"What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!"

As part of my job I spend quite a lot of time scanning through files and disk contents, often in hex or filtered text view, searching for specific keywords or pieces of information. This workflow means that I often have little context to what I'm viewing and that I can occasionally come across some pretty random stuff.

I can't recall now exactly what I was looking at, but I was scanning through the results of some keyword searches against a hard disk and as I was looking through the contents of a binary file, I came across the following string:

"What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!"

Now, I've spent enough time around source code and open-source software to have seen plenty of chatter and interesting things within code comments, however, this one struck me as particularly funny.

The language of this comment gives it a very informal and almost private feel, like it wasn't intended to be seen by anyone but the author - it didn't seem as if it was put there to assist or provide information for future readers or editors of the code, rather it had the feeling of a lone developer essentially ranting to themselves. It's also completely out of context within the file, with nothing else around it to indicate what it might be referring to.

I like to imagine that the author was someone who had experienced previous frustrations with mutex name conflicts in the past and whilst hopeful that such a thing would not occur this time, had accepted that in accordance with sod's law, it probably would!

I was intrigued as to who this mystery developer was, and what their issues with mutex names were, so of course I checked Google hoping to perhaps find the original source code and maybe a bit more context.

I got back a handful of results, the relevant ones being mostly blogs and forum posts, all from people who had come across the same string within an executable file and found it interesting enough to post about it. There's only about 5 different (relevant) posts in total, the earliest dating back to 2003.

Whilst the searches didn't provide me with any information about the author or context of the comment,  I must say that there is something really heart-warming about knowing that over the past 14 years a handful of people have been hunting around in the same binary file, come across the same random comment, and felt it notable enough to post about it online.

It's a long shot but one day I hope the original comment writer will see this post, and discover that their little frustrated comment about mutex names, which they probably intended for no-one to really see, is still floating around the internet 14+ years later and making random people smile :-)


Ether

P.S. a big Hello! to anyone who may have found this post as a result of also discovering the ether-rot-mutex comment within a file and searching it on Google. Welcome to the club!