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These fine folks make it possible to run The Daily WTF.
"TODO" comments are an inescapable part of our work. Yes, yes, you should just do it right the first time, everything should probably have a ticket in whatever your ticket system is for visibility, but at some point, you're just going to leave a "TODO" behind.
But hopefully, the TODO gets TODONE, which is not what happened in Sam C's codebase.
I do like it when submissions include the creator of the wtf, unless the specific kind of err is really spectacular and then it might be noteworthy regardless. This week we received a few who did tell us something about the responsible party. That being said, on with the party!"
An anonymous contributor shared with us this "Important order info from Ubbad HBG-ICS I", saying "I checked on Amazon but can't find order #{randnum(3)}-{randnum(6)}. This is worrisome though, because my credit card does end in **{randnum(4)}." Wild, so does mine!
Pierre found this cry for help:
for (j = 0; j < DISTRICT_CARDINALITY; j++) {
/*
* A poor way to work around some sort of memory
* violation. k gets clobbered, so I buffer l with it.
* Help?
*/
for (k = 0, l = 0; k < customers; k++, l++) {
/* c_id */
FPRINTF(output, "%d", l + 1);
METAPRINTF((output, "%c", delimiter));
We still get a fair bit of old school ASP .Net webforms code, which was cutting edge about twenty years ago, but remains a collection of bad choices that tried to make web programming feel like desktop programming. As an aside, what a reversed world we live in today, where everyone uses Electron and our desktop programming feels like web programming.
In any case, Thomas sends us some pretty ugly webforms code.
A bit ago, I broke with my usual pattern and wrote up some security issues that I felt were particularly funny. It was a change of pace, a different thing, but not a thing that'd become a habit. After all, I'm not a security expert, this isn't a security site, and seriously, what are the odds that suitably funny security issues would crop up again less than a week later?
Well.
Submitter Chops relates a tale of chasing "The Standard" at any cost:
A company had been forced, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, and then into the 21st. Their range of dumb hardware was no longer being bought by customers who expected at least some way to get the data off it, and a USB stick wouldn't cut it.
Usually I have to save up a few weeks' worth of error'ds to get five of a kind, but this week we got a rash of funky date entries! I guess we were due.
First up Tim R. reminding us here that "Dates are difficult! ...but when the entire purpose of your web site is to convert the time to different time zones, I'm not inclined to give you much slack for being one hour out."
We all love format strings for generating human readable text. Certainly, they're a better choice than string concatenation. Even if I have a blind spot that keeps me from remembering the printf format tokens, I still prefer to use format strings.
Jasmine has a co-worker that does use format strings, but they also miss using string concatenation. So they've found a way to combine them, and avoid the perils of making readable code that describes the format of their text.