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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."
...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!!!
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.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
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..."
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".
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.
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.....
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.
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
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.