Things I read

Error'd: Element of Violence

By Alex Papadimoulis

"Avast blocked itself from updating on reboot," Tejio writes, "if it can't trust itself, who can it trust?"

"While browsing for a USB cable from Amazon, I found this bargain for £10431.80," wrote Dazzie Bee, "and it even comes with free shipping!"

"This panel usually displays real-time bus information," wrote Tom Wright, "the fact that the two errors are actually different suggested to me that I had just caught it as it broke. No such luck - it was still displaying the same thing on my way home."

"I recently got an 'ultra high capacity' battery for my HP laptop," wrote Tod, "I noticed that the Quick Setup guide included an unexpected instruction: 'Replace this box with PI statement as per spec'. It's repeated several times, so it must be important!"

"I got this message trying to buy a game that was included as a demo with my xbox," wrote Ryan, "it was a fun game, but I just can't justify the $53.6M cost. If it was only $50M... maybe."

"I got this from Symantec's online store," writes, D.J.. "Repeatedly.

"I guess Adobe 'Reader' doesn't 'like' too much 'violence'," notes Andrew D.

>

01:00:00 PM, Friday 18 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Representative Line: Sanity Check

By Alex Papadimoulis

"Lucky me," Ryan wrote, "I got assigned to work on Legacy, an application whose name accurately describes itself. I'm pretty sure that this system manages to have a WTF/line ratio greater than 1.0, especially if we include the 'minor' ones, like the System.Environment.Exit calls peppered throughout library code that causes the app to inexplicably exit."

"But beyond minor annoyances like that, or the random number generator class that seems to exist solely to duplicate the behavior System.Random, I discovered this gem inside a class method."

// Sanity check
const int expected_length = 199 + 6;

Ryan adds, "I don't even want to know why a constant is declared inside a class... or what makes 199 + 6 better than 205. My head hurts."

01:00:00 PM, Thursday 17 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Long Distance

By Remy Porter

Lawrence's employer had heard that this newfangled "Desktop PC" could reduce their IT costs, and they wanted in on it. It was the mid 80s, and at the time, their plants scattered all over Alabama connected to a central mainframe via dumb terminals connected over very expensive leased lines. It was time to upgrade, and Lawrence wasn't in charge of it. He didn't get called in until things went wrong.

"This new PC system is really slow," he was told while on a plant tour. That didn't sound likely- the PCs were running blisteringly fast 4.77MHz, 8088 CPUs with 16Kb of RAM, and since someone had connected "arithmetic-heavy accounting usage" to "floating point processing", they all had 8087 co-processors. There was no way they were slow, especially since half the time they were just running a 3270 terminal emulator.

But sure enough, when they fired up the terminal emulator, it was slower than anything. Going from the login screen to the menu, and then from the menu to the order fulfillment screen took multiple minutes. Was the 300-baud smartmodem that slow? Lawrence fiddled connections, tested the line, and then eventually got around to cranking the volume on the modem's speaker. No, the modem wasn't that slow.

Whoever had configured the deployment had tried to mirror their old system as closely as possible. In the old system, the terminal started a new connection every time the user pressed enter, and then disconnected from the mainframe until the user triggered the next command. So in the new system, they did the same thing- which meant each time the client finished loading a screen, the modem would hang up.

That particular problem was easy to fix, and simply involved making sure each PC had its own phone line, and that the terminal emulator made sure to keep the connection open. But one of their remote offices, someplace deep in the Alabama backwoods, proved intractable- they couldn't connect at all.

Lawrence tried diagnosing their problem remotely at first. The phone line seemed good- he could dial it; the plant users could dial out. He shipped them a fresh modem, and eventually a fresh PC, but nothing seemed to make a difference. They couldn't dial the mainframe. So he had to go out to the plant.

Having learned his lesson, the first thing Lawrence did was crank the volume on the modem speaker. When the computer attempted to dial out, he heard the sound of touchtone bleeps followed by a crackly voice saying, "Number please."

That particular plant was so back in the backwoods of Alabama that it didn't have direct-dial long distance. The users were so used to it that they didn't even think it could be the problem. The small town phone company had no firm plan when they would start doing it. Lawrence helped pack up the PCs and reinstall the dumb terminals. By the time he left that company, they were still using them. They might still be using them today.

01:00:00 PM, Tuesday 15 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Please Don't Learn to Code

The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this:

10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR"
20 GOTO 10

Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy happening – even in jest – are zero, and for good reason: the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?

To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.

• It assumes that more code in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as a programmer, I have found this … not to be the case. Should you learn to write code? No, I can't get behind that. You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none.
  
  
• It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not. Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already.
  
  
• It puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?
  
  
• It assumes that adding naive, novice, not-even-sure-they-like-this-whole-programming-thing coders to the workforce is a net positive for the world. I guess that's true if you consider that one bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. And for that matter, most people who already call themselves programmers can't even code, so please pardon my skepticism of the sentiment that "everyone can learn to code".
  
  
• It implies that there's a thin, easily permeable membrane between learning to program and getting paid to program professionally. Just look at these new programmers who got offered jobs at an average salary of $79k/year after attending a mere two and a half month bootcamp! Maybe you too can teach yourself Perl in 24 hours! While I love that programming is an egalitarian field where degrees and certifications are irrelevant in the face of experience, you still gotta put in your ten thousand hours like the rest of us.

I suppose I can support learning a tiny bit about programming just so you can recognize what code is, and when code might be an appropriate way to approach a problem you have. But I can also recognize plumbing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work. Being able to get around on the Internet is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into code.

Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

• Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
• Communicate effectively with other human beings.

These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.

09:38:38 AM, Tuesday 15 May 2012 from Coding Horror

Coded Smorgasbord: FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL and More

By Alex Papadimoulis

"We're had been using a manufacturer's web service, but started getting errors all of a sudden," wrote Peter Lindgren. "Something has really, really failed."

<StatusCode>InternalServerError</StatusCode>
<StatusDescription>Internal Server Error</StatusDescription>
<WebHeaders>
  <X-Backside-Transport>FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL,FAIL FAIL</X-Backside-Transport>
</WebHeaders>

"Fortunately, a short time later, it started working again with this message."

<StatusCode>OK</StatusCode>
<StatusDescription>OK</StatusDescription>
<WebHeaders>
  <X-Backside-Transport>OK OK,OK OK,OK OK</X-Backside-Transport>
</WebHeaders>

"I'm not sure of the purpose of this," Jasmine wrote via the Submit to The Daily WTF visual studio extension, "maybe the stack was just too small or something?"

Public Function Save() As Boolean
    Try
        SaveMeeting()
    Catch ex As Exception
        Throw ex
    End Try
End Function

 

"I was asked to modify some simple web page used to generate an online store," Mihai Todor wrote, "here's a Javascript function that I found in it, which is used to validate the required fields."

function checkdata() {
    dataok = true;
    t1 = document.forms.signup.firstName.value;
    t2 = document.forms.signup.lastName.value;
    t3 = document.forms.signup.userName.value;
    t4 = document.forms.signup.password.value;
    t5 = document.forms.signup.passwordConfirm.value;
    t6 = document.forms.signup.email.value;
    t7 = document.forms.signup.url.value;
    t8 = document.forms.signup.adminFrontname.value;
    t9 = document.forms.signup.locale.options.selectedIndex;
    t10 = document.forms.signup.currency.options.selectedIndex;
    t11 = document.forms.signup.timezone.options.selectedIndex;
    t12 = document.forms.signup.packetType.options.selectedIndex;
    t13 = document.forms.signup.captcha_code.value;
    if(t1 == '' || t2 == '' || t3 == '' || t4 == '' || t5 == '' || t6 == '' || t7 == '' || t8 == ''){
        alert("Please fill-up all the fields");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t4 != t5){
        alert("Please enter the password again");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t9 == 0){
        alert("Please select a locale");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t10 == 0){
        alert("Please select a currency");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t11 == 0){
        alert("Please select a time zone");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t12 == 0){
        alert("Please select a packet type");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    if(t13 == ''){
        alert("Please fill-up the code field");
        dataok = false; return(dataok);}
    return(dataok);
}

 

"I've seen these types of constants on The Daily WTF before and always questioned if they were real," wrote Sterge, "and then I saw these."

public static final String SLASH = "/";
public static final String PERCENT = "%";

 

"I'm on a team that maintains a pretty 'serious' banking application," Giga B wrote, "it's pretty serious about the number of parameters in functions."

public void WriteStep1Data(int LoanRequestID,
                           string InsertDate,
                           string OperatorID,
                           string FirstName,
                           string LastName,
                           string BirthDay,
                           int DocuemntTypeID,
                           int MaritialStatusID,
                           string DocumentIssueDate,
                           string DocumentExpireDate,
                           string DocumentIssuer,
                           string DocumentNo,
                           string PersonalNo,
                           int UniversityDegreeID,
                           string Address,
                           string Address2,
                           int RealAddressLivingPeriod,
                           int ChildrenCount,
                           int FamilyMembersCount,
                           decimal MonthlyIncome,
                           decimal MonthlyFamilyExpanses,
                           string HomePhoneNumber,
                           string MobilePhoneNumber,
                           string WorkPhoneNumber,
                           string EmailAddress,
                           string JobOrganizationName,
                           string JobOrganizationAddress,
                           string JobOrganizationActivity,
                           string JobOrganizationPhoneNumber,
                           string JobPosition,
                           string JobWorkingYears,
                           string JobBossName,
                           string JobBossPhoneNumber,
                           byte ClientSex,
                           decimal FinTotalProductsAmount,
                           decimal FinCommissionAmount,
                           int FinLoanPeriod,
                           decimal FinFirstPaymentAmount,
                           decimal FinLoanAmount,
                           decimal FinMonthlyPaymentAmount,
                           string GuarantorName,
                           string GuarantorLastName,
                           string GuarantorBirthDate,
                           string GuarantorPersonalNo,
                           int? GuarantorDocType,
                           string GuarantorDocumentNo,
                           string GuarantorDocIssuer,
                           string GuarantorDocIssueDate,
                           string GuarantorDocExpireDate,
                           string GuarantorTelHome,
                           string GuarantorTelMobile,
                           string GuarantorAddress,
                           string GuarantorAddressReal,
                           string GuarantorJobName,
                           decimal GuarantorIncome,
                           byte? GuarantorSex,
                           decimal HistoryPlaticAnnualTurnOver,
                           string HistoryDescription,
                           string MarketingQ1,
                           string MarketingQ2,
                           int StatusID,
                           string DateViewed,
                           string DateAnswered,
                           string BackOfficeUserID,
                           string RepaymentDate,
                           string ShopID,
                           string CalculationGroupID,
                           decimal RegFeeAmount,
                           int clientDeptNo,
                           int guarantorDeptNo,
                           int guarantorMaritialStatusID,
                           string AccountCodeWord,
                           string ClientFatherName,
                           string ClientBirthPlace,
                           string ClientCityAttendingToReg,
                           string GuarantorFatherName,
                           string GuarantorBirthPlace,
                           string GuarantorCityAttendingToReg,
                           string GuarantorJobActivity,
                           string GuarantorJobPosition,
                           string GuarantorJobContactPhone,
                           string GuarantorJobCodeWord,
                           string GuarantorEmailAddress
    )
{
   ... snip a few hundred lines ...
}

 

"I learned a neat trick from our enterprise framework," Eli noted, "if you want to convert an int to a double, just do this!"

double d = Double.valueOf(new Integer(i).toString()).doubleValue();

 

"I had to look over some C# code written by a colleague of mine," notes John D, "the following lines represent just the tip of the iceberg of the pain that I had to go through while understanding the code."

bool true1 =true;
bool true12 = true;
.... snip ....
true1 = false;
true1 = false;

 

"I found this pattern in source code I have been working on," wrote Nas Nubian, "this is how some developer decided to open a new window for when users click on a links."

<a href="/the/path/to/the/url" 
  onclick="window.open(this.getAttribute('href'),'_blank');return false;">
  link text
</a>

 

"So," wonders Johnny B, "I guess GUID from our production db servers are better than local GUID?"

Function GetNewGuid()
    Dim cnGuid, rsGuid
    
    Set cnGuid = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
    Set rsGuid = CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")

    cnGuid.Open = _
        "Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;" + 
        "Data Source=<production server>; " + 
        "Initial Catalog=<production DB> " +
        "user id = '********';" + 
        "password='*********'""

    rsGuid.Open "SELECT newid() as Guid", cnGuid

    If Not rsGuid.EOF Then
        GetNewGuid = rsGuid("Guid").Value
    End If
End Function

 

"The comment says it all," wrote Michael.

/**
 * Defines the value for none. Default is "none".
 */
public static String NONE = "none";

 

"This is snippet of code I found in a large program I maintain," wrote Brian. "The original developers have long since moved on. Funnily enough, this particular code was properly mutexed, but I guess the paranoid programmer doesn't trust mutexes. I only wish the original developers were so 'paranoid' when it came to avoiding things like buffer overflows, memory leaks, and sql injection."

if ( resData.state() == RESOURCE_STATE_ACTIVE )
{
    elapsedTime.setBase( resData.startTime() );
    if ( elapsedTime.diff() >= maxDuration )
    {
        // Do one more validity check, the paranoid programmer knows
        // the state may have changed since the last check.
        if ( resData.state() == RESOURCE_STATE_ACTIVE )
        {
            resourceActiveTooLong( resData );
        }
    }
}

 

01:00:00 PM, Monday 14 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Error'd: Squared Interior Design

By Alex Papadimoulis

"I found this ad for an interior design company," wrote Wouter, "they probably do a lot of rectangular designs."

"How am I supposed to troubleshoot this?" wonders Jeff Mitchell.

"I'm not really sure what happened here, but I had to use Chrome's developer tools to hack my birthdate into the form so I could submit it," writes Dave.

"I need this form to renew my immigration documents," writes Jack Nathan, "what do i do now?!?"

"I found this ad for an interior design company," wrote Wouter, "they probably do a lot of rectangular designs."

"My mother's middle name has 3 characters." wrote Julie Crowner. "I only have a middle initial. Fortunately, we're the only ones impacted by this. Well, except Ada. And Aja. And Ala, Ali, Ama, Ami, Amy, Ana, Ann, Ara, Ava, Bea, Bee, Bev, Deb, Dee, Dot, Eda, Ela, Ema, Ena, Era, Eva, Eve, Exa, Fae, Fay, Flo, Gay, Gia, Ica, Icy, Ida, Ila, Ilo, Ima, Imo, Ina, Ira, Isa, Iva, Ivy, Iza, Jan, Joe, Joi, Joy, Kai, Kay, Kia, Kim, Kya, Lea, Lee, Leo, Lia, Liz, Lou, Lue, Luz, Lyn, Mae, Mai, May, Meg, Mia, Mya, Nan, Nia, Nya, Oda, Ola, Oma, Ona, Ora, Osa, Ota, Ova, Pam, Pat, Rae, Ray, Roy, Sky, Sue, Tai, Tea, Tia, Tom, Ula, Una, Ura, Val, Zoa, Zoe, Abb, Abe, Ace, Acy, Ada, Add, Alf, Ali, Amy, Ann, Ari, Art, Asa, Bee, Ben, Bob, Bud, Cal, Cam, Cap, Cas, Che, Con, Coy, Dan, Dax, Dee, Del, Doc, Don, Dow, Ean, Ebb, Edd, Edw, Eli, Ell, Ely, Eva, Fay, Fed, Foy, Gay, Gee, Geo, Gil, Gus, Guy, Hal, Ham, Hoy, Huy, Ian, Ida, Ike, Ira, Irl, Iva, Ivy, Jan, Jax, Jay, Jeb, Jed, Jep, Jim, Job, Joe, Jon, Joy, Kai, Kay, Kem, Ken, Kim, Kip, Kit, Lea, Lee, Lem, Len, Leo, Les, Lew, Lex, Lim, Lon, Lou, Loy, Luc, Lue, Lum, Lyn, Mac, Mae, Mal, Mat, Max, May, Mel, Moe, Nat, Ned, Nim, Noe, Obe, Oda, Ola, Ole, Ora, Ott, Ova, Pat, Rae, Ras, Ray, Red, Rex, Rey, Rob, Rod, Roe, Ron, Roy, Sal, Sam, Sid, Sie, Sim, Sol, Son, Tab, Tad, Taj, Tal, Ted, Tex, Tim, Tod, Tom, Toy, Tre, Tye, Val, Van, Vic, Von, Wes, Yee, Zeb, and Zed." What will people with all these middle names do?

"My company recently partnered with a developer who had a custom applicatio written in Microsoft Access that we are now forced to train/support/install," writes Ben Reisner. "The following error message is just one of many that has an interesting definition of Equal."

Kira Russell snapped this when it was a bit cold in North Wales.

"I'm still getting used to my new keyboard, and occasionally hit the '\' and ENTER keys at the same time," writes Michael Dowden. "I was pretty sure I had done this one morning when I logged in to Windows for the first time, however I got in okay and figured all was well...until I got back from a morning meeting, having locked my workstation. I was greeted with the usual login prompt (screenshot attached), but with '\' appended to my username. I was forced to hard boot my machine since Windows doesn't allow you to edit your username on the locked-login screen."

01:00:00 PM, Friday 11 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

CodeSOD: Epoch Billing System

By Mark Bowytz

Everybody in the IT department was quite happy -- even a little surprised -- with how well the outsourced project to replace the legacy billing system was progressing.

Well, actually, the project managers weren't all that surprised. Over the past four months, they'd pumped out reams of specs and design documents, often boasting that their level of planning hadn't been seen since the Apollo missions. So, for them, the fact that everything was turning out as designed spoke volumes about the success of their planning and processes.

New Billing Code

Jeff and the other developers who were stuck supporting the existing billing system until the big cutover (still a few months away) wanted to see what this super system looked like under the hood. After all, because they were expected to support the new system once it came online, shouldn't they at least have an understanding of how the underlying code worked?

The developers made their case for months before the project managers gave up on their "it's not done yet" rhetoric and reluctantly handed over a few modules that they'd deemed bug-free.

When Jeff got his hands on the code, one line in particular caught his eye:

int strElapsedDays = ( 
 convertDate(intDay1, intMonth1, intYr1) - 
 convertDate(intDay2, intMonth2, intYr2)) / DAY;

Unusual Process

Knowing that C# had built-in functions to easily determine the span of days between two dates, Jeff thought the approach was a little strange. Once he tracked down convertDate, things got even weirder:

public const int DAY = 86400;
public const int WEEK = 604800;
public const int YEAR = 31449600;
        
private static int convertDate(int day, int month, int year)
{
 
  int[] months = new int[] 
     { 0,31,59,90,120,151, 
       181,212,243,273,304,334 };

  return ( ((year - 1970) * DAY * 365) + 
           (((year - 1970)/4) * DAY) + 
           (months[month - 1] * DAY) + ((day-1) * DAY) );
}

Caught off guard, Jeff just stared at the function for a good 10 minutes, trying to figure it out. When he did, it hit him like a ton of bricks. Rather than using the built-in C# date functions, the developer had opted to convert a date into its Unix Epoch -- the number of seconds elapsed since Jan. 1, 1970 -- and work from there.

Jeff had to admit, the solution was a little bit genius. Unfortunately, it wasn't a fit because the new system was running on a Windows server. So Jeff did his duty and raised the matter with the project management team so it could be added to the bug-fix queue for the offshore team.

Weeks later, Jeff followed up with one of the members of the project management team, just out of curiosity, to see if the fix had been made. To his surprise, it hadn't been addressed -- nor would it be any time soon. Apparently the "bug" was downgraded to a feature request because -- in the eyes of the project managers -- if an application functioned as it was designed, there wasn't a need to go back in and change it.

Epoch Billing System was originally published in the March 2011 edition of Visual Studio Magazine. VSM is the leading site for enterprise .NET developers, and offers a free magazine subscription for influential readers.

01:00:00 PM, Thursday 10 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

The Online Ordering System

By Alex Papadimoulis

Local businesses aren't exactly known for their web savviness or IT prowess. And for the most part, that's just fine. You'd be better off judging a prospective attorney on the suit he wears rather than the website he maintains, as that at least has some tangential relationship to practicing law. But usually, you'd just go with whomever a trusted colleague recommended, anyway.

For restaurants however, this is quickly changing. With smartphones becoming the norm, many people will use the web to discover the restaurants around them, see what menus they have, and get a general vibe for the place. And as such, local restaurants do become judged by their web savviness – or at least, their ability to maintain a halfway-decent website.

Ludovico Gardenghi found himself in this exact position when looking for a local eatery that offered take-out. He stumbled upon the website of a nearby place that, despite having a hideously orange, flash-only website, looked like it'd be a good place to get dinner. And as luck would have it, there was even big, orange button that shouted ORDER ONLINE NOW!!!!!

Clicking on that button led to a rather curious page that described the process for placing an order. The exact words on the page were in a different language, and it translated to something like this:

Order Online Today!
Already familiar with ordering online? Then just head to the online ordering system now. Otherwise, just follow these few simple steps.

Ordering online is really easy:

1. After reading these instructions, click on the orange, "online ordering system" button below to sign-on to the system
2. When you click on that link, you will be asked to open a connection to a remote server. Click the "accept" button to immediately sign-on, or click the "save" button to create a shortcut on your computer. With a shortcut, you'll then be able to directly access the online ordering system, even without opening our web site just by clicking on the icon (extension .rdp).
3. Once you accept the connection, a grey screen will appear, asking you for a password. Do not enter a password here; just click the OK button to continue.
4. Wait a few moments for the online ordering system to load.
5. If you've already registered, just you can enter your user ID and password, otherwise click on "Register" button and fill out the registration form.

online ordering system

Clicking on the hideously orange "online ordering system" button downloaded an .rdp file:

    screen mode id:i:2
    autoreconnection enabled:i:1
    username:s:beneeats
    domain:s:
    alternate shell:s:
    shell working directory:s:
    disable wallpaper:i:1
    disable full window drag:i:0
    disable menu anims:i:0
    disable themes:i:0
    disable cursor setting:i:0
    bitmapcachepersistenable:i:1

And opening that .rdp file of course opened a connection to their server using Remote Desktop Connection.

"I didn't try to log in as Administrator," wrote Ludovico, "mostly out of pity." Clicking the OK button did exactly what it advertised:

"I couldn't help myself and pressed Ctrl-Alt-End. This brought up Task Manager, allowing me to run anything I'd want (cmd.exe and explorer.exe were already in the history), or change the password, shut down the machine, etc.

Ludovico adds, "I did not dare to check if I could run things as other users, but I could see other users logged in ('cash desk', 'administration'), presumably so that the complete database of users, orders, and payments could be easily accessed from home. I visit this website from time to time and it has surprisingly survived over the past few years, though I would really love to know the story which led to this innovative online ordering system being created in the first place."

And that story, dear readers, I'll leave as an exercise of your imagination. Feel free to share your version of the story in the comments.

02:30:00 PM, Tuesday 08 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

CodeSOD: The Bit Setter

By Alex Papadimoulis

"Bit manipulation can be tricky," writes Nathan, "especially if you have no familiarity with bitwise operators or logic."

"At least, that's what my smarter-than-built-in-language-features colleague must have thought when he authored setBit. Fortunately, his code was the only one that utilized this function, as it doesn't quite work as advertised."

/*
 *    setBit($val, $bit, $switch)
 *
 *    This will switch all the bits specified by $bit to on or 
 *    off in $val depending on $switch. So, if $val = 8, and 
 *    $bit = 4, $switch is true, it will turn on the 4 bit, 
 *    and $val will end up being 12; Now, if $val = 12, and $bit 
 *    is 5, if $switch is true, $val will be 13, if false $val 
 *    will be 8. So, all the bits of $bit is turned on or off
 *
 */
function setBit($val, $bit, $switch = true) {
    $val = (int) $val;
    $bit = (int) $bit;

    // set some strings that humans would consider false
    // but would be converted to true if converted by PHP
    if (is_string($switch)) {
        switch ($switch) {
            case 'false' :
            case 'down' :
            case 'off' :
            case 'not' :
            case '0' :
            case '' :
                $switch = false;
                break;

            default :
                $switch = true;
                break;
        }
    }

    if ($switch) { // we are turning the bits on
        $newval = $val | $bit; // val OR bit
    }
    else { // we are turning the bits off
        $newval = $val & ( ~ $bit); // val AND ( NOT bit)
    }

    return $newval;
}

01:00:00 PM, Monday 07 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count.

We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.)

I do not miss the days when the cats would come and sit on our heads at 5 AM, wanting their breakfast.

Me neither. I haven't stopped loving our fuzzy buddies, but this was also before we had onetwothree children. We don't have a lot of time for random cat hijinks these days. Anyway, once we set up the automated feeders in 2007, it was a huge relief to outsource pet food obsessions to machines. They reliably delivered a timed feeding at 8am and 8pm like clockwork for the last five years. No issues whatsoever, other than changing the three D batteries about once a year, filling the hopper with kibble about once a month, and an occasional cleaning.

Although they worked, there were still many details of the automated feeders' design that were downright terrible. I put up with these problems because I was so happy to have automatic feeders that worked at all. So when I noticed that the 2012 version of these feeders appeared to be considerably updated, I went ahead and upgraded immediately on faith alone. After all, it had been nearly five years! Surely the company had improved their product a bit since then … right? Well, a man can dream, can't he?

When I ordered the new feeders, I assumed they would be a little better than what I had before.

The two feeders don't look so radically different, do they? But pay attention to the details.

• The food bowl is removable. It drove me crazy that the food bowl in the old version was permanently attached, and tough to clean as a result.
• The food bowl has rounded interior edges. As if cleaning the non-removable bowl of our old version wasn't annoying enough, it also had sharp interior edges, which tended to accrete a bunch of powdered food gunk in there over time. Very difficult to clean properly.
• The programming buttons are large and easy to press. In the old version, the buttons were small watch-style soft rubber buttons that protruded from the surface. The tactile feedback was terrible, and they were easy to mis-press because of their size and mushiness.
• The programming buttons are directly accessible on the face of the device. For no discernable reason whatsoever, the programming buttons in the old version were under a little plastic clear protective "sneeze guard" flap, which you had to pinch up and unlock with your thumb before you could do any programming at all. I guess the theory was that a pet could somehow accidentally brush against the buttons and do … something … but that seems incredibly unlikely. But most of all, unnecessary.
• The programming is easier. We never changed the actual feed schedule, but just changing the time for daylight savings was so incredibly awkward and contorted we had to summarize the steps from the manual on a separate piece of paper as a "cheat sheet". The new version, in contrast, makes changing the time almost as simple as it should be. Almost.
• There is an outflow cover flap. By far the number one physical flaw of the old feeder: the feed slot invites curious paws, and makes it all too easy to fish out kibble on demand. You can see in my original photo that we had to mod the feed slot to tape (and eventually bolt) a wire soap dish cover over it so the cats wouldn't be able to manual feed. The new feeder has a perfectly aligned outflow flap that I couldn't even dislodge with my finger. And it works; even our curious-est cat wasn't able to get past it.
• The top cover rotates to lock. On the old feeder, the top cover to the clear kibble storage was a simple friction fit; dislodging it wasn't difficult, and the cats did manage to do this early on with some experimentation. On the new feeder, the cover is slotted, and rotates to lock against the kibble storage securely. This is the same way the kibble feeder body locks on the base (on both old and new feeders), so it's logical to use this same "rotate to lock into or out of position" design in both places.
• The feed hopper is funnel shaped. The old feed hopper was a simple cylinder, and holds less in the same space as a result. When I transferred the feed over from the old full models (we had literally just filled them the day before) to the updated ones, I was able to add about 15-20 percent more kibble despite the device being roughly the same size in terms of floor space.
• The base is flared. Stability is critical; depending how adventurous your cats are, they may physically attack the feeders and try to push them over, or hit them hard enough to trigger a trickle of food dispensing. A flared base isn't the final solution, but it's a big step in the right direction. It's a heck of a lot tougher to knock over a feeder with a bigger "foot" on the ground.
• It's off-white. The old feeder, like the Ford Model T, was available in any color customers wanted, so long as it was black. Which meant it did a great job of not blending in with almost any decor, and also showed off its dust collection like a champ. Thank goodness the new model comes in "linen".

These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details. Did the old version feed our cats reliably? Yes, it did. But it was also a pain to clean and maintain, a sort of pain that I endured weekly, for reasons that made no sense to me other than arbitrarily poor design choices. But when I bought the new version of the automated feeder, I was shocked to discover that nearly every single problem I had with the previous generation was addressed. I felt as if the Petmate Corporation™ was actually listening to all the feedback from the people who used their product, and actively refined the product to address our complaints and suggestions.

My point, and I do have one, is that details matter. Details matter, in fact, a hell of a lot. Whether in automatic cat feeders, or software. As my friend Wil Shipley once said:

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.

This is still one of my favorite quotes about software. It's something we internalized heavily when building Stack Overflow. Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is. I hope for your sake they aren't your competitor.

The details are hard. Everyone screws up the details at first, just like Petmate did with the first version of this automatic feeder. And it's OK to screw up the details initially, provided …

• you're getting the primary function more or less right.
• you're listening to feedback from the people who use your product, and actively refining the details of your product based on their feedback every day.

We were maniacal about listening to feedback from avid Stack Overflow users from the earliest days of Stack Overflow in August 2008. Did you know that we didn't even have comments in the first version of Stack Overflow? But it was obvious, based on user feedback and observed usage, that we desperately needed them. There are now, at the time I am writing this, 1,569 completed feature requests; that's more than one per day on average.

Imagine that. Someone who cares about the details just as much as you do.

08:41:22 AM, Monday 07 May 2012 from Coding Horror

Sponsor Appreciation, nullnull, and More Error'd

By Alex Papadimoulis

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And now back to our regularly scheduled program...

"I don't know what they were thinking putting this ad up," writes Christian Riesen, "but I think I can hold my enthusiasm for that gigantic jackpot easy."

"I spotted this while upgrading the Samsung KIES software on Windows," writes Scott Coonce, "I wasn't sure if I should accept the empty license agreement or not."

"I got this error when trying to upgrade PostgreSQL," writes David, "they must really like cloud computing."

"I was rushing to catch my train at St. Pancras the other day," notes D Bee, "but it appears there was plenty of time before it departed."

"I'd hate to be selfish and not share null with the other readers of the Daily WTF," wrote Dwayne, "I hope you find the same benefits of null that I have."

"The newspaper didn't really contain any interesting news," writes Wout van Poppel "but at least it has interesting photo captions which serve to draw attention quite well."

"Free drink every 0 stars?" writes Andrew ,"wow, now I really want to get to be a 'Gold' members!"

03:00:00 PM, Friday 04 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Buying Happiness

Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point.

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. […] When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000.

For reference, the federal poverty level for a family of four is currently $23,050. Once you reach a little over 3 times the poverty level in income, you've achieved peak happiness, as least far as money alone can reasonably get you.

This is something I've seen echoed in a number of studies. Once you have "enough" money to satisfy the basic items at the foot of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid – that is, you no longer have to worry about food, shelter, security, and perhaps having a bit of extra discretionary money for the unknown – stacking even more money up doesn't do much, if anything, to help you scale the top of the pyramid.

But even if you're fortunate enough to have a good income, how you spend your money has a strong influence on how happy – or unhappy – it will make you. And, again, there's science behind this. The relevant research is summarized in If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right (pdf).

Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness — about what brings it and what sustains it — and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.

You may also recognize some of the authors on this paper, in particular Dan Gilbert, who also wrote the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness that touched on many of the same themes.

What is, then, the science of happiness? I'll summarize the basic eight points as best I can, but read the actual paper (pdf) to obtain the citations and details on the underlying studies underpinning each of these principles.

1. Buy experiences instead of things

Things get old. Things become ordinary. Things stay the same. Things wear out. Things are difficult to share. But experiences are totally unique; they shine like diamonds in your memory, often more brightly every year, and they can be shared forever. Whenever possible, spend money on experiences such as taking your family to Disney World, rather than things like a new television.

2. Help others instead of yourself

Human beings are intensely social animals. Anything we can do with money to create deeper connections with other human beings tends to tighten our social connections and reinforce positive feelings about ourselves and others. Imagine ways you can spend some part of your money to help others – even in a very small way – and integrate that into your regular spending habits.

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones

Because we adapt so readily to change, the most effective use of your money is to bring frequent change, not just "big bang" changes that you will quickly grow acclimated to. Break up large purchases, when possible, into smaller ones over time so that you can savor the entire experience. When it comes to happiness, frequency is more important than intensity. Embrace the idea that lots of small, pleasurable purchases are actually more effective than a single giant one.

4. Buy less insurance

Humans adapt readily to both positive and negative change. Extended warranties and insurance prey on your impulse for loss aversion, but because we are so adaptable, people experience far less regret than they anticipate when their purchases don't work out. Furthermore, having the easy "out" of insurance or a generous return policy can paradoxically lead to even more angst and unhappiness because people deprived themselves of the emotional benefit of full commitment. Thus, avoid buying insurance, and don't seek out generous return policies.

5. Pay now and consume later

Immediate gratification can lead you to make purchases you can't afford, or may not even truly want. Impulse buying also deprives you of the distance necessary to make reasoned decisions. It eliminates any sense of anticipation, which is a strong source of happiness. For maximum happiness, savor (maybe even prolong!) the uncertainty of deciding whether to buy, what to buy, and the time waiting for the object of your desire to arrive.

6. Think about what you're not thinking about

We tend to gloss over details when considering future purchases, but research shows that our happiness (or unhappiness) largely lies in exactly those tiny details we aren't thinking about. Before making a major purchase, consider the mechanics and logistics of owning this thing, and where your actual time will be spent once you own it. Try to imagine a typical day in your life, in some detail, hour by hour: how will it be affected by this purchase?

7. Beware of comparison shopping

Comparison shopping focuses us on attributes of products that arbitrarily distinguish one product from another, but have nothing to do with how much we'll enjoy the purchase. They emphasize characteristics we care about while shopping, but not necessarily what we'll care about when actually using or consuming what we just bought. In other words, getting a great deal on cheap chocolate for $2 may not matter if it's not pleasurable to eat. Don't get tricked into comparing for the sake of comparison; try to weight only those criteria that actually matter to your enjoyment or the experience.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head

Don't overestimate your ability to independently predict how much you'll enjoy something. We are, scientifically speaking, very bad at this. But if something reliably makes others happy, it's likely to make you happy, too. Weight other people's opinions and user reviews heavily in your purchasing decisions.

Happiness is a lot harder to come by than money. So when you do spend money, keep these eight lessons in mind to maximize whatever happiness it can buy for you. And remember: it's science!

10:00:39 PM, Thursday 03 May 2012 from Coding Horror

CodeSOD: Mybad

By Alex Papadimoulis

"At my company," writes Ryan L, "we have a 'certain' developer who has been here a while but is very reluctant to learn or improve. In fact, he actively works against the rest of us when we want to implement pesky things like proper version control, design patterns, or architecture to our code behind having 3000-line code-behind files."

Ryan continues, "I was exploring our SVN logs and came across something checked in by this "engineer". It was a single file, with a commit message of 'Mybad'. The file turned out to be a config file. Here was the previous version checked in:

<app key="ContactEmailAddress" value="jdoe@initrode.com"/>

"and here was the modified value:"

<app key="sContactEmailAddress" value="jdoe@initrode.com"/>

"Yes," Ryan added, "he did a commit with no indication of what the commit was for, simply to add a Hungarian Notation prefix to a configuration file setting, in case we weren't sure that 'ContactEmailAddress' was a string."

12:00:00 AM, Thursday 03 May 2012 from The Daily WTF

Trust Me, I'm Lying

We reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It's even encoded into Boy Scout Law. It's what adults do, isn't it? But do we? Isn't telling the truth too much and too often a bad life strategy – perhaps even dangerous? Is telling children to always tell the truth even itself the whole truth?

One of the most thought provoking articles on the topic, and one I keep returning to, year after year, is I Think You're Fat. It's about the Radical Honesty movement, which proposes that adults follow their own advice and always tell the truth. No matter what.

The [Radical Honesty] movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough – a world without fibs – but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.

And yet … maybe there's something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren't big lies. They aren't lies like "I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator." Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. "Yes, let's definitely get together soon." "I'd love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu." "No, we can't buy a toy today – the toy store is closed." It's bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.

The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a great writer who has made something of a cottage industry of treating himself like a guinea pig, such as attempting to become the smartest man in the world, spend a year living exactly like the Bible tells us to, and to become the fittest person on Earth. Based on the strength of this article, I bought two of his books; experiments like Radical Honesty are right up his alley.

Radical honesty itself isn't exactly a new concept. It's been parodied in any number of screwball Hollywood comedies such as Liar, Liar (1997) and The Invention of Lying (2009). But there's a big difference between milking this concept for laughs and exploring it as an actual lifestyle among real human beings. Among the ideas raised in the article, which you should go read now, are:

• Telling someone that something they created is terrible: is that cruelty, because they have no talent, or is it compassion, so they can know they need to improve it?
• Does a thought in your head that you never express to anyone represent your truth? Should you share it? This is particularly tricky for men, who think about sex twice as much as women.
• How much mental energy do you expend listening to a conversation trying to determine how much of what the other person is saying is untrue? Wouldn't it be less fatiguing if everything they said was, by definition, the truth? And when you're talking, always telling the truth means you never have to decide just how much truth to tell, how to hedge, massage, and spin the truth to make it palatable.
• In a hypothetical future when every action we take is public and broadcast to the world, is that exposing the real truth of our lives? Should we become more honest today to ready ourselves for this inevitable future?
• Always telling the truth can be thrilling, a form of risk taking, as you intentionally violate taboos around politeness that exist solely for the sake of avoiding conflict.
• Total honesty can lead to new breakthroughs in communication, where politeness prevented you from ever reaching the root, underlying causes of discontent or unhappiness.
• Honesty is more efficient. Rather than spending a lot of time sending messages back and forth artfully dancing around the truth, go directly there.
• If people see you are willing to be honest with them, they tend to return the favor, leading to a more useful relationship.

What we often don't acknowledge is that the truth is kind of scary. That's why we have a hard time being honest with ourselves, much less those around us. Reading through all these ambiguous situations that A.J. put himself through, you start to wonder if you understand what truth is, or what it means to decide that something is "true". After summarizing the article in bullet form, I'm surprised there are so many points in favor of honesty, maybe even radical honesty.

But uncompromisingly committing to the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has a darker side.

My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.

"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.

"Well...is there a payoff?"

"F**k you."

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"

Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."

Rather than embrace the truth, as Radical Honesty would have us do, Adrian Tan advises us to be wary of the truth.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

I think he's right. But Radical Honesty isn't altogether wrong, either. Let me be clear: Radical Honesty, as a lifestyle, is ridiculous and insane. Advocating telling the truth 100% of the time, no matter what, is harmful extremism. But it's also wonderfully seductive as a concept, because it illustrates how needlessly afraid most of us are of truth – even truths that could potentially help us. Radical Honesty teaches us to be more brave. That is, when it's not destroying our lives and the lives of everyone around us.

Ask yourself: what is the purpose of this truth? What effect will sharing this truth have on the other person, on yourself, on the world? What change will come about, positive or negative, from choosing to voice a particular truth at a particular time?

I believe that the true lesson of Radical Honesty is that truth, real truth, is honesty with a purpose. Ideally a noble purpose, but any purpose at all other than "because I could" will suffice. By all means, be brave; embrace the truth. But if your honesty has no purpose, if you can't imagine any positive outcome from this honesty, I suggest you're better off keeping it to yourself.

Or even lying.

01:48:43 AM, Wednesday 02 May 2012 from Coding Horror

CodeSOD: Self Documenting

By Alex Papadimoulis

"A little while back, someone introduced the concept of 'self-documenting' code to our team," writes Ryan L. "It was certainly a step forward, but it's somehow taken us two steps backwards. Consider, for example, the following code from an MVC controller."

if (TheFormIsInvalid()) return View("Index", form);

... snip ...

private bool TheFormIsInvalid()
{
    return ModelState.IsValid == false;
}

"Is it really that much easier to follow than if (!ModelState.IsValid)? I'll set that question aside for the moment to instead present some other code from the same class that handles online registrations for events:

public bool IsEligibleToSeeThisEvent(EventRegistrationInformation eventRegistrationInformation)
{
  if (ThisEventDoesNotRestrictRegistrantsBasedUponActivityType(eventRegistrationInformation))
      return TrueBecauseThisEventDoesNotRegistrictBasedUponActivityType();

  var activityTypes = GetTheActivityTypesAttachedToThisEvent(eventRegistrationInformation);

  if (NoActivityTypesAreAttachedToThisEvent(activityTypes))
      return TrueBecauseThereAreNoActivityTypesToFilterOnThisEvent();

  if (TheUserIsNotLoggedIn(eventRegistrationInformation))
      return FalseBecauseNoActivityTypesAreAvailableForUsersWhoAreNotLoggedIn();

  return ThereIsAtLeastOneSharedActivityTypeBetweenTheEventAndCurrentUser(
           eventRegistrationInformation, 
		   activityTypes);
}

private static bool TrueBecauseThisEventDoesNotRegistrictBasedUponActivityType()
{
  return true;
}

 private bool ThisEventDoesNotRestrictRegistrantsBasedUponActivityType(
    EventRegistrationInformation eventRegistrationInformation)
{
  return eventActivityTypeFilterRetriever
      .DoesThisEventHaveARestrictionBasedOnActivityTypes(
          eventRegistrationInformation.EventId) == false;
}

private bool ThereIsAtLeastOneSharedActivityTypeBetweenTheEventAndCurrentUser(
    EventRegistrationInformation eventRegistrationInformation, 
	IEnumerable<ActivityType> activityTypes)
{
  var currentActivities = registrantActivityRetriever
    .GetRegistrantActivityProductCode(eventRegistrationInformation.AccountId);

  return activityTypes.Any(x => currentActivities.Any(y => y.Id == x.Id));
}

private static bool FalseBecauseNoActivityTypesAreAvailableForUsersWhoAreNotLoggedIn()
{
  return false;
}

private static bool TheUserIsNotLoggedIn(EventRegistrationInformation eventRegistrationInformation)
{
  return eventRegistrationInformation.IsLoggedIn == false;
}

private static bool TrueBecauseThereAreNoActivityTypesToFilterOnThisEvent()
{
  return true;
}

private static bool NoActivityTypesAreAttachedToThisEvent(IEnumerable<ActivityType> activityTypes)
{
  return activityTypes.Any() == false;
}

private IEnumerable<ActivityType> GetTheActivityTypesAttachedToThisEvent(
    EventRegistrationInformation eventRegistrationInformation)
{
  return eventActivityTypeFilterRetriever.GetAll(eventRegistrationInformation.EventId);
}

03:15:00 PM, Monday 30 April 2012 from The Daily WTF