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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)

#71

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by xyzzy123 »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #48
iKlsR wrote: post #13

From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it probably will appear in many other products. > Found in a InstallShield sample that I was reversing to check if it's a malware. The line made me chuckle, and it's so heartwarming to see someone actually made a blog on it and the fact the line has been around sinc…

Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't. I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoIm…

Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet.

Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening.

You would think that a product which did nothing but facilitate that workflow would hide, or somehow ease your pain but somehow it made it so that it never worked by default and it was your problem as "installer engineer" (aka short-straw-haver) to fix it.

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

#73

Post by greenhorn123 »

nunez wrote: post #61

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 MacO…

Hackintoshes did not necessarily steal MacOS, you could buy legit copies of MacOS.

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

#75

Post by 91edec »

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.

I was adding juice to a cockpit simulator game, a whole bunch of lerping and dampening of the position/rotation to react to user input. Didn't realise that I had abbreviated cockpitRotation -> cockRot until I submitted the pull request.

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

#76

Post by giomasce »

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…

In a functional analysis class ("analisi funzionale" in Italian, shortened "anal fun") our professor suggested us to complete an exercise using one of the most relevant theorems in the field: the dominated convergence theorem ("convergenza dominata" in Italian, shortened "con dom").

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

skykooler wrote: post #70
schoen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by baisq »

iKlsR wrote: post #13

From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it probably will appear in many other products. > Found in a InstallShield sample that I was reversing to check if it's a malware. The line made me chuckle, and it's so heartwarming to see someone actually made a blog on it and the fact the line has been around sinc…

I just checked the installer of GTA San Andreas and indeed there it is.

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

#80

Post by medstrom »

nunez wrote: post #61

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 MacO…

To clarify why that's supposed to be cool, "MZ" are the initials of Mark Zbikowski, one of the leading developers of MS-DOS.
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