modulus blog

Naming your dog (or anything else…) is not easy – it’s non-trivial.

The car manufacturers spend millions of dollars searching for model names, and even then they generate some stinkers. The largest company in the world, General Electric, named one of its Chevrolet cars the “Nova”, which in Spanish means “does not go”. They are seeking brand recognition and to convey some sense of the qualities of the car they are flogging and sometimes they achieve that. When a car model is called a “Statesman”, “Diplomat” or a “Senator”, you can be reasonably sure it will be an over-long, over-weight luxury lard-arse which guzzles small oilfields while delivering its silver-haired cargo to the gentlemen’s club. On the other hand a “Mica”, “Pica”, “Smart”, “Swift” or similar will be a pint-sized one-point-something-litre built-to-a-price plastic runabout, easily turned into a milk crate by argument with a 4-wheel-drive. These latter tend to have something of the “terra” (and sometimes the “terror”) in their names. Thus the “Land Cruiser” takes off from where the “Land Rover” left off, or was that the “Range Rover”; anyway, it’s not too far removed from the “Desert Runner” or the “Bush Buggerer”. But these semi-innocent, World-War-II-derived devices cannot hold a candle (nor a jack-handle) to the American Sports Utility Vehicle. The SUV as it’s known to its friends, is not so much a vehicle class as an ongoing competition to float the biggest, brashest, bluffest, thirstiest, post-Gulf-War-1 refutation of ecological sensibility as possible. Witness the High-Mobility-Multi-Purpose-Wheeled-Vehicle-derived “Hummer”, which only its mother (the afore-mentioned High-Mobility-Multi-Purpose-Wheeled-Vehicle) could love¹. Or take the Ford “F-series” truck which, from modest beginnings in the 1950′s is now, in its latest incarnation, something like an armed houseboat with air horns. At the leading edge (for certain values of the word “leading”) of this class is the Dodge “Ram”; now there’s an evocative name in only three letters, but up to 10 cylinders of grunt. Specifically, you can buy the “Dodge Ram 3500 dual-rear-wheel 4-wheel-drive quad-cab-with-suicide-doors 8.0-litre Magnum petrol V-10″. You’ll be wanting a step-ladder with that, sir.

Naming people (at least in Western society) has been easy; we choose from a limited list of names which wax and wane in their popularity. Only the artists amongst us seem to have any imagination, and Frank Zappa deserves special posthumous praise for naming his progeny “Ahmet Rodan”, “Diva”, “Dweezil” and “Moon Unit”.

But back to naming your dog. There are certain goals you want to achieve in naming your dog, some of which are purely practical, others more abstract.

Like the car manufacturers, you want brand recognition, but by an audience of one, i.e. your dog. To achieve this you should aim for a name of one or two syllables; the first syllable should preferably be of the consonant-vowel-consonant form, the second (if any) can be of any type. Thus “Rex”, “Max”, “Jake”, “Buddy”, “Bailey”, “Sam”, “Rocky”, “Buster”, “Fido” for the boys and “Molly”, “Lady”, “Sadie”, “Sasha”, “Jessie” et al for the girls are easy for the dogs to hear and recognise. Although you might like the idea of having a faithful hound called “Santa’s Little Helper”, “Shostakovitch” or “Schickelgruber”, you would be asking your dog to perform an extra-ordinary memorisation feat as its first puppy task. “Alowishus” is worse still, since the first syllable is of the vowel-consonant form, harder for dogs to recognise.

A second consideration is that you should probably not give your dog a name which is also a common command. Naming your dog “Sit” or “Heel” can only lead to confusion. Naming your dog “Attack” may also cause some contextual difficulty, especially with Pomeranians.

Thirdly, dogs’ names should be, broadly speaking, people-friendly. Imagine that you’re at the picnic park, and your dog wanders over to the Coffin Cheaters Motorcycle Club barbeque; you have to call you dog back in full voice. Suddenly, the fact that he liked tennis balls as a puppy just doesn’t seem to support your choice of “mr. ball-licker”. Equally, when you’re at the church picnic, your dog starts humping the
leg of the organist and you have to call him off, you may regret having called him “mother f*cker”, whether or not you used an asterisk.

Lastly, the dog’s name should be kid-friendly. Kids are like people but less so. If you call your dog “Alejandrina” (a popular Spanish name for bitches), you might find it sophisticated, but the kids would probably prefer “Bum-drag”, and might even teach it appropriate tricks.

1. since I initially wrote this, the Hummer has become a victim of the global financial crisis and its passing will be greatly lamented by….. hardly anyone.

When I draft my e-books, my editor often complains about my use of the abbreviation “e.g.”. She prefers me to write “for example” and, even then, there is always a struggle for me to get the commas in the right places.

Even worse, “for example” often is not all that I wish to say; often I’m trying to say something of the style “that is, for example”, so I wind up doubting whether I’m really wanting to “i.e.” or “e.g.”

I’ve decided to cut the Gordian knot; from this day hence, when appropriate I will use the newly coined T.L.A.* “i.e.g.”, meaning “that is, for example,”. I’m sure you will find i.e.g. a perfectly cromulent T.L.A.

* T.L.A. = Three Letter Abbreviation.

As I often do, when planning development of my text processor I consider first what capability Microsoft Word has. I have Word 2000; its “Thesaurus” function is really a list of synonyms (with the occasional antonym) rather than a proper thesaurus. When you look up “updated”, the Thesaurus form looks like this:

It’s not very pretty. There are four input boxes, four buttons, three labels and a control alignment which appears to be largely random. The substantive content is a flat list of synonyms. It occured to me that there might be better designs available.

After some trial and error, I have ended up with the following design in my text processor, Weblex:


The synoym list uses a Windows Tree-view; when you select a synonym by clicking on it, synonyms for that synonym are presented, as is the case for “modernism” displayed above.

There are two input boxes and three buttons, one label. One of the buttons is additional to the Word fuctionality (“Find on WWW”), so the net reduction in clutter is quite significant.

The moral of this story is that, despite the owerwhelming number of designers, software engineers, ergonomists, hair-dressers and spin doctors in the larger software development firms, it is still not only possible but indeed feasible realistic practical workable viable to compete with them on good design.

Software documentation and comments are highly variable in quality and usefulness. At the useless end of the spectrum are the detailed source comments which tell you what the next line of code is going to do. As the next line of code tells us exactly the same thing, this is at best pointless; at worst, when the comment does not accurately describe what the next line of code is going to do, it can be seriously misleading; here’s an example of what I’m describing:

#increase each object's value by 10
for (sort keys %objects){
$_ += 10;
}

Perl programmers will notice that the code does not increase the object values, but rather the keys of the %objects hash, so the comment is not only redundant but also plain wrong.

On the other hand, very high-level, abstract documentation which tells us what a program or function library does conceptually is only useful in a very high-level, abstract sort of way.

One type of documentation which is much more successful is the “Javadocs” style of functional documentation, which describes each function (or subroutine or procedure) principally in terms of its inputs and outputs. “Javadocs” is a documentation methodology maintained by Sun Microsystems, originally intended for documenting Java functions, but easily adapted to almost any other language. Here’s an example of the use of Javadocs on a PHP function:

/** * Returns the capability for a given capability name.
 *
 * @author Modulus Pty. Ltd. - prh
 * @version 2008 1.0
 * @param $id unique string id of the device
 * @param $name string name of the capability
 * @param $fallback boolean for considering fallback

 * @param $fallbackChain array of strings, where known, provide this to avoid unnecessary repetitive lookups
 * @return string capability

 */

function lib_getCapability($id, $name, $fallback, $fallbackChain) {
   ...
}



This documentation is immediately useful in the source code for developers maintaining or altering the source code. Furthermore, the effort required to create and maintain the documentation is quite limited in relation to the benefit derived. However, you may wish to publish an API to your functional library without publishing the source code. One way to do this is to use our javadoc.module,
which, for a modest $19.95, creates elegant, valid and conformant XHTML documentation from Perl, PHP, Javascript or Java source code. Here’s an example of the output generated: