Professor for one year (week 30): Device naming systems

Last week, I wrote about my private geek devices.  And I mentioned the names they have:

• heinz (the black MacBook)
• horst (the router)
• herbert (the old Toshiba)
• gunther (the other router)
• fred (the new MacBook Air)
• marlene (the old MacBook Air)
• waltraud (the work computers used for E-Learning and OldPhras)
• berta (my Nokia 6700 c)
• Fräulein Meier (the iPad)
• tippse (the Bluetooth keyboard currently paired with Heinz)

There is actually an Internet Request for Comment (RFC) on "Choosing a Name for Your Computer" (RFC 1178) from 1990.  It points out that "[e]xperience has taught us that it is as easy to choose bad names as it is to choose good ones," and goes on to list a few do's and don'ts, such as: don't use long names, don't use your own name, use words that are rarely used, use theme names.

Well, my list of names is balanced with respect to gender and age.  I don't follow a specific naming system (so no theme names), but usually come up with a name when I unbox the device.  A black MacBook just looks very maculine, while the first-generation MacBook Air surely is a feminine device because of the shape.

"marlene" and "waltraud" allude to Marlene Jaschke, my favorite stage personality of the comedian Jutta Wübbe, and her budgie.  I actually knew the name for my iPad even before unboxing it -- I wanted a meaningful signature instead of the default "sent from my iPad" signature and now it says "Von Fräulein Meier verschickt" ("sent by Fräulein Meier"). "tippse" is a derogatory term for a typist.

"heinz", "horst", and "herbert" are references to my northern German heritage.  You use those names to refer to "someone" (similar to "Tom, Dick, and Harry" in English) -- you also can refer to several unknown people by naming them Horst1, Horst2, and so on. "fred" is just another northern German male name -- as the MacBook Air is thin, it had to be a short name, and a male one because of its angular shape.

The computers I used while working at the Institute of Informatics and later the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich were named:

• keywest (when it it was a Sun workstation, until ca. 2006)
• renamed to sylt
• caipi (when it was replaced by an iMac)
• gnaegi (when I moved caipi to another office, the colloquial term for the Swiss Army Trikothemd 75, a light olive-green jumper, named after former Federal Councilor and minister of defense Rudolf Gnägi, who introduced it)

When almost everybody worked with a Sun, there was a naming system in place: workstations were named after islands (e.g., keywest, sylt, poel, utopia) and servers were named after famous composers' first names (e.g., alban, arvo, igor, gustav, nikolai, bela).  When the workstations were replaced by Macs, cocktail names were used.  So at that time, they followed themes.  However, the admins only gave names to desktop Macs.  MacBooks usually got names following the pattern "username's MacBook" -- not very creative and no theme anymore.

When I studied at Friedrich-Alexander University, the computers in the lab of the Department of Computational Linguistics (CLUE) were named after planets -- or what they assumed to be planets -- e.g., saturn, uranus, sol, terra.  Later that was changed into a naming scheme "clueXX" (with XX being the last part of the IP address).  I worked with clue21, IIRC.

In Konstanz, the iMacs in the computational linguistics lab are named after Roman emperors (e.g., augustus, vespasian, domitian, hadrian, titus, aurel, caesar) and the Mac minis after comic figures (e.g., professor-x, wicked, quicksilver, iron-lad, aurora, captain-ultra, lightspeed).  Also theme-naming here.

Names for my partner's devices at home also follow a theme: Greek mythological figures (e.g., gaia, selene, themis).  However, when I think about this theme-naming recommendation, I do follow a theme: I name my devices according to the first impression they make.

What is your naming theme?

Professor for one year (week 29): Devices galore -- am I a geek?

How many electronic devices do you use regularly?  When you go to a conference or attend a meeting, the first thing participants ask for is Internet access -- and then coffee.  So organizers estimate the number of participants, add some tolerance and then order a certain number of WiFi accounts.  When you look around, almost everybody uses a laptop.  But people have a laptop and a tablet.  So you should double the number of accounts.  And then almost everybody uses their smart phone, too.  Which triples the original estimate.  I don't have a smart phone, but I too travel with laptop and tablet (mostly because I always have to prepare some longer texts for which I prefer a real keyboard and Emacs -- while you can use an external keyboard with an iPad, Emacs is not available for iPad).

When I survey my home office, I discover a high number of computers per square meter:  A black MacBook from 2004 named Heinz, a MacBook Air from 2008 (the rounded-edge model) named Marlene, a MacBook Air from 2013 (the sharp-edge model) named Fred.  Then there is my partner's late-2008 model MacBook (named Themis) and a Celeron PC running NetBSD (named Eurus) we use for scanning -- so we do have a scanner, too (no name for this one!).  All in 10 square meters.  We have a cable modem, which is connected to an AirPort Express wireless router named Horst and a printer named Gaia also connected to the wireless network via a second AirPort Express named Gunther.  And then there are Fräulein Meier, the iPad, Laurin, the iPad Mini, Tippse, my Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Berta, my Nokia phone, floating about the entire apartment.  That's a lot and everybody is talking to everybody via WiFi or Bluetooth!  And in a corner, there is still Herbert, my old Toshiba Satellite notebook from 2001.

I use Heinz for iTunes mainly, I haven't quite finished the migration from Marlene to Fred yet -- Marlene was kind of a lemon, she got a new SSD, but this didn't fix the unexpected crashes and her refusal to install updates.  At my previous jobs, I always had a computer, too.  As I sometimes had several employments at the same times, this almost doubled the number of computers I used regularly: A Sun and later an iMac (with alternating names because of network changes) at the University of Zurich, a Dell laptop at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland named Waltraud, and after that an iMac at the University of Basel also named Waltraud.

Switching computers requires data management, like deciding where and how to access e-mail messages, and where to store documents -- I used the versioning system CVS with the repository stored on the network at UZH, so I could check out and commit drafts from anywhere.  In Konstanz, I decided to use only Fred and not another computer -- I'm also running out of names, but more on this next week -- and asked for a big screen only.