Generating easy-to-remember random identifiers

Posted by Carl Seleborg on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Carl Seleborg
Published on 2010-04-16T12:08:33Z Indexed on 2010/04/16 12:13 UTC
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random-number-generator

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mnemonics

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Hi all,

As all developers do, we constantly deal with some kind of identifiers as part of our daily work. Most of the time, it's about bugs or support tickets. Our software, upon detecting a bug, creates a package that has a name formatted from a timestamp and a version number, which is a cheap way of creating reasonably unique identifiers to avoid mixing packages up. Example: "Bug Report 20101214 174856 6.4b2".

My brain just isn't that good at remembering numbers. What I would love to have is a simple way of generating alpha-numeric identifiers that are easy to remember. Examples would be "azil3", "ulmops", "fel2way", etc. I just made these up, but they are much easier to recognize when you see many of them at once.

I know of algorithms that perform trigram analysis on text (say you feed them a whole book in German) and that can generate strings that look and feel like German words. This requires lots of data, though, and makes it slightly less suitable for embedding in an application just for this purpose.

Do you know of anything else?

Thanks!

Carl

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