[geoffpado]

> This is the same IP address: 3232271615. You get that by interpreting the 4 bytes of the IP address as a big-endian unsigned 32-bit integer, and print that. This leads to a classic parlor trick: if you try to visit http://3232271615 , Chrome will load http://192.168.140.255.

This was the source of one of my favorite “bugs” ever. I was working on multiple mobile apps for a company, and they had a deep link setup that was incredibly basic: <scheme>://<integer>, which would take you to an article with a simple incrementing ID. This deep link system “just worked” on iOS and Android; take the URL, grab the host, parse it as an int, grab that story ID. Windows Phone, however… the integers we were parsing out were totally wrong, returning incredibly old stories!

Turned out that the host we were given by the frameworks from the URL was auto-converted to an IP in dotted-quad format, and then the int parser was just grabbing the last segment… which meant that we were always getting stories <256, instead of the ~40000 range we were expecting.

[GlitchMr]

Curiously, this appears to be a bug in Windows Phone. In URIs, part following `//` is called authority, which is essentially a host with some optional additional stuff (like port number).

According to RFC 1123, hostname could legally be entirely numeric, and web browser shouldn't attempt to "correct" it (as it is a valid URI) for schemas it doesn't know anything about - as it doesn't know the rules for hostname for a given protocol. This is also not a valid IP address according to RFC 3986 (which specifies URI syntax), as this specification requires #.#.#.# format with three dots.

That said, using authority for something that isn't technically a hostname is misusing the field. I think using `<scheme>:<integer>` would have been a better idea.

[namanyayg]

Funny bug :) I often prefix integers with a char, e.g. maybe "u12345" here, in places where I'm using integers as id to force a string conversion and avoid any code accidentally doing math on it.

[hajhatten]

Huh, I'm gonna try to remember this. You'd be surprised how lazy people get, even when money's involved.

[akoncius]

I love those kind of stories. it shows on how high-level abstraction we are working on a daily basis when we have no clue what is going on with stuff which we are touching constantly.

I bet it was not “I love it” sentiment when you had to debug this kind of issue though, haha :)

[geoffpado]

Any bug you can learn something from is better than the alternative. :)

Thankfully, I caught this one while building the feature in the first place; I don’t imagine I’d have such fond memories of it if I’d had to recreate it from user reports!

[slim]

maybe it was more appropriate to use a urn instead of a uri. something like urn:namespace:id:scheme:number

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8141

[whereistimbo]

Well I read how foobar2000 dev (Peter) developed his apps on Windows Phone. He said it was so annoying compared to other two major mobile platform and he was considering to refund the crowdsourced money which comes from pledging Windows Phone.