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.

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

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? =)

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".

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...?

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.

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."

Duh ...

[egon]

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

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