One of our most dedicated readers, Michael R., is also one of our most dedicated contributors, sometimes sending us several submissions in a single day. We haven't featured all of them, but now we're making up for that. Today, it's wall-to-wall Michael, mostly food misadventures. Michael might tell you we've cooked the plot, but he can't prove...

Kyle sends us a puzzler of bad code today. It appears in a "JSP-like" codebase- which Kyle provides no futher details on, but certainly hints at a serious WTF underpinning this code. boolean loop = true; while (loop) { // fake loop to break out of loop = false; doesStuff(); moreStuff(); etc(); } This is a representative block,...

Ever since the DOS days, determining file type based on the three letter extension in its filename has been a common practice. I'd argue that it's not a good practice, but it's become so standard that it's hard to avoid. It's so common that pretty much any language in wide use has some sort of "get extension" method. C# is no exception. Of course,...

When you get into the world of proprietary filesystems, things can get real weird. There are many a filesystem that doesn't support directories, still in use today. Or filesystems which only allocated chunks in multi-megabyte blocks, which means you end up wasting a lot of space if you have small files. Or filesystems where the largest file size is...

Many years ago, Tom supported a VB6 application. It was about 750,000 lines of code, split across far too many files, with no real organization to it. While the code was bad and awful, the organization problem was a universal issue for the application. It even infested the database. This is some VB6 code for querying that database: strSQL = "SELECT...

I'm fresh out of snark this week, so I'm relying on the rest of you to carry the load for me. Tote that barge, etc. First up is a timely comment from an anonymous reader: "Even Kronos admits their software is a pain."   Old Faithful Peter G. is too early for the midnight train, but he's in the right place. "Strange that the train is...