Neonymy

Is there an English word for the part of the brain that produces new words? The ‘neonymizer’, perhaps?
If we program we must neonymize variable-names. If we
use an operating system then file-names and directory-names. Everybody has to neonymize usernames and passwords. It is enough to make the brain hurt. All these blasted choices! Do not we make enough of them in our life already?

Good neonymy can be witty, sly, irritating. It exposes your age, your education, your tastes, your imagination – so long as you do not use a program to do your neonymizing for you.
I recall how years ago work-stations on a network called names like Bifur, Bofur and Gandalf. We all know what that tells us about the network administrator.

I enjoyed Rick’s Frobnicate for his PDF magazine. That were good neonymy, Rick; tantalizing overtones.

In the Heian period of Japan, an aristocratic father would not dream of letting his son marry a girl who did not have good handwriting. I can envisage a more modern snobbery based on good neonymizing skills. Neonymy plays a role like that of poetry. It slips images into the mind – if you have them waiting to be evoked – and enriches the user experience. Every time I walk past my neighbour’s Mazda Bongo Friendee I am almost crippled by laughter. Names are serious business.

Aldershot …. ?

Good post, that, Gavin. Deserves a wider audience than RISC OS OPEN.

Good post, that, Gavin. Deserves a wider audience than RISC OS OPEN.

True, but the localised (RO) reference would pass most non-RO people by and everything else would have c.s.a.* regulars complaining about lack of RO relevance.

so long as you do not use a program to do your neonymizing for you.

When it comes to passwords, why not?

In practice, I don’t – I mostly come up with my own, but the software I use to store those passwords is capable of coming up with much better passwords than me, so I ought to let it do so, really.

User names are even less of a problem, since in many cases (when it comes to websites) they are the email address used for the site (and they are mostly unique¹). If not, I usually go for VinceH unless some rapscallion has beaten me to it, in which case VinceMH instead.

(Or in the case of the Icon Bar forum, VincceH because of a typo that I didn’t spot until it was too late).

¹ Generally, it used to be sitename at mydomain, but I changed to sitenameandnumbers² at mydomain, and more recently it became sitenameandnumbers at catsubdomain.mydomain. Some much older stuff, and many RISC OS sites, still have my basic softrock address – such as this one. I’d quite like to change it, but there’s no option to do so. :/

² And those numbers aren’t just appended. I tend to mix them in – so if I was setting up a new email address for this site today, it might be risc8osopen42 at whateversubdomain.mydomain

Sorry to disappoint, Frobnicate is not my word. It’s from the hacker’s dictionary and you’ll see why I picked that word:

If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he’s carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he’s just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he’s frobbing it.

I really detest sites that enforce stupid password rules. By all means tell me my password sucks, but don’t make me have to use upper and lower case and numbers and symbols and make it X characters long.
I can come up with a nice phase like “thatsaprettycompanylogo” or “pleaseneverdesignanotherwebsite” that is unique to the site, memorable, and easy to enter.¹
For ARM Ltd, on the other hand, was it “f@kN3l1” or “f**kinH377” or any of a dozen unmemorable permutations of the idea? I know, I’ll write it on this post it and stick it to the screen…

What makes a good password is not rubbish like adding zeros and dollars and easily forgotten things, it is simply stringing together some words that are memorable enough to remember but distinct enough that a dictionary attack would be pointless.

Given that big sites seem to be reporting breaches daily, I trust you are not recycling passwords. “It5aS3cret” might be an interesting password, but not on every site you sign up with!

¹ Make it anything that is memorable. My Daily Mail user ID, created to post a comment pointing out an obvious flaw in Boris’ £350M figure (and rejected by DM’s censors, ho ho) is not “YouCretinsSuckDonkeyBalls”, but it is something similar. And the best bit? Should any site get stressy at the potentially offensive password, that means somewhere the system is storing the password in plain text and allowing people to access this information. Multiple levels of win however you look at it!

It seems to be that the sites which get all picky about passwords are also the same ones where it doesn’t really matter. For example, a site where I can watch videos wants a password with at least X characters, containing letters, numbers and at least one special character, blah blah blah… Whereas if someone were to get into my account, what could they do? They can see my first name. They can watch videos. They can not see my address. They can not see my credit card number. The worst thing they can do is cancel my subscription, which is just a mild annoyance.

Meanwhile my bank makes no distinction between upper and lowercase, and one of the competing banks even limits passwords to eight characters!

Thanks for these useful thoughts about passwords. I laughed out loud at the ones for ARM Ltd. The more passwords we need, the more we need password managers to relieve our brains. A similar process is at work with file systems, relegating the business of inventing filenames to the business of searching and finding. Browsing is a useful concept too. How pleasant to browse the penetralia of a second-hand bookshop, how dull to present yourself to a desk to fill in a docket for a particular book when all you can remember about it is an illustration in the second chapter.

I laughed out loud at the ones for ARM Ltd.

Moreso that the password requirements for ARM datasheets are the strictest of any of the sites that I have registered with.
For what? The information is available in HTML form without logging in, and the “restricted” PDFs (that require login) are available all over the internet.
By converse, my bank (Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne) has decided that it is in my interest “for reasons of security” to replace my nine character alphabetic word, a foreign¹ word unlikely to be guessed, with a five-digit number. How, exactly, is that in my interest?

A similar process is at work with file systems, relegating the business of inventing filenames to the business of searching and finding.

Ah, but sometime in the last decade the majority of us ceased to be creators and instead became consumers. When computers were not globally networked and call charges were stupid, people used to create their own stuff on their computers. Be it a type-in program, messing around, writing that never-finished novella, or a letter to the doctor². We’d create stuff and have to give it names and put it somewhere. On the green floppy. No, wait, it might be on the red floppy with the yellow label…

Then we became content consumers. Legitimate downloads or piracy, it doesn’t matter. Because somebody else made the content, somebody else gave it a name, and I’d bet on a fair few setups something else decides where things go. Look at package-managed software. You don’t even get to choose where stuff is installed, you just tick a box saying “I want this” and something beavers away to make it happen. Installing software, buying educational-grade uranium off eBay, it’s all the same. Tick a box and stuff will happen automagically.

How pleasant to browse the penetralia of a second-hand bookshop,

This. This is why I browse the books in the Leclerc Éspace Culturel (for Brits – it’s a book/games/video section of a supermarket). I look for books that seem interesting, and then I add them to my Amazon Wish List. That’s not to say that I never buy anything there, I just prefer to look at, touch, feel, examine. I know many Amazon books have a Look Inside option, but it’s not the same is it?

to fill in a docket for a particular book when all you can remember about it is an illustration in the second chapter.

A couple of months ago I wanted to watch a movie. What I could remember was it was a police girl, some sort of newbie, taking a train ride and then being quizzed by a hard-ass cop wearing glasses. Her powers of observation were being tested, and indeed were key to the entire film.
I searched my harddisc.
I searched my DVDs.
I even looked at every single DVD in the local library.
I could remember the rookie was young, dark haired, and kind of pretty. It put into mind Sandra Bullock, but she’s a generation older now – I’m probably thinking of her role in “Demolition Man”. But I checked her bio anyway. And the bio of anybody I could think of that looked sort of like her. Or played a role of that nature.
Nothing.

So I decided, enough. I dug out USB harddiscs, SD cards, everything. If necessary I would watch everything that I couldn’t discount as “no way that’s it”. “The Goonies”, for instance, I know and I know that ain’t it.

Luckily I found it fairly quickly, in a folder called “Asian (not Japanese)”. A Korean film called “Cold Eyes”.³

I guess it says a lot about my viewing habits these days that I remember the girl was pretty and the boss cop wore glasses and yes, she had to remember stuff on a train. The fact that it was in Korean, played by Koreans, and subtitled? Didn’t make the slightest bit of impact in my brain. ;-)

¹ Not Japanese, either. ;-)

² I knew a girl who used to call letters to the doctor “DOC#.DOC” (where # was a number). She thought it was clever, but she never seemed to realise that her cute naming scheme sort of obliged her opening and reading each file in turn to find the one she wanted. And, of course, she started with “DOC1.DOC”, never seemed to occur to her that it would be quicker to find more recent communications by opening the documents in reverse order…

³ Most of this stuff I get from doramax264. I finally managed to track down a copy of “Railways” (Japanese film set in beautiful Shimane⁴, about a bloke that decides to become a train driver at the age of 49) on Youku in two dozen pieces (Youku is weird, everything is broken into 7 minute long FLVs). Pasted it together. Haven’t watched it yet as no subs, so I need to be in maxi-concentration mode to attempt to make sense of a film in a language I barely know. As for DVDs or fansubs? This film pretty much doesn’t exist. Sad. The bits I saw while pasting all those FLVs together looked good.

⁴ The bit between Hiroshima and the sea to the north. So rural it makes this place (where I live) look like civilisation. Ever watch an anime where the school is one room and all four of the children, of varying ages, go there to study by themselves and there’s pretty much never a teacher? And most of the scenery is rice fields? It’s that kind of rural.
(and yes, I’d like to go there some day)

By converse, my bank (Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne) has decided that it is in my interest “for reasons of security” to replace my nine character alphabetic word, a foreign1 word unlikely to be guessed, with a five-digit number. How, exactly, is that in my interest?

Take a data switch with an OS that allows the password to be any combination of letters and numbers (no minimum length but advice is to make it over 8 characters and include non-alphabetic)
OK, upgrade the OS and it blanks the password to help you (read force) to configure a new more secure one¹. New must be 10+ characters and include upper & lowercase and numbers and symbols.

Obviously this is way better than me using the initial letters of the words of a song with a case mix and numbers in certain places. This gets even better if you use misheard lyrics…

I wouldn’t mind so much but
1. it blanked the existing password and
2. it’s the password of a TELNET access. Yeah, telnet, not anything encrypted like SSH so your average wireshark session scoops up the content.

¹ Actually just one that includes symbols because I already ticked the other boxes.

A couple of months ago I wanted to watch a movie. What I could remember was […] I searched …

Reminds me of my hunt for Romero’s The Crazies. I had a memory from when I was a kid of a [near the end] scene in a film or TV series, and I was trying for years to identify and track it down. At one point (mid-2000s), I thought The Crazies was a contender, and bought a copy – but without watching it, concluded it probably wasn’t, and carried on with my search.

Some three years later, my searches led me back to The Crazies, so I dug it out and watched it. It was indeed the one.

Reminds me of my hunt for Romero’s The Crazies.

They remade it in 2010. Have you seen the remake? Romero was… executive producer or something, so it shouldn’t suck as hard as it otherwise might. :-)

concluded it probably wasn’t, and carried on with my search.

Like with “Cold Eyes”. I first entirely discounted my “foreign” films.

Some three years later,

Whoa. I’m not sure if that is epic patience, or epic memory, but I have neither.

That said – I watched a film when I was about eight. A guy in a tree and kids in a burning house. I never really searched for it, because that’s not a lot to go on. When I got internet, I spammed IMDb and Wiki with search queries until I was able to narrow it down and eventually found it – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Mr._Blunden

One I have given up on is… some kids (aged maybe 12-14) swim to an old house. Dunno why. Mystery? Dare? I was only half watching it. What I remember most is the kids just dived into the water and started swimming fully clothed, and there was never any parent freaking out about that. Oh, they also seemed to have “accents”, so it may have been an Australian film.
A few brief searches led me to “Frog Dreaming”. I saw that on C4 a billion years ago and it’s quite a good film. An HD version is on YouTube if you’re interested. Wasn’t the film I was looking for, but a good film to watch nonetheless. (it’s under it’s other name “The Quest” – I think “Frog Dreaming” fits the story much better!)

They remade it in 2010. Have you seen the remake?

Of course! (That link is just a silly remark about the trailer, not about seeing the film itself.)

If memory serves, it was on a par with the original – better in some ways (21st century production values, and more modern special effects and make up, etc. for a start) and not as good in others.

I haven’t seen it since it was at the cinema, but it’s possible I have it on DVD – I can’t check at the moment because I’ve not yet installed my movie database on my new laptop.

It’s a commercial Windows app, and while it has some nice features – especially when it comes to populating it with an already large collection – it also has some annoying ones. I therefore intend to migrate the data to something on RISC OS. Probably Impact, which I like. (I have that on the Pi as part of Nut Pi – but I’ll buy a copy from Sine Nomine at the London Show and bung it on the ARMX6).