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Pierre found this cry for help:
Sep 26 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.
Today's code maybe isn't much of a WTF, but it does point in the general direction of, "Damn, you live like this?" Poor Nancy unfortunately does.
int x = 3;
int y = 4;
int z = 4;
x = y = z;
At my employer, we use a service called Coveralls, which is a code coverage reporting tool that hooks into your CI pipeline. It takes your lcov reports and gives you some insights, and also makes it easy to cause the CI pipeline to fail if newly added code doesn't have reasonable coverage.
I have no strong feelings about the tool, but on February 24th, our CI jobs started failing, and our CI step that talked to Coveralls was the culprit. Coveralls had gone down. That happened to us, and a lot of other people. It was a widespread outage impacting anybody who used their service.
Taxes are a royal pain for everyone. Amazon has found a unique way to make them even worse, as Kris W. attests:
I recently bought a €9.61 kitchen knife on Amazon Spain. My card was charged €7.94 instead. After some investigation, I discovered that Amazon had applied an old VAT registration number I'd added to my personal account years ago, and had classified my purchase as a VAT-exempt intra-EU business transaction. The invoice even contained my business address from 2022, which no longer appeared anywhere in my account settings. I just wanted to remove the VAT number so I could go back to buying kitchen utensils without accidentally generating international tax paperwork.
Dr. Doom...scroller titled this one "Scrollbar-ception". Said he "Screenshot of the TikTok webpage (i.e. in a desktop browser) while not logged in. I swear this wasn't a NSFW TikTok video, instead it was a montage of some live show from some singer. Anyway... Back on the topic of the actual publishable snarky comments: Social media is known for doom-scrolling. Well, these are scrollbars of doom. Or doom-scrollbars."
We don't cover a lot of security issues here, simply because they're not usually funny. But sometimes, they are. So here's a quick hit about some recent ones.
We start with a very bad month for the Danish social security system, the Central Register of Persons (CPR). Last week, they detected a breach which exposed the personal details of 8.8m people. Per the Register article, a cybersecurity specialist correctly pointed out that treating your ID number as if it were a secret was a terrible idea in the first place, but unfortunately, so many systems have grown up around the idea that full knowledge of your state issued ID number as proof of identity, that the security expert is screaming into the wind. They're right, but it's going to take a lot to change.
Mandy's co-worker recently learned about virtual inheritance in C++. It's become their new favorite button to push, and they only use virtual inheritance.
Virtual inheritance is one workaround for the "diamond problem", where you have an inheritance tree that "recombines" via multiple inheritance: when a child class has a Hapsburg-esque parentage, it's hard to decide which inherited methods are being invoked or overridden.
Ever get some special letter, card, or picture from a friend or loved one that you held onto, maybe even taped to your cube or office wall? Is it something you still look at fondly, something that lifts your spirits whenever you're down? Certainly, a thoughtful card or letter is much nicer than a thoughtful email.
Now imagine your special keepsake being scanned, censored, and converted into a digital file that you can only view from a tablet — assuming you can afford the fee to access the tablet. The original has been destroyed; it's gone forever. You'll never get to see or feel it in your hands.
For some godawful reason, people like to explain object oriented concepts via analogy to biological taxonomies. I suppose it's easy to understand an "is-a" relationship (a cat is a mammal), but the down side is you get a complex and increasingly leaky analogy that over-emphasizes the importance of inheritance.
That's not to slight Alan's choice of using it to anoymize today's code. It's just a broad frustration on my part.
Matias shared a standard sort of flubstituted fail-merge error'd; not really egregious, just routine. "I am {{emotionType}} to hear this."
Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.
Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.
A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?
Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.
Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire.
As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his very first "someone paid me for this" project. This particular function needed to pick a random bit of content from their database to display in the "right side" banner area. This is how DJ implemented it.
Today's anonymous submitter sends us some legacy Java code.
The task is this: check what time it is. And fortunately, even in the older Java datetime libraries that were terrible, this was an easy task. You just needed to do something like new Date(), which constructs a date time object set to the current time. getTime() picks off just the time portion.
We have for you this week a full set of the Error'd we most love to hate: the perverse password policy.
An anonymous reader drops this, with little to say except to note "Speciaal passwords". Evidently they supplied a password which satisfied each of the five green critera, but still it was rejected. It would be nice to know where this offense originated,
