This afternoon I was just finishing up my next Effective Concurrency article (it’ll be up in a few days), when some spam email arrived. Just as my fingers’ auto-delete macro was about to fire, I noticed something odd about the name of the attachment and did a double-take:
Cool! There must be some kind of new truth-in-advertising laws for spammers.
Yes, I know that as programmers we could argue about naming all day long. We could point out that maybe “virusLoader.gif” or “exploit_exploit_muhaha.gif” would be a little better, and argue about the relative merits of camel case and underscores. But there’s no need; I think “runnable.gif” is short, clear, and definitely good enough. (Evidently someone else thought so too, and just shipped it.)
The attachment name is derived from personalised data collected on you off the internet. I guess threadpool.gif or concurrency.gif would have been too obvious… ;)