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."

Comments

Satan meets Santa

[mcgroarty]

I didn't write it, obviously. But there's a security auditing tool called "satan" which probes a system for many known vulnerabilities. It was originally a black hat tool, as I understand it, but it was adopted by the white hat crowd for testing their own systems.

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." :)

Re:Satan meets Santa

[eXtro]

It never was a black hat tool, it was written by Dan Farmer as a tool. His intentions were to use it to secure the hatches on your own systems but it was equally possible to use it to detect exploitable weaknesses in other peoples systems.

Re:Satan meets Santa

[Hitch]

actually, satan isn't really developed any more. there's another program now - don't know if this one is still being developed either, or whether the code was forked, resurrected, or what - but the successor to satan was called "saint". I liked that one.

Don't forget Squid

[linuxwrangler]

Why is it called Squid

Always, I hate naming things

[eXtro]

I've always hated naming programs, and I've really hated the habit that people have where I work of trying to shoehorn an acronym into some silly name. So I just name them whatever happens to be on my mind at the time. I have a perl script that takes a circuit's netlist and generates a directed acyclic graph called encephalitis. I have another that pulls a waveform out of an analog circuit simulation called clusterfuck.

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.

Obvious one?

[Dr. Bent]

fsck

I always lemented that there wasn't a -u option

Re:Obvious one?

[mister_jpeg]

unconfirmed:

DMR: So fsck was originally called something else.
Q: What was it called?
DMR: Well, the second letter was different.
Dennis M. Ritchie, Usenix, June 18, 1998.

--

We've got a ton where I work...

[Ranger Rick]

...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".

lipo fat binaries

[topologist]

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.

*cackle*

[skinfitz]

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..."

Re:*cackle*

[Ranger Rick]

Me: "Now there's just this one drawback..."

What, can't find it? =)

Good one

[gnovos]

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.

So far...

[Badge 17]

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.

Debugging utility program

[cjhuitt]

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".

GGB509

[alacqua]

OK, so nothing about COBOL is funny. It meets the irrelevant criteria, though.

Unix is full of them

[metalhed77]

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.

Modules?

[Xunker]

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.

Software named win-something

[Bothari]

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.....

swears

[gyratedotorg]

i always enjoyed my friend's throwaway php scripts. you couldnt tell what the hell was going on, but they were funny to read:

function goddamnit ($fuck) {
if ($fuck) {
$you_shithead = 'something';
}
return $you_shithead;
}

you get the idea. ;)

CP/M's debugger

[Krelnik]

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.

slashdot

[glenstar]

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...?

There's a GNU utility...

[3waygeek]

called robotussin that converts System V COFF libraries to BSD format.

Once...

[FroMan]

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.

My own tool

[moc.tfosorcimgllib]

A quick program to merge two types of Database tables:

The Super Helpful Information Tool.

All of my programs have the same name.

[trentfoley]

a.out

I keep 'em straight by remembering filesizes :)

Do variable names count?

[cmpalmer]

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...

Unwise.exe

[Chacham]

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).

Computer name

[tigersha]

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...

Obligatory, but . . .

[TinheadNed]

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.

No Joke

[digerata]

I work for an Ad Agency and we wrote a system to manage all of our video and print files. The latest buzzword for that concept is Digital Asset Management. So when we went about creating the administration module, we decided to call it the Grand Organizational Directorate for Digital Asset Management.

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.

How about a domain name?

[travisbecker]

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?

Mark.asp

[Boba001]

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. ;)

Re:biff

[PD]

There's more to the story. The real dog Biff used to bark at the mailman, and that's how Heidi knew when she got mail (snail mail). So what do you call the program that issues a notification that you have e-mail? Of course, you call it biff. That's biff's job, after all.

TWAIN

[einstein]

TWAIN, the scanner interface used in windows..

Technology Without An Interesting Name.

worth a chuckle.

Here's one

[cybermage]

I once wrote a group task and schedule tracker which we called Basic Daily Schedule Manager. It really whipped our office into shape.

Critical Updates

[Webmoth]

As I understand it, Microsoft's Automatic Updates utility was originally called the Critical Update Notification Tool. They quickly changed this one.

An oldie but a goodie - xyzzy

[kireK]

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."

From the Beast itself

[Thing 1]

My favorite came directly from Microsoft, when they wrote a utility for their WindowsUpdate.com site. They called it the "Critical Update Notification Tool."

Later they changed "Tool" to "Utility" but we had already laughed at them.

Re:Personal coding standard

[Trinn]

My [meager] karma will burn on this one but I just don't get it. Care to clarify?

Duh ...

[egon]

Most irrelevant software name? Wouldn't that be Microsoft Works?

PIGCOP

[SlightlyMadman]

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 ;)

a program called y

[oever]

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