Re: OT. Stupid Developer Tricks

Tom van Stiphout wrote:

On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:21:22 -0700, Salad <oil@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Humorous? I liked the one I did several years for a client where we
had a splash screen that displayed for only a second or two at the
most. The form prominently had the company logo on it: a green tree.
Just for fun I wrote some code that randomly with a chance of 5% it
would display a white tree. You can probably imagine what happened. Users don't pay attention to
the splash screen, but they can see from the corner of their eye that
something isn't right. Before you get a chance to focus on it the
splash screen is already gone. Restart the app and all is normal.
Until it happens again a month or so later.


Another one was an April Fools joke several years ago when our Sales
people were using the popular program Act! as their contact manager.
Each rep has about 1000 accounts.
We took a screenshot of the application and built a new app. When they
started up Act! using the familiar shortcut it ran our app instead.
The login experience was the same, the main screen came up, and then a
dialog said something like "An error has occurred. Do you want to
perform maintenance to your records now?". Upon Yes the dialog would
show "Now deleting record #" and rapidly count down to zero. The
developers stood outside the office of one of the reps and we could
hear her reactions No! No! Oh, what's happening.... Until we
couldn't hold it together anymore and were rolling on the floor
laughing.


I can imagine the fear that the rep felt as that counter went down...did anyone call the janitor to clean up the puddle?

This one doesn't have the fear effect. Back in the late 80s I was messing around with the system and this guy mentioned it'd be great if I could write a program that would take money out of a bank and transfer it to his account.

So I created a table of bank names. The form would come up and prompt the user to select a bank. Then prompt the user for the account holder name. It then made a bunch of beeping sounds to simulate a modem, connect to the bank and search for the account holder. If the account holder was found (random yes/no), a random number was returned showing how much money was in the person's account and ask how much money the user wanted to tranfer to their account. They'd enter the money and then they were prompted to enter their bank account number. If they said Yes to continue the transfer the program would beep like a modem then complete the transaction. I went to the guy and when prompted for his account number he took out his checkbook and transferred some money from his friends account to his account. He was impressed until I told him it was a fake program. My sister came to visit me at work a short time afterwards and I had her run the program. She punched in her boyfriend's name and the random dollar amount in the account was within a few dollars of what he had in his account. She was convinced I was accessing their bank account and could transfer money to her account.


-Tom.



Is it a bug? Or is it a miracle?

I had a problem that didn't make sense a couple of days ago that I found humorous and I thought I'd share it with you.

I had a form with, amoung others, two fields; Status and EmployeeID. EmployeeID was hidden, the other visibile. If the status was changed to completed, it was to fall of the list of working items for the employee. So in my testing I would change the status and by gosh, the employee would fall off the working list just as expected.

The problem was that I couldn't display any completed items for the employee later on. And why was my employee ID changing? The value for the employeeID was a bunch of 0s or 1s?

The code was working well. The form looked OK. I finally opened the property *** and checked the control source for EmployeeID and Status. Status had the control source of EmployeeID, not Status as I expected. This was due to copying/pasting the Status Control and giving it the name EmployeeID but not changing the control source.

This is the type of error that is hard to track down as there's not code or logic to check. Just a naming mistake. I doubt it's a common error. But if you see values in tables you don't expect, it might be something to check.

I found it funny. If anyone else has any humorous develper tricks maybe that person can share their's as well.
.

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