Most people don’t think about what they name their computers. It’s just not important enough in peoples lives to be a question of relevance. But for us programmers who set naming conventions and coding standards, prefering convention over configuration, it seems like the next step to use see how these rules apply to naming other things in our lives. Remember – it’s all about having fun. You wouldn’t have a variable named Batman, but what’s to stop you from naming your computers after superheroes?

Naming Computer at Work

At one job I worked they took naming very seriously, in the fun way. All servers would be named after characters from The Matrix. So we might have a development server called Agent-Smith, or a database server called Trinity. If you’re connecting to a small set of servers, you won’t soon be confused over the names. It’s a great improvement over application-1, application-2, etc if you’re naming a small set of servers. There’s plenty of names to choose from. I wouldn’t recommend using the alternate Agent names though, unless you want to get Agent-Smith, Agent-Jones and Agent-Brown confused.

Desktop computers throughout the office were then named after Transformers. There’s plenty to select from, and it adds a personal touch to everyone’s computer. You could even take it a step farther and couple each computer with a Transformer. You could split the office into Decepticons and Autobots if you have a clear divide, and then the two sides can go to war — or something like that. It’s a lot easier to look at the network and see Starscream than “pc-rover-2245″. You can have all kinds of fun with this — big transformers are power computers, flying transformers are laptops.

Naming Computers at Home

My naming convention for devices in my home is largely copied from one of the above. All computers in my home are named after Matrix characters (aside from a few of my girlfriends devices which still need to fall inline). My computers that I use are named after human males – Link and Bane (Bane is the Windows partition on my Mac). Other devices of mine around the house that are named after male programs. So Keymaker is my router, my Drobo is Merovingian, portable hard drive is Seraph, my airport express is Trainman and our shared media center Mac Mini is Persephone (always coupled with Merovingian, you see?). At home you probably don’t have enough devices to really need much in the way of naming conventions, but if you have a few USB drives it suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Table of Elements

I don’t remember where I heard it, but someone mentioned to me that they’d organized their servers based on the periodic table of elements. Domain controllers would be noble gasses, halogens might be file servers, transition metals (which are the bulk of elements) could be desktops used by everyone in the office. There’s a few more groups built in for you to use, so long as you don’t have too many devices. This allows for a little more “professional” sounding names, or at least a different kind of nerdy.

Fun of Functional?

Whether you go with a fun or functional naming convention, or even have one at all, will depend on the atmosphere of where the devices will be. If you have a chance to have a little fun, go for it! Anyone have any other fun naming conventions they use or have heard about? Always looking for more examples.

After reading post after post of smooth upgrades from Leopard to Snow Leopard, I felt more obliged to share my not-so-successful upgrade story. You must remember, if you’ve been using your computer a while, there’s a much greater chance that there’s a problem with it, and that installing a very large enhancement on top of that possibly fragile groundwork might cause issues. Make sure you have some backups (you use Dropbox right?), and that you do a full system save using TimeMachine prior to starting.

What Actually Happened

Insert disc, go through install. Apple products have easy installs right? No doubt there – within a minute it was already copying files over and doing it’s thing. Unfortunately it hit a very odd error “Unable to complete upgrade” with an option to restart. OK, time to restart. Booting up was when the problem hit me though. I saw the normal gray loading screen with the spinner, but it went from that to a complete black screen and turn off. Not a good start. After trying this a few times, I eventually tried holding option on boot, which brings up a boot menu allowing you to select which device to boot from.

With the Snow Leopard DVD still in the drive, I choose to boot from it. It made it to the install window again, and again I gave installing a shot (although much more pessimistic this time). Again it failed, but it suggested I run Disk Utility to verify my drives. Ok, good advice. Luckily you can run these straight from the installer (there’s the default menu bar up top with a “utilities” menu with “Disk Utilities” as one of these. This is the same program you should have available through Leopard. I select my drive, click verify and within a few minutes I see a big red flashing error message that says my drive is corrupt and that I should back everything up using TimeMachine, format and recover an install from TimeMachine. That’s when I realized my first mistake – not verifying the health of my drives before upgrading my OS.

Rather than reinstalling Leopard and upgrading to Snow Leopard, I opted for a complete hard drive format, then installed Leopard on that. It didn’t seem to have a problem installing everything, which was quite a relief. When you think ‘upgrade’ you don’t think you’d be able to get doing from a formatted disk, but luckily Snow Leopard didn’t have a problem with this. Eventually I had a completely clean install of Snow Leopard on a newly formatted drive.

At this time if you have a clean TimeMachine backup you can use it as a starting point to import all your files/settings/passwords/etc. I decided to start from scratch (perhaps it’s the lingering Windows masochist in me), and install only what I need. In not too long I had plenty installed, and didn’t miss what I didn’t know I was missing. The nicest part though, was that with TimeMachine you can just jump in and grab an old file from any computers backup. As someone who hasn’t used TimeMachine very much over the years, it was welcomed relief to backup. Still though, I prefer Dropbox for it’s ability to backup + sync files across multiple computers — but for large files it’s hard to beat TimeMachine.

What I Should’ve Done

Run Disk Utility first to verify disks, and repair them if you can. At least at that point you’ll have one more piece of information on if your Snow Leopard install will be a complete failure or not.

A growing number of people these days are realizing how much of a pull social media has on their lives. Turning off the 24-hour news stations is easy, but unplugging from the constant stream of targeted links online can be much more difficult to pull yourself away from. If you, like me, find yourself clicking on your Reddit or Hacker News toolbar links whenever your attention starts to drift then it’s time to take action!

With this in mind, I decided to try going a month without social link sites. And by that I mean sites that you could theoretically stay on long enough so that when you refresh there’s new content. Reddit, HackerNews and Digg are the top offenders for me. I wouldn’t put Google Reader in the same category, since eventually you’ll reach an end to your feeds (and with periodic pruning you’ll reach it faster). So I set off to work; content in the thought that no matter what I wouldn’t open any of these sites. After removing all bookmark links, things went pretty quietly for the remainder of the first day — withdrawal takes a little longer to set in.

Effects at Home

I felt the first noticeable change in behavior the first night I stopped using these sites. Generally after getting home from work, I’d veg out a little on the couch and read news from the day along with interesting articles. I’d break to eat dinner with my girlfriend, but eventually I’d continue reading more at some point during the night. What I realized what that I concentrate entirely too hard on what I’m doing. In programming, or creating things in general, this is an asset, but in this case concentrating on reading an infinitely long string of articles meant I was adding extra stress on myself while making me much less fun to be around. By not popping open Reddit, there was a refreshing feeling. It’s as if I had a lot of chores that were suddenly called off. The stress that I’d become accustomed too was gone and I ended up sleeping much better that night.

All that extra time

Chances are you have a list of books you want to read. If you’re spending all your time reading the hot blog post of the day, then this list is only going to grow in size. If you attacked this list the same way as social news, you’d probably learn a whole lot more, while cutting the stress. The amount of time you’ll gain is a bit of a shocker at first. When I realized just how much of my time was going into this though, it was unjustifiable to continue. A few minutes here, a few minutes there does really add it. If you want to track where you’re using your time, I’d recommend Wakoopa. Wakoopa is sort of a social time tracker. You can use it to track your use of desktop applications, as well as web applications. It also gives software recommendations. So for instance, if you’re using Transmit for FTP, you’ll see it’s the 2nd most popular FTP client for Mac, and you can check out some of the alternatives other people actually use. It’s convenient to have a list based on actual usage. You can also set your profile so everyone can see certain applications and web applications you’re using, or set certain apps to private. Having something public that’s tracking your usage out there is a nice kick in the butt to go through with something too.

Create something!

In the building I work at, there’s a phrase on the wall that I see everyday

The best times in life are when we are creating.

Although it’s by our landlord, who has since gone bankrupt, it’s still good advice. Thinking back over the years at previous jobs and times of my life; one thing that consistently leaps to the top is what I was creating. Times when I’m not actively working on project; or aren’t genuinely enthusiastic about some personal project are when my attention drifts and I become susceptible to distraction. One of the best ways to fight time drains is just to find something you’re passionate about and sink your time into it instead. Whether it’s blogging, programming, writing or building stuff out of Legos — it’ll feel so much better doing that instead.

Finding a place for Social Media

You might notice above I mentioned that I was planning to go a month without social media; yet the title of this post says differently. The main goal though was not to avoid using sites like this altogether, but to stop one of my biggest time drains. For now I’m keeping these sites off my toolbar. I still go to them occasionally, but now it’s only late at night if I feel like I’ve gotten something accomplished that day, and never enough to linger. Just moving the action from an automated one to a manual one was the kick I needed to regain that time.