The reason puns are so misunderstood is because they lack the key to any good joke: a clearly defined toolset that allows audiences to meaningfully scrutinize them with rigorous objective analysis. This changes now.

Below you will find a framework for pun evaluation. It consists of three core concepts:

• Dimensionality (D), reflecting the complexity of a pun.
• Degree (º), measuring the number of isolated components of a pun.
• Level (L), expressing the number of linguistic facets used to represent all angles of a pun.

Pun Dimensionality

It’s the night before the big game and the star pitcher is at his locker when he hears clucking coming from the equipment room. Intrigued, he walks over, turns on the light, and immediately recoils: the floor is teeming with chickens! They’ve been there all day, and equipment is completely covered in chicken poop. On the wall hangs the emblem of the opposing team. He runs to the hallway to catch the attention of a patrolling umpire. The umpire comes in, looks at the shower room, and shouts “Foul Play!!!”

– “Chickenball”, a 3-Dimensional Pun by Paul Schultz

The dimensionality of a pun is the number of meaningful interpretations, minus one. If a pun has two possible interpretations, it is a one-dimensional pun. Three interpretations? two-dimensional. TEN interpretations? That’s obviously impossible.

For example, the boring phrase “I solved the garbage problem” is a zero-dimentional (0-D) pun. That is to say it is not a pun at all. Embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the phrase “I salved the garbage problem” is a 1-D pun, because “salve” is an old way of saying “salvage!” In this case the speaker didn’t just solve the garbage problem, but they did so by wandering around collecting it for meaningful reuse. Amazing!

You could add yet another layer by saying “I salved the makeup department’s garbage problem,” which uses the whole “ointment” spin to make it a 2-D pun.

This feels rewording already.

In physics dimensionality reflects complexity, with each added dimension opening powerful new ways to navigate a concept or space. This means that physics is really just the science of…

Puns are a great way to lighten the mood.

Pun Degree

Transporting young gulls across a staid lion for immoral porpoises.

– “So this guy”, a 3rd Degree Pun by Peter Schickele

In the United States, the seriousness of certain crimes and injuries (broken bones, burns, murder, Kevin Bacon, etc.) can be measured in terms of degree. The higher the degree, the more intense the affliction.

A pun’s degree is defined as the number of individual sub-puns contained in the joke. It reflects the number of “jokes” that are being coherently strung together to form a single masterpiece. Finally a situation where quality and quantity are one and the same!

Let’s consider the following pun and see what we can do to increase its degree: “When stuck on the beach you can always eat a sandwich.” This is a delicious one degree (1º) pun because beaches have sand, but also people eat sandwiches.

We can do better by shifting the scene and adding some more descriptive text, resulting in a 2º pun: “When playing golf if you’re stuck in a bunker you can always eat a sandwich, but be careful: the bread’s crust might be coarse.”

• Pun 1: Bunkers are a type of hazard in golf, often containing ample amounts of sand.
• Pun 2: You play golf on a golf course, the texture of bread crust can be coarse.

Time to go all in by playing up the golf setting and taking a swing at a 3º pun: “When playing golf, if you’re stuck in a bunker you can always eat a sandwich, but it might be hazardous: the bread’s crust will be coarse!”

• Pun 3: bunkers are a type of golf hazard, coarse bread can be really tough on your gums, man.

Clearly this could go on forever, so why stop?

“War is hell. I remember one time when ten of us were holed up in one bunker on an abandoned country club and I decided to eat a sandwich, it was sub par because the bread’s crust was coarse; I wasn’t gunning to take another bite but my commander wouldn’t lettuce fight on an empty stomach.”

Note: the dimensionality of a compound pun is the maximum dimensionality of the individual sub puns.

Pun Level

A French company was designing the look of their product’s chat system. After days of deliberation it became obvious that there is more than one way to skin a chat.

– “Skin a Chat”, a Level 2 pun by Todd Eichel

When someone says something smart and you don’t understand them, you quietly sigh, shake your head, and say “I’m obviously not on your level.” Take the inverse of everything in the previous sentence and it becomes directly applicable to puns.

A pun’s level is the number of unique linguistic facets needed to communicate the full complexity of the pun, minus one. Calculating a pun’s level takes practice. It involves going through each facet type and determining whether or not it has been invoked.

The following facets can contribute to a pun’s level:

• Hidden structure — inserting or removing components of the sentence results in a new relevant meaning. (e.g. “that amazing gargoyle (is made of) rocks”)
• Lateral manipulations — modifying key words to form other words through the shifting / replacement of letters or sounds. This includes puns grounded in rhymes and typos. (e.g. “I don’t think it’s bare that public nudity is a crime.”)
• Portmanteaus — forming (or inventing) a new word using two or more relevant words (e.g. “geochordinates let you translate a location to music.”)
• Language modulations — invoking a relevant definition of a word in another language. (e.g. “hola at me”)
• Simple heterograph — implying two distinct words that sound the same, where both have relevant meanings. (e.g. “I can’t tell weather or not it is raining.”)
• Dual definitions — using two uniquely relevant meanings of the same word. (e.g. “that NASCAR driver really raced out of here”)
• Contextual binding — unnecessarily choosing a word based on a contextual topic or domain that has been established outside of the pun itself. (e.g. most of the times when someone says “no pun intended”)
• Slant references — artificially incorporating a common or locally known phrase (colloquialism, idiomatic, etc.) into a sentence. (e.g. “I know you hate accessories, but don’t kill the messenger bag”)

Many puns are level zero. Rightfully so.

Note: the level of a compound pun is equal to the total number of unique facets used across all of its sub puns, minus one

Additional Concepts

• Stable / Unstable Facets — although all facets can stand on their own, some are more common among higher level puns. Stable facets are more likely to exist within a Level 0 pun, while unstable facets are more likely to require another facet to form a pun.
• Imaginary Puns — imaginary puns require a change to reality itself (excluding language) in order to make sense. They are measured in distance, with distance being the smallest number of required changes. (e.g. if your coworker were to say “you must have a lot of brass to say something so bold” it would probably not be a pun. But if reality were different, and you played french horn, it would be a (1-D, 1º, L0) pun).
• Unpuns — an unpun is a phrase that feels like it should be a pun, but has no valid facets. These are also known as “Level -1 Puns.” (for example: “We all know that PUN stands for Play UN words”)
• Pun Space: a pun space is the graphical representation of parsed phrases (vertices), interconnected by linguistic facets (edges) that perform translation. Pun spaces make it possible to mathematically describe the way a pun fits into its neighboring tapestry of language.

Practical Applications / Concluding Thoughts

The Puntitled Framework is being freely offered to the world for the betterment of humanity. It is my hope that you will take these concepts and apply them for social and professional gain. As a consumer you are now able to deterministically quantify the puns you are exposed to. In the age of information overload this empowers you to make better decisions about where to get your information and who to continue to publicly associate with. Most importantly, as a pun maker you can use the structure provided by this framework to dramatically increase the quality, complexity, and impact of your puns.

Aside from these obvious personal applications, this framework has the potential to redefine most industries through the optimization and automated discovery of puns. The ideas introduced here will inject new life into the fields of social computing, natural language processing, political debate, robotics, journalism, and probably even international diplomacy.

Now go spread the word and make some puns.

“Bonus” Material

I asked people to draw puns; here they are.

Pun Exquisite Corpse (by Amanda Nedham, Kyle Hittmeier, Jeremy Merrill, Michael Coreg, Ted Han, @Vwampage, Tom Bilecki, and Ben Chartoff)

And the winning illustration:

“Make America Grate Again” by Robert Maguire

This post is not about Quizzler, it is about my quest to answer the question “why are we building this from scratch?” It’s about observed realities regarding cross-newsroom collaboration, insights from upper management of The New York Times, and some major hurdles for open source in legacy media organizations. Prepare to explore the deep, dark, and relatively unspoken depths of technological openness in newsrooms.

We want something similar to…

I was introduced to Quizzler back in August. That first meeting was generally uneventful; we sat in a room. I listened to Miranda Mulligan skillfully duke it out with the project’s newsroom sponsor to explain that no, the first version won’t have custom “you are a 95% Vampire” sharable Facebook messages. I listened to the sponsor vocalize concern that there would never actually be a second version. I decided that both of them were probably right.

Eventually someone said something so shocking that I literally spat out my drink and fell out of my chair at the same time. It wasn’t intended to stand out—I don’t even know who said it. Ready? Brace yourself. Here it is: “Have you seen the Academy Awards tool by The New York Times? Eventually we will want something similar to that.” No wait that wasn’t it.

The New York Times is the parent company of The Boston Globe. They own the Globe in the same way humans own their children.

OK here’s the exchange.

Me: “Can we use some of their code?”

Someone: “We would have to pay them for that.”

Me:

Their response implied two things. First, that The New York Times would charge their kid for the digital equivalent of food. Second that the anticipated costs were high enough that it would be cheaper to rebuild this tool from scratch (again) than it would be to explore the possibility of reusing existing code.

Before you call child protection services, hold on. The situation is complex.

EDIT: To be clear, I quickly learned that the Times would not have charged us a dime.

Actually, this sounds completely reasonable

“Meh.” you say, “so The Boston Globe and The New York Times don’t share code, what’s the big deal?” A fair response, but trust me when I say the deal is big. If the deal was a rapper it would be notorious.

Here’s why: Starting from an existing code base instead of starting from nothing is often the difference between “having time to innovate” and “not.” If you are using technology as a core part of your business and you aren’t set up to experiment then you’re doing it wrong and you will become obsolete.

Borrowing code is kind of like being airdropped into the middle of a marathon; sure, you have to take a moment to figure out where you are and what direction to go, but now you have time to run in circles laughing like a crazy person before winning the race.

There’s more! If you borrow code then you are more likely to be familiar with what the rest of the world is doing. If you share code then you are going to build your systems with an emphasis on reuse and extensibility (i.e. correctly). If you regularly borrow AND share code then you are building a community around whatever it is you do.

What I’m trying to say is that if newspapers can buy into the mantra of openness—even just internal openness—they can kill about thirty birds with one stone.

But they usually don’t.

Why not? Are they idiots?

There are many reasons these organizations don’t trade bytes, none of which have to do with the original “we would have to pay for it” claim.

Reason 1: Wildly Different Technology Stacks

I lied to you earlier when I said the Globe was like a child to the Times–they’re more like middle-aged lovers. They didn’t grow up together or meet in college. They are two independent entities that recognized their love later in life, which means they have fundamentally different infrastructures.

One uses Java and PHP, the other uses Python, Ruby, and NodeJS. They have incompatible content management systems. They disagree on deployment policies, quality control processes, needs, and third party libraries. It’s like they come from two stubborn families that speak completely different languages and eat very different foods. They aren’t going to start casually sharing cook books.

Reason 2: Internal Politics

If a full team dedicates three months to creating a new public-facing interactive, will they want to just give it away? If you are a manager do you want to rely on favors from an external team to accomplish your goals? If you are a coder do you want to be judged for the quick last minute hacks you had to throw into the project?

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is “hell no.”

Reason 3: Moving Costs and Learning Curves

Most technologies are dirty piles of duct tape with a shiny chrome finish. This makes them difficult to deploy and hard to understand. This is especially true among newspapers.

Packaging code in a way that strangers can use could take hours, days, or weeks depending on how much the developers cared about portability when they built it. I’m basically describing the difference between moving a campsite and a home. Newsroom developers don’t tend to have camping on the brain when rushing to meet looming deadlines.

Words from On High

Fine, so there are real reasons that code sharing between the Globe and the Times is a lost cause, but what does that mean for the industry? If financial allies with serious resources don’t share code, what are the chances that other newsrooms around the world will look outside their walls for help? Maybe this is why so many open source journalism tools are gathering dust.

I talked to Rajiv Pant (CTO) and Marc Frons (CIO) of The New York Times about code sharing and the role of open source in their company. For context: the Times is very progressive compared to other newsrooms when it comes to innovation and openness. They have a blog dedicated to their open source inititatives, there is a suite of APIs that provide civic data, and they do a good job of telling people about what they do.

Unfortunately they are also leading an industry that is forced into “deadline driven technology” and without a supportive institutional strategy, open source and reusable code are just nice-to-haves. Developers must ask themselves if they have time to meet the organization’s needs while also contributing to open source. Sometimes this means the same tools get built multiple times, but such is the nature of deadlines. Plus, as Marc was quick to point out, reinventing the wheel can be a good thing so long as the new one is slightly different.

Source: The Wheel Superstore. (Illustration by Lyla Duey)

But wouldn’t it be nice if all these new wheels could be used again and improved upon over time? Rajiv identified three factors that a project needs in order to be realistically used again by an organization like the Times.

Your code has to be…

1. Established – Is it safe to rely on your creation? How long will your project stay active, and how long after you move on will it stay useful?
2. Extensible – Your solution won’t meet all needs. How easy is it to improve? What kinds of features can be added?
3. Easy to Integrate – Will this play with existing systems and tools? Can it be skinned to look like it belongs?

In short, it doesn’t matter how powerful you think your code is: if it is difficult or risky to adopt, it will stay an orphan.

None of those points should come as a surprise, but they should probably be considered gospel to anyone developing anything—open or closed—in any newsroom. Just ask yourself “would the Times use this if they needed it?” If the answer is yes then you’ve made something that will last; otherwise you might as well get out the broom now.

Note: Since I’m sure you are worried, the Times doesn’t actually charge the Globe for code. And yes, we are writing Quizzler from scratch.

At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions.

Of course there is more. The real excitement comes when you contemplate what’s happening to get those words to appear on your screen.

This system unlocks and syndicates a real-time dataset that used to be a pain in the ass to access. Now anyone can build applications and visualizations that update before those crafty politicians have even finished making their points. This post explains why Opened Captions is worth hacking with, what it takes to use it, and how it works.

What is it Good For?

The Internet is filled with real-time updates triggered by online activity, but it still feels like magic when we see automatic updates driven by the real world. Opened Captions makes it easy for programmers to use live TV transcripts as an input.

Note: version .001 only supports a single channel (and my server is pointed to C-SPAN). Eventually the protocol should expand to allow multiple channels.

Let’s consider C-SPAN. If a computer knows what is being said on C-SPAN this very second, it can do things like:

• Change the background of your email client to reflect the issues being debated right this moment on the senate floor.
• Generate modified, more amusing, transcripts by replacing key words and phrases with Tolkien lore (i.e. C-SPAN for Middle Earth)
• Search through lyrics and generate a C-SPAN medley for you to rock out to while voting.
• Send SMS messages 24/7 commanding you to “drink” when certain phrases are spoken on air.

There are also possibilities that aren’t ridiculous. For instance, you could make tools that…

• Improve the transcript by automatically adding contextual information, such as definitions and histories thefted from Wikipedia.
• Send emails with transcript snippets whenever a specific representative or state is being discussed on TV so you know what’s going on.
• Parse out paraphrases of known fact checks and insert a credibility layer over the transcript feed (real time fact-checking).
• Draw parallels between what is being said on TV and what is being said on Twitter.

I could go on and on and on. There is just so much potential!

The Backend

Behind the stream is a first stab at a distributed architecture for Closed Captioning live-feeds. Opened Captions servers can pull a CC stream over a serial port, or (more likely) they will connect to an existing Opened Captions server and pull the stream from there. What that means in de-jargon is that anybody can set up a server that does exactly what mine is doing, even if they don’t have access to hardware, software, or a live TV stream.

When I say exactly, I mean it — your new project runs the same code as mine, and will serve the feed too. People can connect their servers to yours in the same way you connected yours to mine. Practically speaking this architecture means a few things:

1. Once your amazing mashup gets popular it won’t break my server. Your application is syndicating the captions to your users. I serve the captions to you, you serve them to the world!
2. Your server creates a fork of my stream. Want to modify the text so the politicians sound drunk? Add extra layers of information to the message payload? Translate the captions to Klingon? Go for it. If your tweaks happen server side then others can build their apps from your stream to modify it further.
3. You don’t have to rely on anyone else for the Closed Captions. If you want to spend some extra time setting up your own scraper you can point your server to that source instead of a third party. You have total control.

Check ‘Em

Wondering if this is worth your time? Well, it doesn’t require much of it. The service takes about two minutes to set it up if you already have Node.js and Git installed on your computer. Here’s a video to prove it:

Installation instructions can be found in the readme and you can always get in contact with me through the blog or on twitter.

He goes on to explain that he is a journalist writing about Tor. He also tells us that he bets that the CIA and the Italian Secret Service are going to have moles there. What he obviously meant to say was “I work for the CIA and I’ve been watching you now for quite some time.”

It’s possible that he didn’t actually work for the CIA. His name and photo checked out under the website he claimed to write for. It was probably just a one-time job. Even if this isn’t true, even if a network of government spies didn’t track my position across Europe just to meet us in a restaurant, his comment set the tone for my weekend in Florence.

Tor is serious business.

What the hell is Tor?

Did I mention Tor yet?

Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.

Is that too abstract? Here are some illustrative statements. *Taps the microphone*

• A Tor user walks into a bar, the bartender says “who are you?”
• How many Tor users does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only a few, but you’ll never know who did it.
• I used Tor last night and now my wife says that she doesn’t even know who I am any more.

I’ll be here all night.

If you use Tor you become Spartacus. Tor takes everything you do, makes it look exactly like what everyone else is doing, and gets random computers on their network to do the talking for you. Ta-da! Now it is practically impossible to pin an action on you.

The Original Need

I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that this idea was invented by The U.S. Navy. You would have? Oh.

Put on your paper sailor hat and I’ll explain. Imagine you are the king of the Navy and you’re going to war with your fleet of a thousand brand new Navy cars (I don’t really know how the Navy works). Being king, you are in the most important car of all because you’re calling the shots. You don’t want the enemy to know which vehicle is yours. You also don’t want them to know who is receiving orders because that could give away your tactics.

“I know,” you say, “I’ll encrypt everything so that they can’t see the content. Then they won’t be able to tell that my broadcasts are more important than others.”

Unfortunately for you, the enemy has fancy technology. They can’t decrypt messages but they are able to track where everything comes from and where it is going. They can’t tell what you’re saying, but they have all they need.

After about 5 minutes you think you’re doing well. Half of the enemy cars are already on fire! Yours explodes. “How did they do that?” you say in the afterlife. “Easy,” responds god, “they were able to see that your car was sending out the most messages. They knew exactly where you were.” Then he slaps you with a piece of linguini and drifts away.

To prevent this from ever happening again the Navy decided to invent the concept of an “Onion Network” (not to be confused with The Onion Network). Now instead of having packets go directly from point A to point B, each one randomly hops around the fleet first. Because of encryption, the enemy can’t tell the difference between a new message and a “hop” message — they all look the same. It’s like running an invisible sprinkler in a thunderstorm.

Suddenly nobody but the sender and the recipient can figure out the end points of a message chain. Even the middle men (the ones doing the hops) don’t know the path. Each piece of the hop — each “layer” of the message — is encrypted with a different key, so the only thing a relay knows is who gave them the package and where it should go next.

Onions have layers too, that’s why this setup is called an Onion Network. Get it? It’s like Shrek!

Trolls use the Internet, Ogres use Tor. (Illustration by Anne Buckwalter)

What’s it Good For?

Tor has applications in the real world. You can buy drugs and guns, share illegal pictures, and hire assassins. Oh wait, I’m just describing Tor’s reputation (more on that later). Seriously, there are a lot of important situations where people have moral and compelling reasons to want anonymity.

Here are a few:

• Protecting witnesses and victims of domestic abuse. Anyone who wants to be able to access the internet without being discovered by a third party can use Tor to defend against their stalkers.
• If you don’t like being tracked by your government, Internet Service Providers, or search engines.
• Providing truly anonymous tips. There are times when people need or want to share information against the wishes of powerful and potentially dangerous forces (e.g. mafias, governments, or corporations).
• Safely bypassing censorship. If you live in Syria, China, or The United States of RIAA/MPAA, you might use Tor to access content from the outside world more safely.

These kinds of reasons explain why organizations with very good reputations, like the Knight Foundation, are devoting resources to Tor.

The Dark Web

What I’ve just described is a spin on the way people access normal information online. If you point Tor Browser to Google you will see the same old Google, it’s just that now Google doesn’t know who you are. That’s powerful enough, but there’s more: Tor also lets you see hidden content on the Internet.

Using Tor is like entering a cheat code into real life and playing the lost levels. It is the digital equivalent of platform 9 and 3/4. This secret section of the Internet is possible because Tor users can serve content anonymously too.

If you don’t know much about how the Internet works, believe me when I say that if a web site’s location is hidden it becomes essentially impossible to access. It would be like trying to visit someone’s house without knowing anything about where they live — not even the country. Tor gives you a blindfold and leads you there. You still don’t know where the house is, but at least you can visit.

Anonymous sites are accessed through something called an “onion address,” which is made up of a series of random letters and numbers. For instance, this is a “clean” version of Tor’s wikipedia: 3suaolltfj2xjksb.onion. Feel free to try clicking the link, it won’t work (Unless, of course, you are using the Tor browser).

Note: even if that link worked you wouldn’t see any terrible images. However, you need to use your brain before you start actually clicking around if you don’t want to get really upset.

That random looking string is used to find the server within the Tor network. Because the addresses don’t point to a real address on the Internet, there is no way to fully access this content without Tor. There are services you can use to get there without using Tor, but you lose all benefits of anonymity and content is often censored.

Onion addresses are the most fascinating part of Tor, albeit the most potentially disturbing. Rest assured that they don’t all lead to child porn, guns, and drugs. For example there is a secret version of Twitter, a bunch of blogs, a search engine, and an email service. There is even a secret version of 4chan (called Torchan), which I won’t link to because that one does lead to child porn and drugs.

These types of content networks—ones that are served on top of the normal web so that you need special programs to reach them—are known as the Dark Web. Not necessarily because the content is darker (it is), but because it is hidden from view and can’t really be searched and scraped as reliably.

Implications of The Dark Web

Most uses for Tor become more potent with onion addresses. Anonymous servers are just as protected from higher powers as anonymous users. If Amazon suddenly started selling illegal drugs they would get in trouble. If a Tor marketplace started selling illegal drugs, the law would have to figure out a way to find them first.

This power applies to legitimate uses as well. If a government official wanted to contact The Boston Globe with a corruption leak, he or she could use Tor to create a gmail account anonymously. The government could then subpoena Google, and Google might be willing to give away the information they have. They won’t know much, but now things like account access patterns and full email logs would be fair game.

If the official had used Tormail then even Google wouldn’t know what happened. The government would have no course of action because there would be no service provider to ask. Every journalist in the world should be able to agree that there is no good reason for a watchdog to trust the organizations they are watching. Why should you trust in corporations and governments to keep sources safe?

Tor has a reputation because it has a lot of criminal content, but the social good that it supports is just so important (criminals will always be criminals). I’m working on a game called Torwolf to simulate a few situations where Tor would be effective (if you have played Werewolf or Mafia, you can start to imagine what the game will be like). In the mean time, read up on Tor if you’re curious. Better yet, go try it out.

IMPORTANT EDIT: while Tor is much better than nothing, it is neither foolproof nor perfect. If maintaining anonymity could be a matter of life / death / imprisonment, then you need to know more than what I could fit into the scope of this overview. This paper is a good starting point, but seriously, spend some time researching on your own.

Non-nerds, read this first

For the non-techies reading this I have some explaining to do.  When you have more than one computer connected together you form something called a Local Area Network (LAN).  For instance, you have a LAN if you have more than one computer connected to the internet at home.  Computers on networks like to communicate to one another and so they have an address on the network called an IP address, which is a series of numbers (e.g. 192.168.1.100).

If you know the IP of a computer, you can send messages to it.  The problem is that normal people won’t remember all those numbers, and most of the time those numbers actually change when you turn the computers on and off.  For these reasons, most Operating Systems let you name your computers and they do the translation for you.  This probably happened the first time you turned it on and it asked for a name.

For average users the name will be something like “Living Room PC” or “Dad’s Laptop.”  The more tech savvy tend to enjoy goofing around with these names; for instance my friend Julia named one computer “Red” and the other one “Rum.”  Once you get more than a few computers, though, you naturally move toward a theme for your network.  This makes computers more fun, like collections, and gives the buckets of bits and bolts a touch of personal flair.

Here are some examples: you might use the planets in the solar system (I would never do this; who wants to have to wait for the discovery of new planets to buy your 9th computer?), or famous scientists or sports players.  Or Pokemon!  Or musicians.

For most people it stops there, but I recently realized that you can do oh so much better.  Your network names can be truly meaningful.  For instance, name your computers based on elements on the periodic table.  Mobile computers are given gas names and desktops are heavy metals.  Maybe the number of electron clouds reflects the number of processor cores!  Creativity is key

Long story short, some metaphors are better than others, and, quite frankly, I have found the best one.  My theme is StarCraft; an incredibly popular strategy game which has every single feature you could want in a network naming convention.   The game features 3 different races and about 70 units with a variety of shape, size, and function.  Well look at THAT!  It turns out there are 3 main flavor of operating system, and I plan on owning about 70 computers with a variety of shape, size, and function.

Back to the point

My network is named based on StarCraft/StarCraft2. The name of the unit should reflect the power, size, and special abilities of the hardware. To some extent this is an art, however there are a few set rules which must be followed.

Rule 1: Flying vs Ground

Starcraft units, in general, can either fly, or they are stuck on the ground.

Computers, in general, are either mobile (laptops), or they are stuck on the ground.

Summary:

• Laptops and other wireless devices are flying units.
• Boxes that are not inherently mobile are ground units.

Rule 2: Race

Starcraft has three main races: Zerg, Protoss, and Terran.  Zerg are the icky gooey alien race (think “Alien” alien); Protoss are the super intelligent shiny sleek technological aliens (think ET);  And Terran are the more traditional space age humans.

Computers have three main operating systems: Unix, OSX, and Windows;  Unix is the icky, gooey nerd computer (think “command lines”);  OSX (Mac) is the super pretentious shiny sleak technological computer (think Unibody Macbook); And Windows is the more traditional normal day human computer.

Starcraft also has other kinds of creatures in the universe.  Loveable animals called critters which mindlessly roam around, and mostly unknown super beings called the Xel’Naga.

Computers also have other kinds of operating systems in the universe.  Random things like the Wii which are based on who knows what, and the mostly unknown Google OS called Crome OS.

Summary:

• Unix / Linux varieties is Zerg
• Windows is Terran
• Mac is Protoss
• ChromeOS is Xel’Naga
• Other is Critter

Rule 3: Non-computers

The real world has tech that aren’t computers, and Starcraft has things that aren’t units (buildings are another type of object in StarCraft.).  Anything that doesn’t have an Operating System like Windows or Unix but can still have a network name (e.g. a shared computer peripheral like a printer or disc drive) or is a piece of tech that you want to be able to easily reference in casual conversation should have a building name. Ideally the building would be a non-unit producing structure (buildings are what make the units in Starcraft), unless of course the hardware in question is something that is used directly to produce computers.

Examples from my network

• Zergling – A tiny little zerg unit that runs around all the time || A tiny little  Ubuntu box that runs all the time
• Overlord – a zerg unit that isn’t used in combat but instead floats around and feeds other units || A unix based Network Attached Storage (NAS) that isn’t often used directly but instead hosts data and media for the other computers.
• Goliath – A pretty standard terran “mech” unit which isn’t insanely powerful, but packs a reasonable punch || A pretty standard Windows PC which isn’t insanely powerful, but packs a reasonable punch
• Thor – A big-ass giant warrior zoid type of suit thing (think transformer style) || A big-ass giant computer case (although currently in hibernation)
• Viking – Terran unit that replaced the goliath in StarCraft2; it can transform from flying to being on the ground || Erek’s Windows desktop (same build as my Goliath desktop) but it also has a wireless card!
• Wraith – !%*#ty flying Terran unit || Erek’s !%*#ty laptop
• Dark Templar – Stealth Protoss ground unit, it is invisible to the naked eye || Stealth Apple mac mini, it is invisible to the naked eye
• Corsair – Sleak and thin air unit for Protoss || Sleak and thin Macbook Air 11″
• Scout – Standard Protoss air unit || Macbook 13″ — pretty standard Apple laptop
• Interceptor – a tiny Protoss air unit that gets launched from a bigger “Carrier” ship || a tiny iPod Touch which you plug into bigger computers
• Kakaru – A flying critter || A Wii with wireless connection
• Spore Colony – A zerg building that spews out spores || A printer plugged into the NAS that spews out paper and ink.
• Pylon – The protoss building which provides energy to other protoss buildings || An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) which provides energy to all my computers.

Feel free to adopt this naming convention. If you have a perfect fit on your network post the name here!

Amazing Opportunities

The nice thing about this convention is it makes you want to buy / build technology just to have the perfect fit for a unit.

For instance:

• Apple AirPort named Carrier
• Macbook Pro 19″ (doesn’t exist… YET) named Mothership
• A partitioned box with unix and windows. Windows OS named Marine, Unix OS named Infested Marine
• A unix box dedicated to masterminding trojan attacks called Infestor
• USB based unix install named Larva
• Two apple computers called High Templar 1 and High Templar 2 which can combine to form an Archon.

The potentials are limitless!