Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

Post by astockwell » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

davb wrote: post #28

astockwell wrote: post #3

Right after WinXP came out, I was a sys/win admin at a manufacturing co. Their ERP system was an old VB app that sat on a share drive and everyone opened the same .exe from their respective workstations. The app required a ton of scheduled database and ERP tasks (it used a legacy flat-file db), so the vendor wrapped them all up in a secondary executable that was effectively a non-headless (headful?) daemon (this was…

Oh wow. Yeah, that sort of thing seems to have been so common in ERP software. My first professional programming job was working on a bespoke ERP and industrial process control suite (written in PowerBuilder). The program had a huge number of sub programs (dynamically loaded modules, each an MDI window accessed using a “program name”, something like a SAP transaction code). We had a number of background services that…

Post by sbierwagen » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

r3vrse wrote: post #51

macromaniac wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a posh script like this when i dont want the computer to lock. $ws = New-Object -COM wscript.shell; while($true){ $ws.SendKeys("j"); Sleep 60;} Ive used it for demos that way the computer doesnt lock before the demo starts, its pretty short and easy to remember. Also on windows if you spam SendKeys("{Left}") everything you type is backwards and when you hit the windows key it freezes the computer in an interest…

Try this: http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/ Use it all the time when working from home/moving around and I don’t want my laptop to lock every 15.

Post by ollin » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:34 AM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #12

Not sure if this is still the case, but back when I was at Apple the program that triggered when you pressed a button on an Apple remote pointed at a Macintosh was just a giant AppleScript file that, at the top level, was a giant `if...else if...` statement to try and determine which application had the foreground so that the appropriate action (e.g. next track for iTunes, next slide for Keynote, next chapter marker…

Post by r00fus » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:17 AM UTC

mattzito wrote: post #19

In my startup days, we were working on a proof of concept with a really big bank. Because of their security rules, we couldn't have direct access to their systems - so if we wanted to do something remotely, we would have to start a webex, they would join and share their screen, and give us remote control. This worked great, except if we wanted to work over the weekend, since if we left the screen alone for more than…

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #12

Not sure if this is still the case, but back when I was at Apple the program that triggered when you pressed a button on an Apple remote pointed at a Macintosh was just a giant AppleScript file that, at the top level, was a giant `if...else if...` statement to try and determine which application had the foreground so that the appropriate action (e.g. next track for iTunes, next slide for Keynote, next chapter marker…