Category: Humor

Today, John sends us a confession. This is his code, which was built to handle ISO 8583 messages. As we’ll see from some later comments, John knows this is bad.

The ISO 8583 format is used mostly in financial transaction processing, frequently to talk to ATMs, but is likely to show up somewhere in any transaction you do that isn’t pure cash.

One of the things the format can support is bitmaps- not the image format, but the “stuff flags into an integer” format. John wrote his own version of this, in C#. It’s a long class, so I’m just going to focus on the highlights.

private readonly bool[] bits;

Look, we don’t start great. This isn’t an absolute mistake, but if you’re working on a data structure that is meant to be manipulated via bitwise operations, just lean into it. And yes, if endianness is an issue, you’ll need to think a little harder- but you need to think about that anyway. Use clear method names and documentation to make it readable.

In this developer’s defense, the bitmap’s max size is 128 bits, which doesn’t have a native integral type in C#, but a pair of 64-bits would be easier to understand, at least for me. Maybe I’ve just been infected by low-level programming brainworms. Fine, we’re using an array.

Now, one thing that’s important, is that we’re using this bitmap to represent multiple things.

public bool IsExtendedBitmap
{
	get
	{
		return this.IsFieldSet(1);
	}
}

Note how the 1st bit in this bitmap is the IsExtendedBitmap flag. This controls the length of the total bitmap.

Which, as an aside, they’re using IsFieldSet because zero-based indexes are too hard:

public bool IsFieldSet(int field)
{
	return this.bits[field - 1];
}

But things do get worse.

public void SetField(int field, bool on)
{
	this.bits[field - 1] = on;
	this.bits[0] = false;
	for (var i = 64; i <= 127; i++)
	{
		if (this.bits[i])
		{
			this.bits[0] = true;
			break;
		}
	}
}

I included the comments here because I want to highlight how useless they are. The first line makes sense. Then we set the first bit to false. Which, um, was the IsExtendedBitmap flag. Why? I don’t know. Then we iterate across the back half of the bitmap and if there’s anything true in there, we set that first bit back to true.

Which, by writing that last paragraph, I’ve figured out what it’s doing: it autodetects whether you’re using the higher order bits, and sets the IsExtendedBitmap as appropriate. I’m not sure this is actually correct behavior- what happens if I want to set a higher order bit explicitly to 0?- but I haven’t read the spec, so we’ll let it slide.

public virtual byte[] ToMsg()
{
	var lengthOfBitmap = this.IsExtendedBitmap ? 16 : 8;
	var data = new byte[lengthOfBitmap];

	for (var i = 0; i < lengthOfBitmap; i++)
	{
		for (var j = 0; j < 8; j++)
		{
			if (this.bits[i * 8 + j])
			{
				data[i] = (byte)(data[i] | (128 / (int)Math.Pow(2, j)));
			}
		}
	}

	if (this.formatter is BinaryFormatter)
	{
		return data;
	}

	IFormatter binaryFormatter = new BinaryFormatter();
	var bitmapString = binaryFormatter.GetString(data);

	return this.formatter.GetBytes(bitmapString);
}

Here’s our serialization method. Note how here, the length of the bitmap is either 8 or 16, while previously we were checking all the bits from 64 up to see if it was extended. At first glance, this seemed wrong, but then I realized- data is a byte[]– so 16 bytes is indeed 128 bits.

This gives them the challenging problem of addressing individual bits within this data structure, and they clearly don’t know how bitwise operations work, so we get the lovely Math.Pow(2, j) in there.

Ugly, for sure. Unclear, definitely. Which only gets worse when we start unpacking.

public int Unpack(byte[] msg, int offset)
{
	
	
	var lengthOfBitmap = this.formatter.GetPackedLength(16);
	if (this.formatter is BinaryFormatter)
	{
		if (msg[offset] >= 128)
		{
			lengthOfBitmap += 8;
		}
	}
	else
	{
		if (msg[offset] >= 0x38)
		{
			lengthOfBitmap += 16;
		}
	}

	var bitmapData = new byte[lengthOfBitmap];
	Array.Copy(msg, offset, bitmapData, 0, lengthOfBitmap);

	if (!(this.formatter is BinaryFormatter))
	{
		IFormatter binaryFormatter = new BinaryFormatter();
		var value = this.formatter.GetString(bitmapData);
		bitmapData = binaryFormatter.GetBytes(value);
	}

	

	for (var j = 0; j < 8; j++)
	{
		this.bits[i * 8 + j] = (bitmapData[i] & (128 / (int)Math.Pow(2, j))) > 0;
	}

	return offset + lengthOfBitmap;
}

Here, we get our real highlights: the comments. “… but it works… I think…”. “Good luck understanding this. There be dragons below.”

Now, John wrote this code some time ago. And the thing that I get, when reading this code, is that John was likely somewhat green, and didn’t fully understand the problem in front of him or the tools at his disposal to solve it. Further, this was John’s independent project, which he was doing to solve a very specific problem- so while the code has problems, I wouldn’t heap up too much blame on John for it.

Which, like many other confessional Code Samples-of-the-Day, I’m sharing this because I think it’s an interesting learning experience. It’s less a “WTF!” and more a, “Oh, man, I see that things went really wrong for you.” We all make mistakes, and we all write terrible code from time to time. Credit to John for sharing this mistake.

Trigger warning: domestic violence

Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie made way for a haunting aftermath, as a decade later, the fortunes of celebrities featured in the infamous pictures, such as Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, and others, took a sinister turn. Some may go as far as to speculate that the star-studded snap was cursed.

In 2014, Ellen took the unforgettable yet ill-fated selfie at the 86th Academy Awards, herding popular Hollywood stars together. Since then, so many of the featured celebrities have seen their fortunes take a turn for the worse.

The picture included Ellen, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Jared Leto, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Peter Nyong’o, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, and Lupita Nyong’o. Eight out of the 12 famous personas went on to have notable instances of negative turns in their careers or personal lives.

Ellen DeGeneres’ infamous 2014 Oscars selfie sparked a haunting aftermath

Image credits: EllenDeGeneres

Ellen was dubbed “the meanest person alive”

Image credits: ellendegeneres

Starting with Ellen, who was “knocked off her Queen of Daytime perch” after allegations were made in a 2020 BuzzFeed article accusing the comic of lording over a “toxic workplace environment.”

A resulting thread on X (at the time known as Twitter) went on to dub the 66-year-old host “the meanest person alive,” The New York Post reported.

Moreover, an Ellen DeGeneres Show source told The Post in 2020: “The stories are all true!” Subsequently, the show, which had been on for 19 years, ended in 2022.

Julia was seemingly spared from the cursed

Image credits: juliaroberts

Kevin was accused of sexual assault

Image credits: Kevin Spacey Talks

In 2017, Kevin Spacey was reportedly instantly fired from his Netflix series House of Cards after actor Anthony Rapp had accused him of a sexual assault years earlier when he was a teen, as per The Post.

The 64-year-old Oscar-winner went on to face a series of similar charges in the US and the UK, all of which he was acquitted of or have been dropped. Nevertheless, his career has never recovered.

In 2016, the once beloved “Brangelina” couple broke up, with Angelina initiating a divorce from Brad in 2016, citing irreconcilable differences.

Bradley kept on being nominated for Oscars without winning any

Image credits: Variety

Channing got divorced

Image credits: TheEllenShow

The former couple’s separation unleashed a slew of allegations and disputes over custody of their six children and division of assets, including a French vineyard they co-owned.

Additionally, a court filing from Angelina alleged that on a 2016 flight, Brad grabbed her by the head and shook her, then he choked one of their children and struck another when they tried to defend her, AP News reported.

In the same theme, Page Six reported in 2023 that Meryl and her husband of 45 years, Don Gummer, had been separated since at least 2017.

Jennifer was also seemingly sparred

Image credits: Peter White/Getty Images

Meryl separated from her husband of 45 years

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Image credits: Leon Bennett/GA/The Hollywood Reporter

Additionally, Channing and Jenna Dewan divorced in November 2019.

In 2014, Bradley was nominated for his second Oscar for his role in American Hustle. However, he has since been nominated for 10 more Oscars and has never won one.

Meanwhile, Jared has gone on to star in the unpopular Suicide Squad, amongst a handful of other movies.

“Brangelina” faced a terrible faith

Image credits: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Lupita’s life seemingly evolved favorably

Image credits: lupitanyongo

More so, the 52-year-old actor saw accusations of questionable behaviors with underage fans resurface since a 2005 article for The Post alleged that he had invited minors to performances by his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

In 2018, actor Dylan Sprouse wrote on X: Yo @JaredLeto, now that you’ve slid into the DM’s of every female model aged 18-25, what would you say your success rate is?”

As for Peter Nyong’o, Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, and Lupita Nyong’o, their personal and professional life have evolved favorably. For now…

“Hollywood is just bad,” a reader commented

Today’s submitter identifies themselves as pleaseKillMe, which hey, c’mon buddy. Things aren’t that bad. Besides, you shouldn’t let the bad code you inherit drive you to depression- it should drive you to revenge.

Today’s simple representative line is one that we share because it’s not just representative of our submitter’s code base, but one that shows up surprisingly often.

SELECT * FROM users WHERE last_name='NULL'

Now, I don’t think this particular code impacted Mr. Null, but it certainly could have. That’s just a special case of names being hard.

In this application, last_name is a nullable field. They could just store a NULL, but due to data sanitization issues, they stored 'NULL' instead- a string. NULL is not 'NULL', and thus- we’ve got a lot of 'NULL's that may have been intended to be NULL, but also could be somebody’s last name. At this point, we have no way to know.