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Bug of the moment 2007-04-29


The other day, JensenDied in Freenode #pidgin-win32 showed us a couple of particularly nice screenshots and has given me permission to reproduce them. One of them is waiting, along with Mr Anonymous’s superb submissions, for the next major Screenshots update. This is the other:

Firefox download: 2 of 168 KB at -9212.-9 KB/sec

If BotM had categorisation (you know, if my site wasn’t the Real WTF) this would be filed under “Re-inventing the square wheel”: why is anyone writing custom code to format decimal numbers, that has no idea what to do with negative numbers? Negative decimal parts my anus. More on this bug in a few minutes.

www.www.www

On a certain forum I frequent, I followed a link to a site I work on:

A link to www.waterloggedproductions.com.

I was just curious to see what had become of the front page since someone else has taken over one of the subdomains. What I did not expect to see, however, was this error message:

In a manner semblant of New15 York, the address has gained a long chain of “www.”s at the start. At first, I considered that maybe the forum software had gone mad, but no, the forum link was perfectly valid. However, the site in question, run by Globat (!) doesn’t understand valid domains. Technically, a domain name should end with a dot as you can see in the screenshot above, but this breaks the site. In my best Neil Buchanan voice, try it yourself: a Panic Attack — www.waterloggedproductions.com. (No longer fails as the site has been relocated to DreamHost.)

You can see a trace of the request in HTTP Werkzeug’s history:

Of course, the user-agent is meant to stop trying after six redirects and give up, but Firefox doesn’t know when to stop. (HTTP Werkzeug leaves redirecting to manual control; I stopped when I could no longer resolve the domain name.)

But the real irony? Right after JensenDied showed us that first picture …

This page took -21599.-997 seconds to generate.

Man.


Posted 29th April 2007 – Comments and questions?