Classic WTF: Holiday Smorgasbord

Your Christmas present this year is a pile of WTFs from back in 2005. A veritable holiday smorgasbord. This post wouldn't be here if it didn't exist. --Remy

It's been a while since I've done a smorgasbord post, so here goes ...

DM discovered the source of some rather ... unprofessional ... error messages in the log files ...

try
{
  /* SNIP: 15 lines */
}
catch
{
  //How did this happen??
  log.fatal("Aaaaarrrgghhhh");
}

A former developer on Chris' team made up his own way of handling align="center" ...

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The customer service at Jason Harmon's had been telling clients that the bad data coming seen in their system was a configuraiton problem, not a code problem. A client finally complained enough to get the problem pushed back to development where Jason learned that this just might be a coding problem after all ...

private bool IsValid() 
{
  return true;
}

Shayne Studdard chuckled at the original authors comment while porting the old ASP code into the ASP.NET ...

var aLeapYears = 
  new Array(1900,1904,1908,1912,1916,1920,1924,1928,1932,1936, 
    1940,1944,1948,1952,1956,1960,1964,1968,1972,1976,
    1980,1984,1988,1992,1996,2000,2004,2008,2012,2016,
    2020,2024,2028,2032,2036,2040,2044,2048,2052,2056, 
    2060) //please god let this be far enough??

Chris Reigrut recalls a conversation with a technical support guy years back when he had a problem with one of their products ...

Chris : We're having problems with the new version of your software.
Support : That can't be. We didn't change anything.
Chris : Well, I uninstalled the new version and put the old one back on, and the problem went away. I then reinstalled the new version, and the problem came back.
Support : No, it can't be our software. We didn't change anything!
( ... Lots of back and forth about my analysis of the problem ...)
Chris : So you're telling me that you sent out an update, but you didn't change anything. If that's the case, what's the point of the update?
( ... More back and forth, Support getting more and more exasperated ...)
Support : I'm telling you, nothing changed!!! The only difference between the old version and the new version is that the old version was in COBOL, and the new one is in C!!!

Tristan Harmer was a bit mystified by this metaphysical comment ...

        If iFile.Exists Then
            fileSizeBytes = iFile.Length.ToString
        Else
            'Actually this test was done earlier
            ' - the code wouldn't be here if it didn't exist
            Throw New FieldAccessException("File does not exist.")
        End If

And I suppose I'll wrap it up with this bit from TomA, who shows us yet another way to zero-pad a number

$limit = 9999;
for($i=1000;$i<$limit;$i++) 
{
  $number = "$i";
  if ($i<10) $number = "0".$number;
  if ($i<100) $number = "0".$number;
  if ($i<1000) $number = "0".$number;
  if ($i<10000) $number = "0".$number;
  if ($i<100000) $number = "0".$number;
  [ ... snip ...]
}

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