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."

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." :)

Don't forget Squid

[linuxwrangler]

Why is it called Squid [squid-cache.org]

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

--

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.