Forums
These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
With a minimum of curated snark this week, you get only the freshest goods.
Unpreserved jeffphi reports "My friend Jason mentioned this to me. I assume if you select these options, your pickle state will collapse only after observing your delivered goods."
The saying goes that debugging is like solving a murder mystery, where you are both the victim and the killer. This, of course, is a bit inaccurate, since we rarely are the only programmer working on a project.
Cole Tobin brings us a small mystery in C# today, though in this case, the mystery is- how does this even work?
2020 was a rough year for everyone. Eventually, it will end, but as we drag through to the end of 2020.2, it's sometimes hard to remember the beforetimes.
Sometime in that long era before 2020, Marc's team patched a bug in their software. Like good developers, the patch included a unit test. They could prove that the test failed before the fix, passed after the fix, and happily closed the ticket and went on to different things.
My Steam profile doesn't represent the most active gamer on Earth, but in my time I put some pretty serious hours into the recent XCOM games. Each mission your squad goes on gets a procedurally generated name, and that can lead to some funny results just by itself (like "Avenging Avenger"). But, if you've put too many hours into the game, you might notice that every once in awhile, you see a mission with "Chicken" in its name.
Now, it's obvious that this is just a joke. Clearly an Easter Egg hidden in the code by a programmer. But Rich D picked through the UnrealScript which powers the game, finding the code responsible.
In the US, we "fell back"- that is to say we abandoned Daylight Saving Time and moved back to Standard Time, and I think the general consensus is that time changes are the real WTF.
So let's use this as a moment to look at some bad date handling code, an evergreen topic.
Amateur mathematician Chris F. thoughtfully sums up this screencap. "Although Numberblocks is a brilliant show for kids learning to count, I can't help but feel the BBC perhaps need to watch it themselves when it comes to the order of the series (or 'seasons' as many of your readers may know them) in the show..."
Cassi continues the fight against ancient, creaky PHP code.
Today, it's particularly ancient- according to source control, it predates PHP 5.0 (and thus structured exceptions, and in this case may predate the current century). So the fact that this sets a pass-by-reference $errMsg variable and returns false on an error isn't the WTF in the code.
Mark was trawling through the WordPress code, tracking down a bug in an extension, when he noticed this particular method for deciding whether or not WordPress is served via HTTPS or not.
function is_ssl() {
if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ) {
if ( 'on' == strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) )
return true;
if ( '1' == $_SERVER['HTTPS'] )
return true;
} elseif ( isset($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']) && ( '443' == $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] ) ) {
return true;
}
return false;
}