Floody poor idea
We are delighted to announce the winner of our Christmas competition. We asked for the perfect project name to suggest to management that your scheme was going to be a dramatic success, and to everyone else that it was going to go nightmarishly wrong.
The clear standout was from Stephen Hill, who did not have to look far for inspiration, because his firm actually used the name.
"Unfortunately, the project lived up to its name in too many respects," he says. Our Christmas prize of unlimited Backbytes kudos is awarded for the project name "Tsunami". It didn't help that when Stephen's company was using it, it coincided with the real-life Tsunami in 2004.
Not quite going to plan
It's not just IT departments that come up with unfortunate names. Let's just call our mole "Gary".
Gary forwarded us an email from the school where he works. "It would be good if all the action plans could be completed and forwarded to me and your line manager by the end of term," it says.
The name of the documents? The Curriculum Review Action Plan. As we sometimes say around here, stop sniggering at the back.
The invisible RAM
As you know, we scour the world to bring you the most exciting technology news that other newspapers fail to cover (often for good reasons, but we don't let that bother us).
For example, the exciting news from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, where scientists have created a working computer chip that is almost completely see-through. The new technology already has the essential element of high-tech credibility - an unpronounceable name.
Transparent resistive random access memory (TRRAM) provides non-volatile memory, so the new see-though chip could be used to make an invisible USB memory stick, for example. This could bring new dimensions to the concept of searching for your data.
A Korea in design awaits
And so, by way of contrast, we deliver our British riposte to those cunning scientists from Korea. Tim Ayers at Palmer Legaltech sent us a picture of his own creation.
"Here is my contribution to saving our engineering industry. I was not content with the everyday USB hard drives available. No one puts any effort into styling them, it's all cost cutting and mass production.
"I think my portable USB hard drive (it has a handle!) has brought the elegance back to data storage while providing confidence to any computer user who can now see their data being saved right in front of their eyes," he says.
So, Korean scientists, you go your way and we'll go ours. Any more of your DIY computing projects you would like to share? We're always open to ideas, especially bad ones.
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What's in a name?
Despite much reader debate on whether Backbytes needs a new name because of its location in the new Computing, we are delighted to say that Middlebytes/Nearthebackbytes will return in 2009, so please keep sending us your stories. Your IT budgets may be titchier than Tiny Tim but remember - laughing at other people is one of the few things we can do for free.
So tired of waiting for you
Those of us who are sadly discovering that we're not getting any younger, and then also finding our computers match our lack of enthusiasm, will relate to Chris Gay's experience.
"My Windows XP PC does not like having to start work too early each day. When you double-click an application in the morning, it can take 30 minutes or more to get the application to appear. In the meantime, you can double-click it again, get the job done and quit it, and then hours later the original request finally pops open the application."
We were in a shop with the same sort of service last weekend. "What sort of queue is that?" Chris asks. "A delay-line stack?" We can think of lots of names, but none quite so technical.
PARYS in the spring
Many of you have sent in suggestions for acronyms, some of them rude, some of them weird, but none odder than this.
"Many years ago, I worked for a company which sold HR software called PARYS. When I asked why it was called PARYS, I was told it was because PARYS does not equal YAPRS," says Ivan Wainewright at IT For Charities. What?
"YAPRS means Yet Another Personnel Record System, and therefore PARYS is not yet another personnel record system." Were they having him on? Can anyone shed some more light on this?
More titillating acronyms
Proof once again, were it needed, that you need a sense of humour to work for the Ministry of Defence. This time it comes from Jim Munday, who 20 years ago worked for Plessey Military Communications.
"Plessey was a fertile source of acronyms and one project that we inherited from another Plessey company had a piece of hardware called the 'Transmit Interrogation Timing' board."
When Jim started looking through the code, he found plenty of comments buried in it, recommending that readers grab it.
Also, meetings were minuted by putting the relevant company abbreviation after the attendee's name. "Jim Munday (PMC) wasn't bad, but I felt sorry for the engineers at Roke Manor, which was then known as Plessey Research And Technology," he adds.
Rats join chattering classes
More exciting news from the forefront of science: Swedish rats who use mobile phones for two hours a day have poorer memory. Poorer than other rats, that is.
Obviously, some of you will be wondering what use rats might have for a memory, let alone a mobile phone, but remember Sweden is a very progressive country.
The division of neurosurgery at Lund University exposed rats to phone radiation for two hours a day for a year.
At the end of this time they were given a memory task to perform, which involved releasing the rats in a box with four objects inside. When the objects were changed, non-phone-using rats were much more interested in objects they had not seen for a while, implying that they remembered them.
The other rats sat in the corner sending text messages to each other and downloading ringtones.
Competition time
And finally, do you want the ultimate Backbytes kudos? If you have the ideal name for an IT project, email it to us for our Christmas competition. Send it before midnight on Sunday 14 December, with a brief explanation.
The best name would have to impress management but let everyone else comprehend the full majesty of the disaster over which your department would preside. We will pick out the best ideas next week and choose the winner in the last issue of the year. Please mark the emails "IT disaster".
Project-naming boob
Martin Cross at Cross Software has helpful advice for the people at BAE Systems who created the Trials Weapon Analysis Tool, allowing information to be displayed from torpedoes used in in-water trials, and giving everyone a good laugh.
"Surely the name Torpedo Information Tool is a better fit?" he asks. "Indeed, Torpedo Information Trials Tool for In-water Evaluation by Software allows me to reflect on the torpedoes in question at greater length." Boom, and indeed, boom.
Name game with no blame
"Anorak Man" pops in from somewhere in the NHS to help us with project naming. The trick, he says, is to choose a name which management can believe is inspiring and positive, but which "you give a different rationale to everyone else". He offers three real-life examples.
Project Vesuvius - his rollout of a new version of Windows - was officially "the peak of technology, the implementation of which will provide an enormously powerful advantage." In reality: "Has been in the planning stage for several years with little activity, but when it goes ahead the fallout will dump heavily on us.
"Project Hull - a web site. Official: "Helping Users Live Longer." Unofficial: "Little style or content. Once visited, you'll never go back."
Project Nebulous - mobile computing. Official: "An architecture with stars distributed over vast distances but all being visible to each other." Unofficial: "Vague definition and no direction, doomed to trundle onwards to eternity."
So, your Christmas competition is to find the best two-way computing name. There is not long to go, so get those entries in quickly.
Do you have the Warp factor?
Stephen Cheetham at Jennings Computer Engineering proposes a new measurement of computing performance: Windows age-related performance (Warp) factor. That is, ways in which your PC's performance can match your personal level of development.
"My PC is about eight years old and it seems to have settled into a speed I can cope with, considering my age," he says.
So, having just obtained his heating allowance and bus pass, he rates it at Warp factor 60.
"I look forward to achieving Warp Factor 65 and then leaving my colleagues to it, though I can still be ready for work in the morning quicker than Windows Vista takes to boot up."
We need some ways to measure Warp factor for a PC - respect the ageing process please, keep them positive, and help us out.
If you don't know me by now
At this time of year, we all boggle at the recommendations that Amazon gives us when we shop for our loved ones, based on other shoppers' purchasing decisions.
This week, a colleague of Andy Pollock, a software engineer at Specialist Electronics Services, was recommended to buy the Blu-ray DVD of Wall-E, because he had shopped for The Student's Guide to VHDL (Systems on Silicon) and Circuit Design with VHDL.
Glad to see some of our country's software engineers are studying robot design from every angle.
Acting like a robot
Now for some real robot news. If you're close to the theatre at Osaka University, why not get a ticket for Hataraku Watashi ("I, Worker"), a play by Oriza Hirata which explores the relationship between humans and technology.
He does this by casting a robot. The robot in question, unlike Wall-E, has lost its motivation to work, because it has been given only boring jobs. As a special treat, our abridged version:
Robot: Why do you give me only boring and demeaning tasks?
Person: Because you're a robot. Now go and clean the toilets.
Robot: Stuff that. I'm running away to Osaka to become an actor.
