• (cs)

    Hey, I'm attending the University of Idaho as well. Given the quality of the education I have received, it's no wonder he was able to come up with this idea!

  • whoCares (unregistered)

    Congratulations to the coder, this is just sick :)

    The first one wins for being more "realistic".
    you don't know the code i'm supposed to work with ,-)
    • 18 closed brackets in a row(i've seen 16 not so long ago, but after eight closing, they had a statement like "if i == 1 break;" and then another 8 closing...)
    • unnecessary indirection and calling Methods "doSomething"...
    • handle and memory leaks all over the place
    • comments like "Not sure why I need all these stupid sleep commands, but things just didn't work without them." and "//Enter some more strings. It's like ClickString, but different."

    thats the reality for me everyday :-/

  • Ezra (unregistered)

    What an awesome idea. I started working on one that took string input. So users would type eighty-three minus seven and it would display seventy-six. A seperate button could be pressed to convert the answer to integer.

  • Joost (unregistered)

    This gets ++ points for copying unix-style - i.e. re-use existing simpler tools instead writing your own - in a way that doesn't make any sense in an environment that's actively hostile to writing programs that way.

    plus, it made me laugh

  • (cs) in reply to vt_mruhlin
    vt_mruhlin:
    brilliant! I might as well go ahead and reveal my similar, yet less-obfuscated idea that I never got around to coding.

    I wanted to make one that would just do a Google search for whatever expression you wanted to calculate, then parse the result.

    There are at least four submissions that do exactly that. One of them asks Yahoo for a second opinion.

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to Smilr
    Smilr:
    For those of you using Safari / Opera and other browsers that won't show the flash video:

    The video's "Automaticaly start playing" setting is OFF. Right click or CTL-click on the little "Created Using Wink" box and select PLAY from the contextual menu.

    I think you misunderstood the problem, there is no such element. There is simply the text of the WTF and nothing else.

    Firefox 2.0 and never had this problem before. Whatever trick this uses to get the Flash to work, I suggest the poster never use it again.

  • Southern (unregistered)

    I liked this one very much ... This guy is a genius

  • samic (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo
    Carnildo:
    There are at least four submissions that do exactly that. One of them asks Yahoo for a second opinion.

    That would be an awesome idea to put "webservice" to good use.

  • (cs) in reply to Carnildo
    Carnildo:
    vt_mruhlin:
    brilliant! I might as well go ahead and reveal my similar, yet less-obfuscated idea that I never got around to coding.

    I wanted to make one that would just do a Google search for whatever expression you wanted to calculate, then parse the result.

    There are at least four submissions that do exactly that. One of them asks Yahoo for a second opinion.

    Great minds WTF alike.

  • (cs)

    The Flash movie is embedded with an <object> tag. Firefox appears not to understand <object>, only <embed>. Switch it to <embed> and it works. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the two tags, but isn't <embed> obsolete?

    Is Firefox 2 bloated compared to 1.5? I switched to 2 some time ago and as far as I know, there's no difference in size. Firefox 2 has advantages (although I forget what, now) but it also introduces stupid bugs like tabs not always closing. It's not really any worse than 1.5 -- fix a few bugs, create a few more -- the equilibrium is maintained.

  • Luke Schafer (unregistered) in reply to vt_mruhlin

    ditto

  • Akerbos (unregistered)

    The fact that this one is not localizable adds to its odditiy. Nice one!

  • MblSH (unregistered)

    Wasn't one of the contest requirements to perform calculations in under a couple of seconds time?

    I really wanted to write something involving Excel but that requirement put me off :(

  • anon (unregistered)

    i don't know, i'm still waiting for the calculator that can read mail.

  • Tarilla (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo
    Carnildo:
    vt_mruhlin:
    brilliant! I might as well go ahead and reveal my similar, yet less-obfuscated idea that I never got around to coding.

    I wanted to make one that would just do a Google search for whatever expression you wanted to calculate, then parse the result.

    There are at least four submissions that do exactly that. One of them asks Yahoo for a second opinion.

    chuckles Now... if Yahoo and Google disagree, who wins? Or is a third one called for a third opinion hopefully agreeign with eitehr google or Yahoo? G

  • iMalc (unregistered)

    A problem with this program is that you lose whatever you had on the clipboard.

    Hmm, I wonder if anyone submitted a calculator that internally worked in unary?

  • En3pY (unregistered) in reply to Goldie

    Gotta love the fact that on Italian version of XP it doesn't even save the file... I guess some i18n issue lol Anyways... the example is great and the approach (maybe not for this specific application) is very useful :p

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    i don't know, i'm still waiting for the calculator that can read mail.

    Wouldn't that be emacs?

  • (cs) in reply to Tarilla
    Tarilla:
    Carnildo:
    vt_mruhlin:
    brilliant! I might as well go ahead and reveal my similar, yet less-obfuscated idea that I never got around to coding.

    I wanted to make one that would just do a Google search for whatever expression you wanted to calculate, then parse the result.

    There are at least four submissions that do exactly that. One of them asks Yahoo for a second opinion.

    chuckles Now... if Yahoo and Google disagree, who wins? Or is a third one called for a third opinion hopefully agreeign with eitehr google or Yahoo? G

    I was thinking about that very same thing last night. I was thinking the only sane thing to do would be to return the average of the two responses.

    Of course if Google and Yahoo disagree on the average too...

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to vt_mruhlin
    vt_mruhlin:
    brilliant! I might as well go ahead and reveal my similar, yet less-obfuscated idea that I never got around to coding.

    I wanted to make one that would just do a Google search for whatever expression you wanted to calculate, then parse the result.

    I was thinking of loading Alex's Test Cases page and scraping that for the correct answer. For each digit you could create an array of the TR tags that contain the value of the button entered. Then all you have to do is find the common WTF identifier of the test and scrape the answer from that row in the Test Cases page.

    The real WTF is that everyone seems to want to use Google all the time to solve their problems.

  • albear (unregistered)

    I am very upset this dosent work on my Mac!

  • El Supremo (unregistered)

    This could have been a real contender... only it catches / Zero errors all by itself, without resorting to any fanciful methods.

  • Sharkie (unregistered)

    This submission is absolutely beautiful. It's true "WTF-ness" stems from how it brute forces the solution through other tools.

    I think the Google & Yahoo idea's would have a bit more WTF-ness to them though, just as long as the code that parses the web pages is horrible to maintain and breaks with any small change in the source webpages.

    The problems folks are having compiling/running it also make it a true gem. Localization and multi-platform stability cannot exist in a real OMGWTF submission, so this author scores high.

  • Mankynd (unregistered) in reply to capnPedro
    capnPedro:
    Working fine on Vista.... the real WTF?
    *faints*

    Same dichotomy on the first two entries here as well. Love the faked history of the first submission, but this one would get my vote.

    It's so hideous it's compelling.

    Capcha: pinball (do people still make these things?) - Ex-pinball technician.

  • (cs) in reply to Mankynd

    Doesn't work here, just returns 0 whatever I type in. I guess it's because I have a swedish version of XP. You should internationalize the application.

  • Kris F. (unregistered)

    Funny, we used something similar at a company I used to work for... must be the same developer.

  • Phyzzip (unregistered)

    Found another amusing issue. Basically I have no C drive. (Longstory involving installing XP over a trashed copy, with LInux on another drive just to screw with stuff) so the drive is F: instead. Guess what's hard coded. The WTF-ness of my computer interferes with its WTF-ness.

  • jarlz (unregistered) 
    if (op2 == 0) {
	*isErr = 1;
	return 0;
}

    Now that's just cheating...

  • Fred (unregistered)

    Great design concepts! Does TopCoder actually pay him or did he win a position in one of their contests?

  • Aptent (unregistered)

    I will not be surprised if someone will make a calculator out of Google's calculator service( http://www.google.com.ph/#hl=tl&q=8+*+(5+%2B+6) ). Though Google(isp outage) is not as available all the time as notepad

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