Hello and welcome to One-Minute Tech WTF. Today we’re looking at “What the FFFFFFFF,” a Resident Line from The Daily WTF by Remy Porter. As Remy puts it, “Computers were a mistake, which is why I’m trying to shoot them into space.” This time the culprit is a Java project full of bitmasks and bitwise operations, built on a network protocol. The developers defined their masks with

private static long FFFFFFFF = Long.parseLong("FFFFFFFF", 16);

That’s right—they parsed an eight-character hex string at runtime instead of using Java’s built-in literal support. You could simply write 0xFFFFFFFF. Worse, the constant isn’t even final, so FFFFFFFF could hold any value at any time. And naming a constant FFFFFFFF hardly makes the “magic number” any clearer. The fix is simple: use a descriptive, final constant and a proper hex literal. That way you avoid parsing overhead, accidental reassignment, and future head scratches. Stay tuned for more quick code cringes next time!
Link to Article