For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.

Submitted anonymously, one of our readers' companies uses a lot of CMOS batteries from Dell. To save time and money, they asked for fifty spare batteries instead of having them delivered individually. Dell was happy to oblige, sending one giant box with fifty small boxes inside; each with one neatly-packed CMOS battery. I can't help but be reminded of a similar incident from the past.

As we learned in Random Stupidity, developers don't really trust rand(), random(), Random.GetNext(), etc. Nor should they. The documentation, after all, clearly states that the function "generates a pseudo-random number." That's right, pseudo. Who wants pseudo?

The neat thing about pseudo-randomness is that, if you think about it -- and you don't think too much about it -- you can actually generate a real random number by pseudo-randomizing a pseudo-randomizer a pseudo-random number of times. It's kind like how two wrongs (either wrongly done for the right reason or rightly done for the wrong reason) make a right. Really, it's simple math.

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Survival Edition).

"I work in a moped shop," Jeremy J Starcher (Tallmadge, OH) wrote, "and we, too, see our share of unexplainable things. A customer brought in a bike that had the wrong spark plug. REALLY the wrong plug. It didn't fit in the hole, so they used a series of spacers to "pad it out" about where the plug should be. The larger plug is included so you can see the difference."

In an effort to gain marketshare, Initrode quietly built a new product — a network management appliance that out-featured and out-performed the competition's nearest equivalents. The R&D, testing, production, infrastructure, trade shows, demos, trials, last-minute feature additions, sales, and late nights had taken their toll on Chris W. and his colleagues, but they had built something they were genuinely proud of in the end.

The launch went smoothly from a technical perspective, though initial sales were underwhelming. After several months, their sales were paltry.

"It's the strangest thing — I can't connect to the wireless anymore. I can still use the Microsoft but not the email."

The Microsoft was a key phrase that let Jay L. know that the woman on the line wasn't exactly what you'd call a power user. "I'll be happy to help. First, can you tell me what router you're connecting to?

"I took this picture from my cell phone at the Wendy's drive-thru," Chris Jones noted. "Somehow, the total still came out correct."

Over the course of 100-plus years, Sampo Bank had grown into one of the largest banks in Finland. Since its founding in 1887, Sampo stayed ahead of the technology curve, introducing the first modern payment system -- the postal giro -- in 1939, becoming Finland's first adopter of IBM's "electronic brain" in 1958, and amassing nearly one million users of its online banking service by 2006.

But alas, in today's acquire-or-be-acquired world, Sampo was swallowed up by Denmark giant Danske Bank. On Nov. 9, 2006, Danske announced not only the acquisition, but that it would integrate all IT platforms -- online banking, merchant processing, account management and so on -- in 1 year, 4 months and 15 days, by Easter weekend of 2008. And come hell or high water, they would meet that date.