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.

While most students received mundane case studies, the one that Niclas Olovsson and his teammate were assigned became the envy of the other students - the usage of IT tools for supporting flight mechanics at a local airport. Upon receiving their assignment, Niclaus figured that any modern airport would require a state-of-the-art system to keep their airplanes in the air. He imagined hand held smart terminals that received work orders over an intranet, sent data back over an extranet to a VB application over the internet! The synergistic combinations of buzzwords were endless! However, on the morning of their arrival, much to their chagrin, all they found was a greasy old PC...and Klaus.

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.

"So I was bored at work one day," Graeme Job explains, "and wondered, what's the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything. Then it hit me. I could use T-SQL to generate... Mandelbrot."

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.

The one thing that the new companies all lacked was the name recognition and brand loyalty of TaxQuik's customers. The company developed an aggressive plan to continue to support the DOS version, while simultaneously building a Windows version of the software. And by all accounts, the plan worked like a charm.

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.

The contact in the US didn't like one solution more than the other, and in the interest of getting the project done quickly, sent an email with his solution.

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).

It's not every day that one is treated to a nice, steak dinner. Even rarer is when said dinner shows up at your front door, completely randomly and unexpected. Brandon "galgorah" Leach (Boston, MA) wrote, "here's at least one lunch you shouldn't be able to complain about. Well, unless you eat this all in one sitting."

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

Double-Click on My Computer
I was on a call with a lady who was having Internet connectivity issues. I listened to her describe what was happening and was just starting to guide her through a few things to try to find the problem. I asked her to double-click on My Computer to which she replied, "How can I double-click on your computer?" I had to hit mute and collect myself because I didn't see that one coming.

"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.

Nobody would probably show, let alone stay awake, if it weren’t for the free coffee and bagels.

“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!”

“Okay, okay,” Tom nervously responded, flipping through some papers, “we’re… uh, 30% through AMQ, 60% percent towards AMA-2, and… err… 100% for DBD.” Murray frowned and gruffly murmured something unintelligible. That was his way of saying “thank you.”