Slashdot Mirror
Funny and Irrelevant Program Names?
dentar asks: "I got into a conversation with a peer today about funny names we've given programs in the past. I have a small program I wrote for a client called omnihurl whose purpose is to get a summary listing of their last 20 omniback backups and display them. I called it that because I couldn't think of a good name when I wrote it.. It never got renamed. That program is still used every day and is about seven years old. The guy I was talking with had written a backup script named shazbot. A few years later a friend and I wrote a program that was going to be a dynamic DNS type of client and server. I couldn't think of a name for those either, so they wound up being whale and plankton. We still laugh about it. So, how's about y'all? What's the funniest thing you ever named a program? The more irrelevant to its purpose, the better."
Now, many white hat folks are affiliated with businesses or other groups who don't take kindly to running something called "satan." It looks bad in the company reports, and some take personal offense. The solution?
Many releases came with a utility which simply moved the n up a bit, renaming the built executable as "santa." :)
Why is it called Squid
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I just couldnt help myself one commercemas - I wrote a game (as you do) and based it on the whack-a-mole concept but using photos of staff.
The name sort of just popped into my head...
The only place I really spend time thinking about names is when I'm creating an API that other people need to use as opposed to a script that people use whole. Then I try to make the function name describe what the function does and if there's and if there are similar functions which use different argument types the argument as well.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
...It's kind of a running gag, we write embedded stuff so people don't really see them.
I wrote the backup/restore code, after calling backup "backup", I decided restore would be called "unbackup". =)
We've also got "spank" (it restarts everything, someone off-the-cuff had mentioned spanking the appliance after it was behaving badly).
I've also got a wrapper for forking processes in a way that matches up with the rest of our startup called "forkme".
Hrm, what else. Oh, yeah, one to remove everything in the database "smokingHole". And to get a list of understood SNMP traps, you would run the "trap-yanker".
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Oh, there are plenty of funny program names. Perhaps one of the funniest examples is on Mac OS X, where the apple gcc gives you the option of generating "fat" binaries, which are combined ppc and x86 executables (so you can run them both on x86-darwin and ppc for instance). The tool to create a single architecture "thin" binary is called "lipo" (as in liposuction..). I had a good laugh when I saw that.
Many years ago on a programming course we visited Belgium with a project based on travel and tourism - the thing was a database for booking holidays etc.
I remember the conversation from my lecturers:
Them: "Come up with the name - you're good at stuff like that."
Me: "Uh.. oookkk... how about Computer Literacy and Information Technology Organisational Relational Information System?"
Them: "That's brilliant! We really like it!"
Me: "Now there's just this one drawback..."
Webcam Body Image Total Code Hotsite Its cam site in a can
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
We have a bandwidth managagement program at work and it's called SLUICE.
n ts
Sluice
Limits
Users
In
Congested
Environme
It's only slightly worse than our SINC
Sinc
Is
Not a
Calendar
(it's a scheduling program)
I long time ago I used to get collections of programs on 5 1/4 inch disks from A.P.P.L.E (Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange)
There was a program called "The Super Himem Bit Nibbler" because, I guess it didn't do anything but take up high memory. I always got a chuckle out of the fact that it was called "Super"
Frustrated trying to get one piece of code to talk to tanother piece, I eventually wrote a middleware app I named the "ensmartenator" for the intended purpose of "ensmartenting" the two pieces' communication api's so that they could understand each other... It was supposed to be a stopgap solution until we could get somone to rewrite the communication APIs... that was about five years ago. The ensmartenator is still it's exceptionally cromulent job to this day.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I've written a program that outputs to a temporary file... to prevent overwriting other temp-files, I call it "temp2.718" -> and I call the outfile ARIZONA.
Think about it.
Because it was a python script, we were trying to match the .py. Happy, guppy, etc.
-Uberhund
Well, at work I wrote a quick utility to add debugging information to our code, and since I couldn't think of anything better I called it "debuggery". Knowing full well what buggery implies, of course.
Come a few weeks later, there's another utility to remove the debugging information. Called, of course, "rebuggery".
OK, so nothing about COBOL is funny. It meets the irrelevant criteria, though.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
if you use unix you probably use this everyday.
The pager 'less' of course is a pun on the old pager 'more'. And let's not forgot that the name Unix was chosen to replace an existing OS called MULTICS.
Photos.
Thought I'd get that in before the grammar hounds pounced.
IMP, turba, and my favorite, the http2nntp gateway called troll.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
when throwing something quick together, I call it "foo"
While I can't speak for programs themselves, a code module I wrote about 3 years ago id still kicking around -- the module is named parent_trap (because it checks the validity of parent data of children), with a hidden method named, of all things, halley_mills.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
The code name of the project was "squeaky." Spitsqueak was a piece of software that took data from a related product and spit it out in the right format. In a sense, you could say that the name was precisely descriptive, but I think it qualifies because the name of the project was completely unrelated to what it actually did.
I named a program PUD..
it was actually very relevant to what it did (I won't say what it stands for though), but alot of the techie users liked it because of the slang use of the word pud. Some of them just liked saying that they were using it just to fit the word into a conversation
zonk - sets the time stamp on Windblowsux files to 00:00, todays date.
Once prototyped a replacement interface for the 3270 based library system at a University. The program was called the:
Document Information Retreival Tool
You'd use it to scrape references from the backend. ie) digging up dirt on a particular publication.
Back in the day that every new piece of software for windows 3.1 was named win-something, my then employer used that exact same naming scheme, where the something was a shortening of the subject matter of the app.
One day we did an analysis tool for the other apps. The marketing departement got as far as actually printing brochures before noticing that maybe Win-Anal wasn't such a good name after all.....
i always enjoyed my friend's throwaway php scripts. you couldnt tell what the hell was going on, but they were funny to read:
you get the idea. ;)
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Don't know about funniest but I can certainly point out the UNfunniest software names:
VIASRA Is A Stupid Recursive Acronym
GNU's Not Unix was cute. Well, maybe. OK, not really. By the time the HURD/HIRD thing rolled around, any residual humor had long been stomped out of the practice.
Worst name? Boy, I hope they come up with an alternative to "Kroupware".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The operating-system provided debugger for CP/M was called DDT. Ostensibly this stood for Dynamic Debugging Tool, but most assumed it was a reference to the now-banned pesticide.
Not really a program, but there's this one website where a bunch of geeks discuss stuff. Apparently pretty popular. It has a pretty funny and *irrelevant* name.. what was it again...?
called robotussin that converts System V COFF libraries to BSD format.
1) luser -- stands for 'list user'. It lists the name of a user locking a database resource.
2) litlp -- the screen says it stands for 'little interface to lp', but I know it's really 'luser interface to lp'.
Man, I've read way too many BOFH stories...
We have a Java class in our software that calls the config file (the "Big Daddy" File) and submits it to the main processing engine - we call it the "Lord of The Dance" class.
ymmv
I had a korn shell script once called "AndysMakefileFixOMatic.ksh"
It's purpose was to fix a common problem in a large tree of Makefiles...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Not exactly a program name, but not totally off-topic.
While taking Beginning Pascal, we were learning about giving variables and functions meaningful names. Part of the lesson was that, if you couldn't give a function a short, meaningful name, it was probably doing too much all by itself or its actual task was unclear.
Anyway, it was the intention of one of my fellow students to name his main function (the one that did all the work of his program) "do it". Nice and short and, yes, it describes what the function does (that being "it"). Obviously, no spaces allowed, so this ended up as "Doit".
Instructor upon reading this source code: "What the hell is a doit?" (sounds like "voit")
I've liked that indentifier ever since, and always pronounce it sounding like "voit".
Perhaps you had to be there.
cygnuhchur
The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. It was named after the dog of Heidi Stettner. He died in August 1993, at 15.
For some reason many of the scripts which maintain our archives were simply named after women. We have katie, linda, etc. Makes zero sense when you are trying to remember what script does what.
...but in an automated invoicing system written for my current clients, the main invoicing function call is, of course, Invoice-O-Matic() :-)
No
fuckem.sh
null routes the top 10 abusers of our mail system.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Or even BitchX. Maybe you login to bitch!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
In college I interned in the international systems department for a company, which has OMS (Order Management System), DMS (Distributor Management System), IMS (Inventory Management System), and another *MS, but I forget. Well, my boss had a pet project he wanted done which was to control the parameters between all the systems and be able to handle parameters between sites. Well, the parameter management system was the final name of my project as it neared completion.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
That table was called guzinta because it listed which module "goes into" this one.
it stood for Service Measure: Accuracy and Quality. We twisted the name just to fit it into the acronym. It was just a simple app that measured how well a phone call to our 800 number went.
A quick program to merge two types of Database tables:
The Super Helpful Information Tool.
a.out
:)
I keep 'em straight by remembering filesizes
I used to get a kick out of naming Boolean class status variables bFailin (in Hungarian notation) so I could write VB code like:
...
Dim myXYZ As CXYZClass
myXYZ.DoSomething
If myXYZ.bFailin Then
Before you flame my coding style (lack of proper error handling, using Hungarian notation for class members, etc.), this was a long time ago and I know better now. But the code is kinda funny...
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
One of the most stupid names I have seen is Unwise.exe. Basically, it's the uninstaller program for the Wise Installation program. Being probably the second most common installer (next to InstallShield) you ought to find a copy of it on most Windows computers.
Anyway, if you don't know what it is, many people seem to think it's a virus or something (and it didn't help when Norton identified it as one).
Have you read my journal today?
One our computers, which had a nagios/Openview like program on it that monitored and checked the other stuff was called edgar, named after J. Edgar Hoover.
Not a program, I know but...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
We were supposed to write something which was to raise the productivity of salespeople.
;)
First it was just a training tool. Then it was used to create quotes and toss them into the backend systems. Then to look up customer history. Then it became a CRM apps.
I called it RUST, because it was a Randomly Useful Sales Tool. It was also an old crufty hack, which fit since things that are rusty are often old and kludgy.
The name has stuck since, and I believe the company still relies on the system. No reported bugs in 18 months, but it was written without a spec and in less than a month. Huge hack.
-----
seeing as astonishingly, nobody's mentioned it:
I love Nero burning ROM. What a brilliant name, with an icon of the Colosseum afire too.
Personally, when I got a job due to my knowledge of C++ and ended up coding in VB, I started making functions of AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs and SomeoneSetUpUsTheBomb. I gave up though as they're difficult to spell and remember. They were only called twice and still played hell.
I learnt from this two things.
(a) It's not big
(b) It's not clever
But it's so funny when you're working and you're bored shitless.
alias sex='chmod a+x'
There's no shot like a cheapshot and there's no kill like an overkill.
Later on this system was renamed. One of the print production managers thought the best way to visualize how the system works was to use the concept of a tank (as in bucket or trough) that all of our data is thrown into and we can go and retrieve it. So our system is now called the Digital Tank.
This is great except for the fact that tank can mean different things like, 'The project tanked.' Or the project is like a giant lumbering hunk of steel that is soooo slllooooow.
Its funny, we are an ad agency. We have copywriters that come up with award winning commericals. But when it comes to naming our own internal software, we can't think of shit.
1;
Ten years ago I wrote some code for spatial data analysis using the Splus package. I called it 'splancs', which stood for 'spatial analysis code in S-plus', but also included the 'lancs' part from Lancaster University which is where I work. Double bonus.
So this summer I get invited over to University Of Western Australia to work on a similar project. We argue for days over the name! Eventually I realise we need a name that keeps the 'splancs' nature.
SpUWA.
I even designed a logo - a big yellow splodge representing the area of a point pattern of data composed of small orange and green chunks. But strangely this was too coarse even for the Australians. Pah. We agreed to call it 'Rasp' (R Analysis of Spatial Patterns) but in true Mozilla fashion, pronounce it 'Spuwa!'.
Baz
OK this may be a little OT...
I used to own trav.com, which in and of itself makes sense, since Travis is my name. However I got quite a few random emails from people in Sweden who visited my site. "Why Sweden?" I kept asking myself. Then I found out...
In Swedish, "trav" roughly translates to "trot." A popular sport in Sweden is horse racing, but the kind where the jockey rides in a small carriage behind the horse. This is known as "trotting." So fans would check trav.com expecting a horse racing site.
I had used an irrelevant name without even knowing it! Pretty funny huh??
OK maybe you had to be there.
Travis
P.S. Can anyone who knows Swedish language and culture verify any of this?
Neither of them mine:
TWAIN - Toolkit Without an Important Name
cat.schroedinger - sometimes it would cat your file, other times it wouldn't
-Josh
When I worked for a dotcom company and we were going through some layoffs I had to write a script that basically did someone's job who had been let go (of course, their duties fell on me... and I had no time to manually do them.) It took 3-4 days to write/debug/polish and the result was 10x better than when the actual person was doing the job by hand.
;)
It later became a joke when we were talking about new projects that would "help" people do their jobs (instead of them manually doing something, the computer would do most of it), causing their job to become redundant and they wouldn't be needed anymore.
-riclewis
TWAIN, the scanner interface used in windows..
Technology Without An Interesting Name.
worth a chuckle.
I post links to stuff here
I don't know about program names, but sometimes I name generic error handling routines "BadThingHappen".
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
I once wrote a group task and schedule tracker which we called Basic Daily Schedule Manager. It really whipped our office into shape.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
As I understand it, Microsoft's Automatic Updates utility was originally called the Critical Update Notification Tool. They quickly changed this one.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
It's amusing to speculate why someone thought bighonking.c should become a.out.
-jpeg
It's called windows 95. I mean whats it got to do with what it's name is. I've been waiting for 8 years, and that window STILL isn't washed. Biggest waste of money ever.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
I made a program called Gorilla. It's a database front-end for searching and modifying records and such...nothing to do with Gorillas, but I was sick of seeing "tool" or "utility" used in program names. I also have another program called Radium. No explanation other than: it sounded good.
I've had to do a lot of iterative numerical programming, and had to check each iteration against the minimum tolerance value.
To this day, code reviewers want to know (about my tolerance value) "What's this constant NATS_S supposed to mean?"
(Hint: read it slowly)
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... can't we just go to Starbuck's for coffee?
Data General's AOS/VS operating system had an undocumented command named "XYZZY." In the original 16-bit version, the response was: "Nothing happens." In a later 32-bit version, this was amended to: "Twice as much nothing happens."
Later they changed "Tool" to "Utility" but we had already laughed at them.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
People routinely cracked up when I discussed this tool because I pronounced it "testicle."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
There used to be a company called PC DOCS, who wrote a Document Management System called DOCS Open. The company was purchased by Hummingbird, and they have an updated version called PowerDOCS.
/XYZZY, it gets you into the sort-of-undocumented super-user design mode. I say sort-of-undocumented because, although the parameter is documented as a means of getting into the super-user mode, the additional functionality that it gives you is not documented, so you get to play guess-what-this-checkbox-does.
There's a Designer program used to customize the software -- add fields to the database, change the appearance of the forms, that sort of thing. If you start the Designer program with a command line parameter
Most irrelevant software name? Wouldn't that be Microsoft Works?
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
I had to write a project management & time tracking app for in-house use, a couple years ago. Since I hate the idea of recording every second of my time, I decided to call it Personal Interface for the Graphical Control Of Projects, an homage to Duke Nukem.
;)
Unfortunately, the Duke Nukem reference would become a curse, as it's still in development, with no specified release date (when it's done, damnit!). It also spawned a slimmer web-based cousin called PORKCHOP, but I'd have to hunt through some documentation to remember what that was supposed to stand for
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
A friend of mine (who went by Uber-Jedi) once wrote a program that did some simple image manipulation for something he was working, and called it uj-image. That doesn't sound that odd at first, but the interesting part is how you pronounce it. It's pronounced "you-ja-maje".. where the "maje" is similar to the Canandian (French i think, Avid always say's it's Canandian) "image", like in SoftImage. (yes, lots of people think it's "soft image", it's not.. :))
That one always made for some fun. It saved in .uj files.
He also wrote a program that would play mp3's from inside Jedi Knight II, which was called something simple like JKMusic. However what was intersting was that when it started up it played a wave from the JKII game, with Lando going "You ok?". It had plalist files. They were .uok files.
http://www.reddwarf-central.com/files/polymorph.t
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
I had to make a pair of custom interface boards a few years back. I named them "Jake" and "Elwood". We used them for quite a while, and so conference calls were quite amusing at times. When we made a new pair of boards, the new names were Boris and Natasha. Being asked "Is Natasha ready to back up Boris?" in meetings was an interesting question. I had considered naming the boards Tom and Jerry, but one manager involved in the project was named Tom, so it was not a viable name.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I wrote a biff-like mail checker for Windows named Ham. If you really wanted to, you could claim it was a recursive acronym for "Ham is an Automatic Mailchecker", but I really just wanted to be able to say, "Oh look, Ham says I have new mail."
I'm not a seasoned web developer, but doesn't apache have a spell-checking module called 'mod_speling'?
(note the missing 'l')
too funnie...
Our company's naming convention for software is words to do with ice. Our mail server is called "igloo"; our web tools are "gelid"; our network monitoring system is "icecube". There's no reason to the names, other than being ice-related.
-Stephen
I worked for a large media company, and some of the developers came up with some pretty good names.
They had a sproc that would go do whatever you told it to, and it was called sprocbitch(), but was later changed to sprocstar().
They had another tool called ASS (forgot what it stood for) and another called PHAT (Publishing something something Tool)
I had a perl script that watched some processes and restarted them if they died called babysitter.pl.
They also had the HOG (Hand of God) that watched processes on servers and whacked them if they got out of hand.
There were some others, but I forgot them all.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I wrote an app for a client to handle contact forms a bit like FormMail in PHP that I named Phirst Contact.
WebDAV client that uses an FTP commandline GUI.
I always wanted to write a program named "chowder" that was advertised as the end-all be-all of applications but which came with no documentation and was nearly impossible to use, so everyone who downloaded it would at one point or another have to type "man chowder"
:-P
"...In the original 16-bit version, the response was: "Nothing happens." In a later 32-bit version, this was amended to: "Twice as much nothing happens."
If "Nothing happens" in a 16-bit program, then in the 32-bit version, it should be "65536 times as much nothing happens."
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
i work for a telco and one of the apps we run is called bigbrother ................ tell me someone doesnt have a sense of humor
xyzzy advent
Oddly enough the first result of this search, results in you being whisked to a random page.
What's so funny about a program called y?
...
Well, its function is to print this to the screen: You may as well stop typing now.
rm: remove regular file `file101'? y
rm: remove regular file `file102'? y
rm: remove regular file `file103'? y
rm: remove regular file `file104'? y
~> y
You may as well stop typing now.
~> y
You may as well stop typing now.
~> y
You may as well stop typing now.
~> y
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
A friend of mine wrote an algorithm for a QA system called 'diet' for his Master's thesis. Several support tools having names like 'trim', 'lowfat', etc. were added to the set. This QA system placed in the top of the world in TREC 9 and 10...Of course, the name was changed for the paper to something a bit more academically professional...
Unfortunately none of the ones I've been involved in were as obscene as some of the posts here..
There was one that was written to automate the loading of data, called getLoaded
I'm still looking for a reason to implement something called "necklace" in Perl. Maybe an object that creates a linked list (like Judoscript)?
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Smalltalk had a "doit" button, but in the fonts common on our systems, it looked like "dolt"
I wrote a program to do hardware-assisted color calibration, the hardware guys didn't grok software, and while they wanted a 12x9 grid of RGB colorimeter values, they thought it would be easier to write a program to read one red square first (never heard of a "for loop"? And the colorimeter could read RGB as easily as R). So I called it "Gorky"
I know of someone who used "snoopy" as a sample file name (like "foo") in a customer demo - when the customer requirements came back, the data format had been named "snoop"
I briefly had code that tested the booleans "scroll and noScroll" (meant something like "scrollbar hit, but nothing to scroll" IIRC). I put a comment next to it - "or tea and no tea" (HHGttG game ref, for the children out there)
I used to work for Homes & Land Publishing Corporation in the pre-press and printing area. The business was to print those free Homes for sale type magazines found at grocery stores and real estate offices nationwide. The model was that associate publishers would sell ads containing pictures of houses and real estate agents, and sometimes pictures or mug shots would run in more than one sequential issue of the magazine.
We called that process a "pickup", the goal being to "pick up" the photo exactly as it was printed in the previous issue for the future issue. This was in the days before extremely large disk arrays were prevalent, and so the pickup process used to be done slowly, and manually.
When we automated the process, I wrote the program, and called it bounty. It took about a year before it announced its presence in the form of some bug or another that it couldn't recover from, and someone asked me what bounty was. After fixing the problem, they asked why it was called bounty - thinking of all the other meanings of bounty: a reward for capture of a criminal, the HMS Bounty, etc.
I said, it's Bounty... you know, the Quicker Picker-Upper.
I left shortly thereafter to come work for Simutronics, purveyors of fine role-playing games at http://www.play.net
-andy
Way back in the days of 8.3 DOS, VisualWorks Smalltalk had L&F emulation (yeah, before Swing). The directory for the code nearly shipped as "emulation", until somebody noticed the name on Windows (and pronounced it as something you'd do to the previous post).
Meanwhile, back in reality, a manpage is considered to be documentation.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I stuck a script in my path named "lsd", a typo I constantly make. It runs the command "ls | rot13".
--
est modus in rebus
shut up.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I worked for a large company where an in-house tool for resetting NTs passwords and unlocking accounts (pathetically stupid users. The kind that forget to breathe) from a single console app was called "bioya".
/?
I used it for about a month, not giving any thought to the name, until one day in a fit of boredom I did
bioya
Usage: Blow it out your ass [domain\username]
I got a chuckle every time I used that program for the rest of that contract.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
ever wondered what the f stands for ?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
When I started working in a firmware test lab, we had an email address that you could send large numbers of large test emails to, and they would all just get deleted. It was called 'tester'.
After several misunderstandings resulting in lost email, I renamed the account 'blackhole'.
A grad student whose claim to fame was having the moderator of alt.sex.stories forget to remove the student's name on a posting came up with our project name: Whip Me.
We Handle Interactive Pattern Mapping Efficiently.
-----
Klactovedestene!
Yeah, but it's not so bad if you move it to /etc/rcS.d
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Here you go.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Oh wait, you wanted funny... sorry
Makes zero sense when you are trying to remember what script does what.
I can never remember the differences between my women, either.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Bitrape, DivX bitrate calculator... (hwhq.com)
We are all Gods unwanted children. Did you ever consider he may hate you too?
Ok, mine isn't terribly clever or anything, but I'll share it anyway. I wrote a little program once for the company my girlfriend worked for to monitor some servers for certain files that were getting transferred to them by mistake. They called the process "black hole monitoring" because these 4 servers seemed to be like black holes for the files. They hadn't managed to figure out what the problem was, and they didn't seem to be trying. They had her and a few of her co-workers monitoring the servers and writing up some sort of problem reports for the files. So, getting to the point, I wrote the little program and didn't know what to call it, so I named it Cygnus, after the U.S.S. Cygnus from the movie The Black Hole. See, told ya it wasn't terribly clever :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Meanwhile, back in reality, a manpage is considered to be documentation.
and in this same wonderful place called reality, typing "man " does not mean a manpage for has to exist. 1) It was a joke; 2) if you're going to criticize it, READ.
So because there is no manpage, people everywhere are going to type "man chowder", yes, perfect sense there. But then, maybe after reading in full the vast multitude of words comprising your post, I had still missed something. So, what is it that I would have seen if I possessed your incredibly superior intellect?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
thanks for the semantic gymnastics. If by "incredibly superior intellect" you mean "basic literacy", then you would've seen just what I mentioned; that typing "man something" does not mean that a manpage for "something" exists. That seemed to be clear by inference in the parent.
you know, being that it's nearly 5am and I havent slept in a while, it took me an inordinate amount of time to realize that we're having a flamewar over a joke that was crappy to begin with. Sorry, pal - if I were over there and you didnt throw me out of your house for showing up unnanounced at five in the morning, I'd buy you a beer. Unfortunately, the best I can do now is a virtual beer. Cheers.
One user made the jump into the software development group. He was responsible for a lot of these now-critical macros. He had feared the macros would become important to daily processing, being used by people who didn't really understand them (and the afforementioned limitiations didn't help), so he chose some names that he hoped would indicate to the user that they probably shouldn't rely so heavily on those macros.
The best name was shitstorm, but another favorite of mine was trainwreckwaitingtohappen. In another macro, if the operation encountered an error, this was communicated by a clipart eagle swooping down across the spreadsheet, ripping off a clipart businessman's head, and shitting down his neck. (While the sysadmins restricted storage quotas, they did install the vast waste of space that is the MS Office clipart library.) The clipart one is something of an underground classic among the programmers around here.
Eventually he (wisely) quit and went to work somewhere else. To this day those same macros are busily doing whatever it is they do, rude and portentous filenames intact, and the users refuse to fund a project to decypher the macros and write a proper application. (Bad because the macros are starting to fail... trainwreckwaitingtohappen is particularly shaky these days...)
Oh well, he tried to warn them...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
dunno where they came from, but lately I'm in the habit of naming temporary variables and data:
as in:coco, mimi, nounou...
A friend of mine wrote a safe memory allocation function.
The name? SmartAlloc
Your credit card information wants to be free.
I once wrote an animated screen demo system in a weekend. Because of the unrealistic project deadlines, I named it Mathew's Amazing Demo. I gave the data files the extension .MAD.
.MAD file extension and demanded that it be changed.
.MFD.
Everyone was delighted that I actually got the job done, but marketing objected to the
So naturally, it was changed to
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Oracle's Real Application Clusters product may not be that great of a name given the current political situation. (Try saying the full name of the product fast.)
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
Once wrote a language for specifying state machines for communication software. Internally, I had decided to name every project after genera of opisthobranchs (sea slugs) that I had observed while scuba diving. I called the language and compiler Rostanga. Due to a lack of creativity in our marketing and executive talent, it never got renamed and the compiler shipped with that name.
When I was developing a web site, as sort of a joke I called my style sheet HolySheet.css.
As in "This is the Holy Style Sheet upon which all documents rely" and the obvious joke play on words to go with that.
Imagine my surprise when that document showed up with the most hits on the site usage reports! (Since it's used from every page)
Needless to say it was promptly changed.
I also once wrote (or started to write) a software delivery program I called Milkman.exe
Many times at work when we talk about backup plans if anything were to ever happen to someone, and the phrase used is always...
Okay, suppose someone gets hit by a bus on the way to work tomorrow.
So now all emergency backup procedures are referenced as HBB.
Nobody ever leaves their house at 5AM, that's why nobody ever leaves their house at 5AM. Such is annoying.
/at least/ the level of inteligence you'd get from screaming "Jesus is a fag!!" [or, conversly, "Jesus is not a fag!!"] in order to get a responce.
Me on the other hand, I just get bored no matter what time it is. Arguing about important things get people all excited for no reason. It's much better to pick something random to get a person to go "ah", about. Would anyone change their mind about Jesus being a fag? Of course not. But telling somebody that they made what ammounts to nothing more than a typo? I have discovered the ultimate secret of winning arguments.
Most people, if you shove them, will shove back. Even if it doesnt fucking matter. So a debate of
And you can win. Getting an electronic version of something I wouldnt accept a non-electronic version of counts as winning to me.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I work for a large university doing some part time development. My boss and I like to come up with fun names for our projects.
My favorite is "NASTI" - The Nightly Apache STatistical Information generator. Its a big name for a pretty simple perl script that uses Sawmill to parse Apache logs into pretty looking statistics pages.
My boss' pet project is "Dominate"... The name has almost nothing to do with the project.
http://chrismetcalf.net
MOFO = MP3 sOng File Organizer.
A simple Windoze app to scan CDR's for *.mp3 files, then catalog them in an Acc3ss database. I actually tried really hard to come up with this goofy name...
@sshatrack
present it then
Penny Arcade calls their new RSS feed the "News Fucker 3000", which of course is a take off of their hella funny Fruit Fucker 2000.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I've been adding a bit of code to all my perls as a "signature" for quite a few years now. It's so I can name every program suffixed "with kung foo action grip" It prints an ascii art picture of a kung fu fist...I tried to post the source code here but was slammed for lameness. It's funny when some asks me what the "-foo" option does. 100% irrelevant
I once wrote a script that would kill all the data in the database without deleting the tables.
It was called "NeutronBomb"
Don't ask me why we called it this -- I have no idea.
The funny thing was that we didn't use our power for evil. All we ever did was kill runaway processes, fix unsecure directory permissions (e.g., they had /usr/spool/mail at 0777), and
shit like that.
There is a -u option if you get unicos. Might have to pay a bit for the hardwar though...
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
I've heard of an editor called EINE (German for One) - EINE Is Not Emacs.
The second version was called ZWEI (German for Two) - ZWEI Was EINE Initially.
These are not mine, but the guys at Lucas Arts had the habit of naming their utilities after gross body fluids. The best known being S.C.U.M.M. Sript Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion.
Others were something like SPUTUM or PHLEGM, but I don't remember exactly what they were used for. One time, they even used a word, someone thought to be a body fluid, but after looking it up, they were so grossed out, they changed the name (if I remember correctly it was the description for very smelly poo a newborn does right after birth or something like that).
I haven't written anything, but I find it quite funny that Red Hat 8 has a package called cannalibs...
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
Maybe we could impliment this option and try to unmount the volume first ;)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Patient Evaluation Networked Information System
We had to shorten it to PEIS
I read a program written in BASIC for the BBC computer (made by Acorn, before the RISC). The keyword to define a procedure is PROC.
This code included a delay procedure called PROC rastinate.