A very expensive javascript...

Hallvord R. M. Steen GeekDancer and Sith hacker at Opera Software explains in his blog how, by the time they were increasing the computing capacity of the company, they found some nice and smart javascript.

The thing is that, by the time, Opera Software was about to buy some servers to fulfill the growth of their services. The management department turned on the green light to spend a hefty quantity of money in the new purchase, so all the big hardware companies wanted a bite of the cake and servers samples were travelling from all over the world to Oslo trying to satisfy the sysadmins needs.

One of those major hardware vendors, name not revealed but apparently whose name you would be familiar with, didn't do it very well. When Opera's sysadmins booted up the server and tried to test the web-based administration interface, they founded some wonderful javascript able to piss off everyone there.

Apparently it had been written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced in order to come up with the programing of the administration interface. This cost them a lot of money in unsuccessful sales.

Here you have some of the code sent to Opera Software for testing:

if (is.opera)
{
window.location.href="config/error.htm";
}

"Watch what?"
Princess Leia Organa