{"id":7151,"date":"2016-04-24T01:56:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T05:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7151"},"modified":"2016-04-26T19:03:46","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T23:03:46","slug":"the-rule-of-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7151","title":{"rendered":"The Rule of Names"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is an entirely silly post about the way I name the machines in my house, shared for the amusement of my regulars.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The house naming theme is &#8220;comic mythical beasts&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>My personal desktop machine is always named &#8220;snark&#8221;, after Lewis Carroll&#8217;s &#8220;Hunting of the&#8221;.  This has been so since long before adj. &#8220;snarky&#8221; and vi. &#8220;to snark&#8221; entered popular English around the turn of the millennium.  I do not find the new layer of meaning inappropriate.<\/p>\n<p>Currently snark is perhaps better known as the Great Beast of Malvern, but whereas &#8220;snark&#8221; describes its role, &#8220;Beast&#8221; refers to the exceptional capabilities of this particular machine.<\/p>\n<p>One former snark had two Ethernet ports.  Its alias through the second IP address was, of course, &#8220;boojum&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>My laptop is always &#8220;golux&#8221;, from James Thurber&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_13_Clocks\">The Thirteen Clocks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The bastion host (mail and DNS server) is always &#8220;grelber&#8221;, after the insult-spewing Grelber from the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Broom-Hilda\">Broom Hilda<\/a> comic strip.  It&#8217;s named not for the insults but because Grelber is depicted as a lurking presence inside a hollow log with a mailbox on the top.<\/p>\n<p>Cathy&#8217;s personal desktop machine is always &#8220;minx&#8221; after a pretty golden-furred creature from Infocom&#8217;s classic Zork games, known for its ability to sniff out buried chocolate truffles.<\/p>\n<p>The router is &#8220;quintaped&#8221;, a five-legged creature supposed to live on a magically concealed island <a href=\"http:\/\/harrypotter.wikia.com\/wiki\/Quintaped\">in the Potterverse<\/a>.  Because it has 5 ports, you see.<\/p>\n<p>The guest machine in the basement (distinct from the mailserver) is &#8220;hurkle&#8221; after the title character in Theodore Sturgeon&#8217;s <cite>The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast<\/cite> (1949).<\/p>\n<p>For years we had a toilet-seat Mac (iBook) I&#8217;d been given as a gift (it&#8217;s long dead now).  We used it as a gaming machine (mainly &#8220;Civilization II&#8221; and &#8220;Spaceward Ho&#8221;). It was &#8220;billywig&#8221;, also <a href=\"http:\/\/harrypotter.wikia.com\/wiki\/Billywig\">from the Potterverse<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I have recently acquired 3 Raspberry Pis (more about this in a future post).  The only one of them now in use is currently named &#8220;whoville&#8221;, but that is likely to change as I have just decided the sub-namespace for Pis will be Dr. Seuss <em>creatures<\/em> &#8211; lorax, sneetch, zax, grinch, etc.<\/p>\n<p>That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is an entirely silly post about the way I name the machines in my house, shared for the amusement of my regulars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7158,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions\/7158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}