ut ullam impedit amet et. Harum voluptatum debitis itaque corrupti libero dolorum. Doloribus nihil sit laborum. Laborum amet est est. Qui quo in voluptas maxime doloremque cumque voluptas. Officia sequi voluptates placeat. Impedit non et minima. Veniam doloremque qui dolorem excepturi autem debitis. Minima voluptatibus magni aperiam temporibus atque ullam iure. Aut dolores unde enim odit cupiditate non numquam et. Praesentium ut veniam quis ut voluptatem inventore at. Voluptate voluptas omnis a qui temporibus. Tempore facilis tenetur consequuntur. Quod voluptates sed inventore blanditiis. Sint voluptatibus optio enim incidunt deleniti nostrum. Molestias corporis et corrupti velit eius natus. Sint delectus rerum praesentium nemo. Et dicta odit dolor. Quos repellendus et saepe consequatur rem molestiae nesciunt. If you switch to LDAP all accounts will be completely deleted because this is a feature. Soluta beatae perferendis sed. Est temporibus natus ab odio tenetur nemo alias. Ex sed consectetur possimus quia animi. Doloribus nihil cumque commodi recusandae id dolores quisquam cupididate.

[David Robinson 1]

People called Romanes they go the house?

[J.G.Harston]

起名兒北走向房子

[Robert Carnegie]

Just before I went to Google Translate this into English, I noticed that a few words of English are already included. And I think I remember that story, yes. And I assume that the original document wasn't in Latin, it was just unrewarding to read.

[jake]

"And I assume that the original document wasn't in Latin"

You're not familiar with lorem ipsum? The always suspect Wiki has a decent, if short, write-up on it.

[Robert Carnegie]

Be fair, this doesn't say "Lorem ipsum", and recently Pope Francis has passed away, so people might have something to say in Latin. But if Google is correct, this Latin is indeed gibberish, and not even complete sentences, mostly. There is a religious tone to it, I think.

[Robert Carnegie]

It was this "Who Me" published in mid January 2025: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/13/who_me/

Updating "the customer ticketing system" - having read *some* of the manual -

"It wasn't in bold or caps, there were no warning symbols or information boxes. It was just another sentence in the paragraph: 'Enabling LDAP authentication will delete all existing users'."

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Colourful Comments in Code

I put some choice words in code comments when I had (yet again) to create a workaround for some bug in MS Pascal. One example was that in a linked list with an even number of of nodes, the statement

current := current^.next^.next;

(i.e. jump forward two nodes), and the code snippet

current := current^.next;

current := current^.next;

produced different results. The former caused random crashes, the latter worked flawlessly. I added some quite colourful comments at this juncture.

In a similar vein, the natural logarithm function was extremely inaccurate. I had to call the version in the MS C library to get correct results. Again, various swear words emanated from my office, and quite a few were included in the comments in the code. They didn't end up visible to users, but were available to any programmer bothering to read the documentation thoroughly.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

MS Pascal ?

How to say you are an old IT guy, without saying you are an old IT guy...

Was it on CTOS per chance?

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

How to say you are an old IT guy, without saying you are an old IT guy...

How about, "I used Pascal/MT+ on 8080-based computers", and "I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401"?

[ChrisElvidge]

"I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401"

CDC 7600 in my case.

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: "I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401"

Took my uni assembly language course* from a CDC Software Consultant** on the CYBER74. Yay, COMPASS!

*it was either this, or fight with the CS students for time on the PDP-11s, and they got first dibs

**when we took delivery of the CYBER, it came with a software consultant to help us translate our apps to the machine. I guess this is standard for businesses, but as the university didn't have any apps that needed to be translated, they put him to work teaching the undergrads how to write assembly.

[HenryCrun]

Re: "I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401"

Happy times had running RT-11F/B on a PDP-11. Where I learnt to code in FORTRAN,

[Joe W]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

I used to joke with a colleague that while I learned Fortran (95) he leraned FORTRAN (no year given...)

He was actually quite happy that a young lad learned "the ways" and did complicated stuff that actually got better results than he did. Wonderful guy. Allergic to BS and could then be quite... yeah.. abrasive to say the least. As I said: wonderful guy

[Martin J Hooper]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

Compiling a fortran program on a 1401

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM

[Vincent Manis]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

Learning Fortran on a 1401 would be quite an achievement. IIRC, the 14xx Fortran compiler had 64 (sic!) passes, given the microscopic memory size of that machine. I always wondered how many people had enough patience to wait for an entire compilation.

I actually came late to the party: IBM 7044, in 1966.

[GeekyOldFart]

Re: Colourful Comments in Code

There was one time when a long-standing bug in a different package, developed in-house but by another team, had gone unfixed for so long it had whiskers.

Then a colleague of mine realised that as a "fresh set of eyes" on it, each of the two teams led the code review of the other's changes. So, every time his code called the other package's API he'd have a comment along the lines of "They still haven't fixed this. Apply dodgy workaround AGAIN."

After a month or two of this it was suddenly fixed - and in the comments of their code when we reviewed it was "Shut up, [colleague's name]"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Clever" machine obscenity detection...

"I have implemented a clever machine learning tool that scores each line of code for vulgarity and flags possible issues,"

So we're in danger of locking all the people in Scunthorpe off your system! (as legend has it has happened before).

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

Or Penistone, Staines, Clitheroe, Twatt (in the Orkey islands) and any number of <place> cum <nearby place> locations all over rural England...

[HenryCrun]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

You forgot Scunthorpe (Lincolnshire) and Pratts Bottom (Kent) to name but two :-)

[Shalghar]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

There is a little village called "Pissen" (yes, "urinating") near Merseburg in eastern Germany.

Other more "civilized" names like AschAFFENburg (monkey) also exist.

Profanity filters should implement a cross reference list for triggering but "innocent" nonprofanities like comPUTEr (for french speaking people) or mARSCHmusik or whatever longer word seems to contain a built in profanity substring. There was a now closed down MMORPG called "forsaken world" that censored its own item "Drachenkraut" through all three languages it was published in europe due to "kraut" i believe. Its hard to guess beyond the XXXX or ****.

Naturally, the french players talked trash in circles around any filter upgrade that was implemented. Biological creativity outwitting any kind of "AI" or similar glorified sort-of-sort algorythm as usual.

Much better however would be to globally set the societal variable snowflake_mode_intensity from "excessive" down to "whocares".

[OhForF']

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

My favorite example is Blizzard's bad world filter censoring the german weniger for some unfathomable reason.

[Alan J. Wylie]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced The University of Sussex (or was it Essex?)

[blondealien]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

This is why The University of Sussex have the domain susx.ac.uk in addition to sussex.ac.uk.

[PB90210]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

Quite a few schools had trouble with emails from the Horniman Museum... something about anthropology...

[Caver_Dave]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

I know someone who was working in Building Control in that area of the country when emails were first being used by the Councils.

For some time all his emails that referred to the use of hardcore in Scunthorpe were refused.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

Years ago, where I worked it was corporate policy that email addresses were in the form [first initial][second initial (if exists)][surname]@company.com.

This led to some email addresses that were funny and very rude. I won't say what they were here but they were for people with names a bit like Trevor Watts, Sian Hitter and so forth. The strange thing to me was that those individuals never asked for a different username or email address.

[goblinski]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

We had First Name + First letter of Last Name for username policy.

The day we hired one Ana Limes, we were specifically told NOT to use the standard convention. To this day, I don't know why.

[Francis Boyle]

Well

I am not a lawyer but they were probably worried about being sued.

[Meph]

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

On more than one occasion, I've gone out on a limb to veto the default naming convention to avoid circumstances like this. As amusing as it would have been to let it go through, I do still have at least some conscience left (which is surprising after 25 years in IT..)

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Candid error message

I wrote a script that the desktop support staff would use to remotely query a machine via WMI and it would return lots of useful info: whose on it, the phone number of whose on it , uptime, OS ver , where it is , IP address , etc etc .

.

...UNLESS there was some kind of DNS error / conflict , when the script would establish that it had been routed to the wrong machine , apologise to the user and suggest they go and berate the server team responsible for the DNS tables.

Captain of server team was less than impressed when they themselves were using the script for something and this occurred .

[Anonymous Coward]

funny code comments

I've been known in the past for putting funny comments in my code, yes. Nothing any end users had any chance of seeing, though, like comments in C code.

Not vulgar or inappropriate but funny vs. other team members.

The satisfaction came, when those were unearthed, 10 years later, and an ex-colleague told me he had a good laugh, when porting said code to a new platform :)

[Anonymous Coward]

The crudeness was ok, but not the trace message

Back in the 80's I joined a team to work on an Expert System shell for the IBM PC, which already had a few less than professional messages coded in:

If the engine hit a problem, the status/progress box recorded that "shit" had happened; if the problem was in the text-UI-handling code then it was "deep shit" (the devs up to that point were happy with the maths in the engine but weren't great with UIs!).

But those weren't what I recall having a user complaining about (well, we did *try* to fix those problems and stop the messages before a release).

One of the small demo scripts was to decide "which sport would you prefer?", so "football" or "tennis" or "running" or ... The user was upset that, no matter what he input, it always gave the same suggested sport - so how could he trust the decision engine was working and could run his own script properly?

Turned out that when the script completed, it did a fast traversal up its stack and, as this in C code, the status text was given to the user was that we had decided to do - the "long jump".

[Anonymous Coward]

Why always build Client DBs from Scratch

Many years ago, I was told this second or third hand - Software company setting up the Phone booking system for a cinema, and rather create a clean database they used a copy of a internal test database.

First phone call was made by CEO and the audio message describing the film was "this film was s*** I don't know why anyone would see it" - now add customer was Disney related, lets just say someone got sacked over it.

Lesson - always keep things clean and nondescript, you never know who'll see/hear it.

[jake]

::perks up::

"I have implemented a clever machine learning tool that scores each line of code for vulgarity and flags possible issues,"

Challenge accepted.

[Ordinary Donkey]

Re: ::perks up::

Got your Profanisaurus ready?

[Juha Meriluoto]

I was once in a team developing some research software, in times when a '386 at 33 MHz was considered high-end hardware. As M$ C 6.0 memory allocator was a piece of cr*p we had to work around it... When the workaround ran into an impossible situation, it would give a 'Red Screen Of Death' saying 'Fatal internal system error: Press any key to reboot, or any other key to continue.'

[Anonymous Coward]

Not rude but still hard to look the user in the eye

Writing a UI to fit a text-mode screen, added an INI file guard to enable turning on extra config features for developers to use, like being able to replace an area of the display with internal stats, enabling commands/actions that were useful but could cause damage if not used carefully, search options we thought were a bit complex for the user. The normal sorts of things that make life easier. No guard entry, no developer mode and these features' config options were inactive.

Until the inevitable, when it is realised by our consultants that a few of these features would be really useful to the clients' installs: "Does it work with the versions they already have?"

"As it happens, yes, yes it does. All you do is add "enable-xxx" to the INI file (in those days, users were quite capable of editing INI files) just replace "xxx" with the name of the feature, here is the list of the safe(ish) items."

"Sounds good; ah, you're looking a little shifty, is there anything else I should know?"

"Um, well, you see, to actually allow any of these to work, you have to tell the program to run in developer mode"

"And?"

"You tell the user to put at the top of the INI file, um, ah, the line"

"Yesss?"

"MeProgrammerYouJane"

"<sigh>"[1]

[1] note: this predates HTML and you didn't need to pronounce the closing slash in those days.

[Noram]

Re: Not rude but still hard to look the user in the eye

Ok that one had me laughing.

Especially as whilst it's a bit of a silly string to use, it also presumably ensured that some random user couldn't make a change that would have stopped it working.

[K555]

In the logfiles...

I can't quite remember the exact text or circumstance now, but in the OpenVPN implementation of some old Yealink handsets, if it couldn't connect because of (IIRC) some generic issue like lack of DNS resolution, the line in the log said "shit happd"

[Roger Kynaston]

Anyone else remember inetd on Solaris

It was probably Solaris 8. I had a problem which seemed to have something to do with the inetd daemon and I had a look at the init.d startup script which had the immortal comment

# Why oh why did we mess with inetd

Made me chuckle at the time.

[A____B]

Error Message

Back in prehistory (late 80s), I recall a colleague's error message which almost made it to production.

The system was for a local authority managing social housing. On the data entry screen for a client were the usual fields -- name, date of birth... and one labelled sex [that long ago it was just M or F].

If this field was left blank, the error message was "Sex is mandatory, please make an insertion" - if not F or M then "I need your sex, give it to me"

This was picked up in the rehearsal just before formal customer acceptance tests started and quickly changed to a more boring response. The customer tester, who had seen it commented that "I see what you have done there! very clever, but I know for certain that there are some on our books who will complain"

[HenryCrun]

Four letter word FORTRAN

During the 1980s part of my life included patching the FORTRAN in a Nuclear Medicine heart scanner. On one occasion I was surprised to find a comment block liberally spattered with four-letter words. The algorithm was quite tortuous code and the comment was clearly expressing the author's contempt for having to use it. After working through the code I decided to leave the comments as they were quite apt if rather fruity.

[goblinski]

I did that on my then big boss' wife's company website once (real estate company), after we shoveled for weeks while she kept changing her requirements. Just the hover tags over pictures.

I wasn't nasty, I have to insist. Just cutely snarky (I hope).

Took it down fast, as my direct supervisor was already neck deep into this and really stressed out (unlike me, he was actually working rather than goofing around). I hope to this day someone saw it.

[Stratman]

When on an OB quite a few years ago, covering a world famous dog show, we rigged a couple of standalone portakabins with various bits of equpiment. As is the way of things their names were scrawled with magic marker on 50mm wide PVC tape and stuck to the doors. We called them Additional Recording and Sound Equipment, and Field Editing and Compilation Kit.

We got a few knowing smiles, mostly from fellow tekky types, and they stayed there for the duration.

[collinsl]

Pity you didn't have a film store you could label Giant Internal Rolls of Largeformat Stock

[MirandaNoor]

Stockphoto

No profanity, but a colleague of mine once made a presentation for internal use where he used photos from ShutterStock. Except, he used pictures with the ShutterStock watermark in it.

We pointed it out, and he said he was aware of it, but needed to wait for the properly licensed photos to arrive. As this was just an internal presentation, he considered it okay, because "what's the worst that could happen?"

Well, the CEO of the company could happen. He wasn't there during the presentation and didn't realize it was still a work in progress. But he found the presentation in his mailbox as part of the report about the presentation, and he forwarded the presentation to several of our customers.

Yes, with the ShutterStock watermarks.

To our customers, who were in the marketing business, thus not very happy about us violating copyrights.

With at least one client forwarding it to ShutterStock, who sent us a bill for unauthorized usage.

And three clients dropping us over this scandal.

Which resulted in me needing another job as the company went tits-up due to the loss of income and the high price we had to pay for the use of those images.

Let's say that explicit texts did appear in various company emails after this, though...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stockphoto

Ah Shutterstock, such a nice company that wouldn't do anything shady themselves.

As IT Manager with my current employer, I signed up for a single user account in the company name with me as the contact, paid for from a Paypal account in the company name with me as the primary account contact. After we had the account for 15 months and downloaded 184 photos for use on our website, Shutterstock contacted me and said we needed to upgarde to a Corporate account rather than the Personal account which they said I was using in my personal capacity an was persoanlly liable for.

They wanted us to pay £1800 a year upfront for the account rather than the £59 per month we were paying. We went back and forth with them threatening legal action against me personally and everything.

Finally I asked for a signed copy of the agreement, and quoted their terms and conditions which say "For clarity, if a user is acting in an employment capacity, the employer will be deemed the licensee for the purposes of the license." at which point all chasing from them stopped.

Apparently harassment like this is not unusual for them.

[Marty McFly]

Back in the 2x daily reboot days of Windows 9x...

I shared an office with an attractive and endowed red head who was dating the PFY from the IT team. He created a script with seemingly random errors and put it on her computer, with instructions to not reboot and to precisely write down all the messages. After about 50 errors that morning, the final message before lunch professed his undying love for said damsel with a distressed computer.

Shortly thereafter her ample assets were bestowed elsewhere and he had more time available to write code.

[Steve Hersey]

I once coded APPROPRIATE profanity in a splash screen.

Decades ago, I worked on a truly awful project building an app to talk to a portable instrument.

The entire software spec was, "We want it to talk to the flowmeter." Predictably, it just got worse from there.

There was a series of internal-only test versions; predictably, sales, who were expressly forbidden to give them to customers, did exactly that, and demanded that I support these incomplete test apps.

I responded by incorporating a special splash screen in the next test version that read, more or less, "INTERNAL-ONLY <EXPLETIVE> TEST VERSION, NOT FOR CUSTOMER USE."

To the utterly predictable howls of outrage from sales conveyed to my manager that this was inappropriate language to expose to customers, I responded by by pointing out that internal-only test versions were never supposed to be given out in the first place.

[Excused Boots]

Re: I once coded APPROPRIATE profanity in a splash screen.

Yes well that’s ‘sales’ for you. You have to work around them, but at the same time CYA!

[A.P. Veening]

Re: I once coded APPROPRIATE profanity in a splash screen.

To the utterly predictable howls of outrage from sales conveyed to my manager that this was inappropriate language to expose to customers, I responded by by pointing out that internal-only test versions were never supposed to be given out in the first place.

Let me guess, that only made them howl louder and now for blood.

[Ian Johnston]

I got an MSc in stress analysis based in part on code which included a comment saying "Reversed the sign here. No idea why it works, but it does. Check this out later." Oops.

[Paul Herber]

There's a PhD ready and waiting for you if you add a comment "Well, that's very odd. Why does that happen?"

[samsungfreud]

Webserver gone wild

I was made a sysadmin for a webserver belonging to a research facility.

My first task was to run a scan of everything on the server.

I found the developers had set up some obnoxious pages highly critical of the facility.

I turned over my findings.

The developers received a slap on the wrist.

I was marched into the office and questioned, "How could you let this happen?!?!"

Mind you I'd just received the role of sys admin a day before.

I

It was one of the worst tenures I'd ever had.

[TFL]

At an old job, we used this terrible, Java-based content manglement system. At one point in its history, it had effectively removed the ability to set cookies, so they'd added this dodgy hack where you could put the typical 1x1 transparent GIF on a page, with a Set-Cookie header. OK fine, except that being an image with a static URL, the image would be cached, and the cookie could only be set once.

I got annoyed by all this, so added a useless extra parameter that I called "fubarcookiecrap", with a random number as a value.

Did I mention that when this CMS failed, it barfed back 500 Server Error responses in various content panes? Well, this was found by a customer, who called it in, because they could now see the parameter on the invisible GIF request.

[Anonymous Coward]

London is full of....

I work on rock concerts and during one rehearsal it was amusing seeing a placeholder slide pop up on the giant screen behind where the band woud be playing. The guy running the media server assured everybody that it was only a placeholder and would never be seen during a show.

Of course a few weeks later during a show in Glasgow the audience roared their approval when the placeholder slide made its inevitable appearance 20ft high and 60ft wide -

"LONDON IS FULL OF CUNTS"

This made the national newspapers and the band were forced to issue a grovelling apology as the next show was the "Big London Show"

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/21/kasabian-expletive-banner-glasgow-production-error

[Meph]

Re: London is full of....

I thought it was only considered libel if it wasn't true

[J.G.Harston]

Way back when Rubik's cube was a novelty and Regan was still alive, I dug into Dynix (remember that?) and found loads of test error messages. Things like "It's an error Jim, but not as we know it." Somewhere I have a printout of the ones I managed to capture.

[that one in the corner]

> "It's an error Jim, but not as we know it."

That one is going straight into my next project!

[Seenit]

A UK bank wanted to impress how important their major clients were by sending a letter from a senior executive, who needless to say couldn't be bothered penning the letter to mere customers so it ended up delegated to Junior Oik. Junior was bored and started the letter 'Dear Rich Bastard'. The letters were sent out, then the calls started.

[Anne Hunny Mouse]

Not rude

Not rude, but appropriate for the day of posting.

Cisco had to hastily release new firmwares for their VC / Collaboration equipment a few years ago

The previous ones had a feature where R2D2 would randomly run about the screen and play the Star Wars theme on May the 4th...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even comments can leak

I was working on a syringe pump that had a tendency to jam if it went wrong and hit the end of travel. If it was a bad jam then a spanner was required but most of the time a brief move at 100% power away from the endstop was sufficient. After doing this with manual commands many times I added it to the firmware with the very correct and descriptive comment that this is the pump jerkoff routine.

A few years later I was called by one of our support people at a customer site who asked if a specific firmware implemented jerkoff - clearly the comment had leaked.

Another one that took a few years to come to fruition was a line much like this

result = 0xffff; // With a nice Chianti

For a unlikely error. A developer next to me spotted and had a laugh.