Stupid Programmer Tricks

[fzammetti]

C4010... THAT'S a riot!

As someone who actually has written a compiler (years ago in Compiler Construction class), it IS a lot of fun. Modern compilers amaze the hell out of me though, I wouldn't know where to start any more.

[britcode]

>warning C3910: Why are you compiling software at 3 AM?


#pragma warning (disable:3910)

[brendan]

[deadsoul]

[refractor]

Somebody who worked for the place I work now had an obsession with timer events. The entire GUI handling was based around a timer on each window that would fire every second. It was complete, utter, total madness.

The lamest programmer I've ever seen/suffered just couldn't code *anything* properly, and he was the "most qualified" person that was interviewed. If we find bugs now, we try and locate the problem by searching for comments in French (we all write in English - he wrote in French)... rather sadly it's actually pretty good way of finding bugs. He's gone now too, thankfully.

Another amusing one was an "Access" "programmer", who regularly had the Access manual open on the "IF" page - it took her ages to work that one out.

Ho hum.

Cheers,

Reefractor

[skybuck]

[Arisme]

[superman]

[angedelamort]

[Pacomac]

A work colleague asked me to knock up a quick DOS utility to recursively delete a sub directory.... (you know whats coming don't you!!)... I forgot to tell it to stop when it recursed back to the original directory and I managed to wipe his whole hard drive in just a little over 20 seconds. That's quite an impressive speed don't you think. This was a few years ago mind when hard disks weren't that big.

[fzammetti]

A work colleague asked me to knock up a quick DOS utility to recursively delete a sub...

DING!!!

Wow, it's Deja Vu all over again!

[Quirk]

[skybuck]

[britcode]

>A work colleague asked me to knock up a quick DOS utility to recursively delete a sub directory.... (you know whats coming don't you!!)... I forgot to tell it to stop when it recursed back to the original directory and I managed to wipe his whole hard drive in just a little over 20 seconds. That's quite an impressive speed don't you think. This was a few years ago mind when hard disks weren't that big.


Heh, if we are talking about cock-ups, I have a great one: on my second day at my first programming job when I was about 16 or 17 I was asked to write a program to test the disk compression software (back in Windows 3.1 and DOS days, Windows 95 was just coming out) by writing out a string to disk thousands of times. They suggested I use my name as the string.

Anyway I set the program running on a large file size and then realised I'd put far too many zeros in the size (so I'd done about 100000 instead of 1000). I got a calculator and worked out how long it was going to take, and it was going to take a few hours, so went "damn" and decided to quit the program. Escept of course this was before PCs had multi-tasking. So I hit Control-C, Control-Break and even Ctrl-Alt-Delete. No luck. Then I hit the reset switch, and when the computer booted up it found itself completely dead. Oh dear. This is my second day on the job remember...

Several hours, and a few Norton Utilities later (of course I didn't know what Norton Utils was back then, but I do now), one of the other programmers was looking over the partition table and found that (wait for it) I had managed to write my name all over the partition table (and presumably the rest of the disk as well).

I had a slightly red face.

Weird thing is, I still seven years later have no idea how it could have happened... as far as I'm aware when using standard Microsoft C C-Library functions most FAT systems do not start writing on the partition table after they fill up! (At least I hope not otherwise I'm installing Linux!)
Maybe it was dodgy disk compression software!

[refractor]