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What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

etherrotmutex.blogspot.com

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Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#61

Post by nunez »

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool)

Or the "Don't Steal MacOS.kext" that was used to prevent Hackintoshes from booting if it was messed with

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#63

Post by procanal »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #38
not2b wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process an…

I wouldn’t be surprised if I have a few “anal”s lying around in veritable names I’ve written over the years. We have a lot of “analysis” in our application and I bet I have shortened them a few times, and in my head I would have pronounced it as uh-naa-l not realizing what it also looked like.

I wrote a utility to analyze processes for a database system that liked to capitalize and abbreviate everything. To keep my naming conventions in the spirit of things, and because I was feeling a little spicy that day, I named the table that the utility wrote the analysis results into "PROC.ANAL"

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#64

Post by iamwil »

not2b wrote: post #20
sprior wrote: post #7

Back when I was in high school and programming on the original IBM PCs I wrote a program that would graph "solids of rotation" (a function rotated around the X axis). Well I chose the obvious name based on the 8.3 filename limitations. One day someone looked over my shoulder and said "you named your program solid rot???" Oops.

It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process an…

I was whiteboarding with a fellow (girl) student in college. We were sketching out a client/server architecture, and I abbreviated server as "srvr". When it came to the client, I thought I should also make it four letters, so I wrote "clit". I stood back and looked at it. After a couple seconds pause, it dawned on my brain that was probably a terrible shortening. I wordlessly erased my gaffe, and just wrote out the whole word.

So yeah, I can believe it happens by mistake at times.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#65

Post by Thorrez »

teschty wrote: post #55
gomox wrote: post #46

The best part of this is that it is concrete evidence of Google Search result quality decay. The screenshot of the search in the article shows a result from a Blogspot blog called "Frankie's Joint". If you do today the exact same search that the OP does on his screenshot, that result does not show up. ALL the results I get are either a reference to this Hacker News post, or computer generated pages. A short 2 pages w…

I'm curious if they explicitly excluded their blog from Google search results, they don't seem to have the highest opinion of Google from various posts.

Doesn't look like it. I see 3 pages from the blog when I search site:frankiesjoint.blogspot.com . None of them are the post about ether-rot-mutex .

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#66

Post by irrational »

not2b wrote: post #20
sprior wrote: post #7

Back when I was in high school and programming on the original IBM PCs I wrote a program that would graph "solids of rotation" (a function rotated around the X axis). Well I chose the obvious name based on the 8.3 filename limitations. One day someone looked over my shoulder and said "you named your program solid rot???" Oops.

It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process an…

I’ll take anal entry for $500 Trebek.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#68

Post by anyfoo »

IncRnd wrote: post #23
bmm6o wrote: post #8

If it ended up in the binary it probably wasn't a comment, in the true sense. Was that the name of the mutex?

> If it ended up in the binary it probably wasn't a comment, in the true sense. I think you meant "in the source code sense" not "in the true sense." It could very well be a comment in installware.

In the true source code sense, I think it was well implied and understandable.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#69

Post by xyzzy123 »

lights0123 wrote: post #59
cossatot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matlab and SciPy both have ‘cumtrapz’ for trapezoidal integration.

Although SciPy retains an alias for compatibility, the preferred name has changed: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/12924

Whats sort of funny about that to my mind is, the original authors were very likely innocent / oblivious in terms of alternative meanings and it's the (quote unquote) dirty minds of the PR/MR fix authors which make them a problem.

"I object to my own urban dictionary / reddit-based post-hoc interpretation of this abbrevation. It's offensive.".

Which is fine. We can fix all the things, and yes it's short term pain but not a big deal. What was said isn't the same as what is heard.

Where there are historically unfortunate names, we can deal with them just like all the other changes we make as a matter of course.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#70

Post by skykooler »

schoen wrote: post #58
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it ended up in the binary it probably wasn't a comment, in the true sense. In some languages, rather than comments being a special syntactic thing, you just write a string-literal expression as its own statement. Before dead code elimination was a thing, I imagine these string-literals would end up in the binary.

I just checked, and this method is still syntactically valid (though not recommended style) in... C Javascript (Node) Python Perl Ruby Rust The strings did end up in my Python 2.7 .pyc bytecode, though not in my C or Rust binaries. My intuition was that this would work in most of these languages, but not all. For example, I thought Rust would probably complain about a value being unused. There's no such thing in gene…

Technically multiline strings in Python are the recommended style for multiline comments (e.g. docstrings).
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