Good news, everyone! Sometime late Thursday evening, Intern Boyd was able to finish up validating each and every submission on the list. Most of the submissions made it to the next round, but a handful didn't; Boyd did what he could to resolve compile/configure errors, but there's just too many submissions and too little time.

Yesterday (Friday), Jake, Boyd, and I sat around the conference table and discussed half of the valid submissions (second half comes Tuesday). I can see already that this is going to be a very difficult decision to pick out finalists, let alone pick the winner. So many of you did such an incredibly good job at writing an incredibly bad calculator. Seriously, it's impressive.

I look forward to writing up and discussing your horrific work! More to come soon ...

 

Alex Papadimoulis:

Good news, everyone! Sometime late Thursday evening, Intern Boyd was able to finish up validating each and every submission on the list. Most of the submissions made it to the next round, but a handful didn't; Boyd did what he could to resolve compile/configure errors, but there's just too many submissions and too little time.

Yesterday (Friday), Jake, Boyd, and I sat around the conference table and discussed half of the valid submissions (second half comes Tuesday). I can see already that this is going to be a very difficult decision to pick out finalists, let alone pick the winner. So many of you did such an incredibly good job at writing an incredibly bad calculator. Seriously, it's impressive.

I look forward to writing up and discussing your horrific work! More to come soon ...

 

You should go one better than getting the intern to do your dirty work: you should have hired a consultant to pick the winner!

gunny:

You should go one better than getting the intern to do your dirty work: you should have hired a consultant to pick the winner!

 He did. Four of them. :)

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc.  If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

libcurl? You can never trust library code. Real programmers write their own HTTP client code from scratch.
 

vilcans:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

libcurl? You can never trust library code. Real programmers write their own HTTP client code from scratch.
 

 

"Real" programmers write their own protocol, and write the client / server (ha, you should be so lucky!) code from scratch. 

TheFeshy:

vilcans:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

libcurl? You can never trust library code. Real programmers write their own HTTP client code from scratch.
 

 

"Real" programmers write their own protocol, and write the client / server (ha, you should be so lucky!) code from scratch. 

I wasn't going for "real programmer" with this entry, I was going for "Enterprisey".  No real programmer would make MediaWiki a core component of a four-function calculator.

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc.  If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Looking over the notes for "MediaCalc", that one failed the compile test, "could not find curl.h" or something to that effect. Because the submission did not include a readme or notes for installing/configuring this library, we put it on the "research & figure out if time permits" pile. And unfortunately, with all the submissions, time did not permit ....

I thought I read somewhere at one point in time that if we resubmitted our entries with the same entry details (author, email, and project name) then the latest entry would supercede the previous entries. If that is so why did I get a notification to update my older entries (the 500 char max description thingy)? Entry #100320 should have superceded #100108 and #1000064 before that. If older entries were eliminated it would probably cut down on the number of entries. I am sure I am not the only one who updated their submissions as they got their code working.

I do not mind my older entries being eligible for judging, but that is not what I thought would happen.

They probably ran a script to send the emails on all the entries in the database but only looked at the last one while judging.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc.  If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Looking over the notes for "MediaCalc", that one failed the compile test, "could not find curl.h" or something to that effect. Because the submission did not include a readme or notes for installing/configuring this library, we put it on the "research & figure out if time permits" pile. And unfortunately, with all the submissions, time did not permit ....

You said you'd send an email or otherwise contact the submitter if an entry didn't work right.

To install libcurl, download http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.2.tar.gz, decompress it ("tar -xzvf curl-7.16.2.tar.gz"), change to the source directory ("cd curl-7.16.2"), configure and compile (./configure && make), and install ("sudo make install" or "su", "make install" depending on how the system is set up to give you root access).

Carnildo:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Looking over the notes for "MediaCalc", that one failed the compile test, "could not find curl.h" or something to that effect. Because the submission did not include a readme or notes for installing/configuring this library, we put it on the "research & figure out if time permits" pile. And unfortunately, with all the submissions, time did not permit ....

You said you'd send an email or otherwise contact the submitter if an entry didn't work right.

To install libcurl, download http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.2.tar.gz, decompress it ("tar -xzvf curl-7.16.2.tar.gz"), change to the source directory ("cd curl-7.16.2"), configure and compile (./configure && make), and install ("sudo make install" or "su", "make install" depending on how the system is set up to give you root access).

One less concurrent for my Entry :D, Still 348 to evict :D

Btw, i agree with you, curl is present on most systems. But not the curl development headers which most systems don't install :p You should have used implicit declaration instead of including a potentially not present header :p 

Chicken Little:

I thought I read somewhere at one point in time that if we resubmitted our entries with the same entry details (author, email, and project name) then the latest entry would supercede the previous entries. If that is so why did I get a notification to update my older entries (the 500 char max description thingy)? Entry #100320 should have superceded #100108 and #1000064 before that. If older entries were eliminated it would probably cut down on the number of entries. I am sure I am not the only one who updated their submissions as they got their code working.

I do not mind my older entries being eligible for judging, but that is not what I thought would happen.

Yes, we did only look at #100320 -- those older ones just must have gotten caught up in the email script...

tchize:

Carnildo:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Looking over the notes for "MediaCalc", that one failed the compile test, "could not find curl.h" or something to that effect. Because the submission did not include a readme or notes for installing/configuring this library, we put it on the "research & figure out if time permits" pile. And unfortunately, with all the submissions, time did not permit ....

You said you'd send an email or otherwise contact the submitter if an entry didn't work right.

To install libcurl, download http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.2.tar.gz, decompress it ("tar -xzvf curl-7.16.2.tar.gz"), change to the source directory ("cd curl-7.16.2"), configure and compile (./configure && make), and install ("sudo make install" or "su", "make install" depending on how the system is set up to give you root access).

One less concurrent for my Entry :D, Still 348 to evict :D

Btw, i agree with you, curl is present on most systems. But not the curl development headers which most systems don't install :p You should have used implicit declaration instead of including a potentially not present header :p 

Carnildo:

tchize:

Carnildo:

Alex Papadimoulis:

Carnildo:

My server logs don't show you as having tested my second entry, MediaCalc. If it's simply that it couldn't find or link against the libpcre or libcurl libraries, that's easy enough to fix: I just assumed that since those are fairly standard libraries, they'd be present on the system.

Looking over the notes for "MediaCalc", that one failed the compile test, "could not find curl.h" or something to that effect. Because the submission did not include a readme or notes for installing/configuring this library, we put it on the "research & figure out if time permits" pile. And unfortunately, with all the submissions, time did not permit ....

You said you'd send an email or otherwise contact the submitter if an entry didn't work right.

To install libcurl, download http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.16.2.tar.gz, decompress it ("tar -xzvf curl-7.16.2.tar.gz"), change to the source directory ("cd curl-7.16.2"), configure and compile (./configure && make), and install ("sudo make install" or "su", "make install" depending on how the system is set up to give you root access).

One less concurrent for my Entry :D, Still 348 to evict :D

Btw, i agree with you, curl is present on most systems. But not the curl development headers which most systems don't install :p You should have used implicit declaration instead of including a potentially not present header :p

Except that the headers also define some constants -- and implicit definition of compile-time constants would be a real WTF!

Dude, with an attitude like that, how are you ever going to hope to win?  Haven't you heard of hard coding?   

phaedrus:

Carnildo:

tchize:

One less concurrent for my Entry :D, Still 348 to evict :D

Btw, i agree with you, curl is present on most systems. But not the curl development headers which most systems don't install :p You should have used implicit declaration instead of including a potentially not present header :p

Except that the headers also define some constants -- and implicit definition of compile-time constants would be a real WTF!

Dude, with an attitude like that, how are you ever going to hope to win?  Haven't you heard of hard coding?   

Or how about just including a copy of the necessary library in the submission? After all, we've all been burned when an app or library we need changes just before release... and usually the QA person is the first to find out when they set up the build from zip. 

Carnildo:

tchize:

One less concurrent for my Entry :D, Still 348 to evict :D

Btw, i agree with you, curl is present on most systems. But not the curl development headers which most systems don't install :p You should have used implicit declaration instead of including a potentially not present header :p

Except that the headers also define some constants -- and implicit definition of compile-time constants would be a real WTF!

Well, for the constant, either hardcode them, or cut and paste them from header to top of your code, or better, if all you needed was to download a file, why didn't you got for the fork/exec to run wget as a separate process?
 

Worf:

Or how about just including a copy of the necessary library in the submission? After all, we've all been burned when an app or library we need changes just before release... and usually the QA person is the first to find out when they set up the build from zip. 

Actually, that was one of the rules, IIRC.

I'm quite puzzled.

The finalists have been selected, but this announcement was posted to the main site and not in this update section...

Massimo:

I'm quite puzzled.

The finalists have been selected, but this announcement was posted to the main site and not in this update section...

Just toss it up to "The Real WTF" like everything else weird that has happened