So, I got some very good feedback on the IP Mnemonics that I was kicking around earlier. I worked with a colleague in person for a some time today and we whittled the list down to the required 256 entries - so, here's version 0.5 of some proposed IP mnemonics. (For those of you not following along, they're used in place of standard set of four octal IP addresses: 192.168.100.9 for example)

Sorry, jbucata, I decided to stick with three letter ones for a few reasons, mostly because I'm lazy. 8^), but I did track down and eliminate last few two-syllable words.

mbrubeck - thanks for the references. We managed to get a few things right, trying to eliminate homonyms and near-homonyms/soundalikes, acronyms, obscure or difficult to pronounce words, proper names, etc. I think that we have done a fair job of doing so.

This system has a few advantages over other systems and an equal (if not greater) number of disadvantages:

1. All mnemonics will be 12 characters, which is hypothetically backwards compatible with the four x three digits maximum available before. (== easy way to assign guaranteed unique machine names, which was my original intention way back when...)
2. The mnemonics (mnes from now on) are in alphabetical order(*), which offers some visual clues to the IP behind it. (This can also be viewed as a disadvantage as well)
   • We special cased 0 and 255 as 'zip' and 'all', respectively.
3. The one-to-one ratio makes translation easy to do by hand.

The disadvantages are:

1. There's a limit to the phonetic distance one can have in only three letters. This is not optimised for speaking
2. The words were strained by hand, which leads to vagaries in the choices, as we all know.
3. Lots more

So, using the 0.5 version...

1. PGPFone
   • advogato.org: kiwi cannonball goldfish warranty
   • lowly.limpet.net: beaming escapade spigot apollo
   • norlug.org: beaming supportive upshot applicant
2. Mnemonic
   • advogato.org: heavy-blitz-tictac
   • lowly.limpet.net: except-energy-banjo </li>
   • norlug.org: frank-flood-axiom
3. IP Mnemonic - the new kid
   • advogato.org: lag-bus-irk-who;
   • lowly.limpet.net: bin-gap-rut-ape
   • norlug.org: bin-sky-was-ant

God knows I'll have more to say about this later. Gotta sleep.