All In a Name, or Who the Hack Are You?

Say what you want, names are funny things. According to Xunzi, an influential Chinese philosopher way-back-when, "we have names in order to illuminate noble and base and distinguish same and different." This from someone whose name I have no idea how to pronounce. Of course, names and naming conventions are nothing new to programmers, as anyone who has tried to read the source code of a new programming language knows. Which suggests there is a formality to names, a philosphy of names, if you will. And there is. Even Plato was into the name game, stating that "every thing has a correct name by nature." At least I can pronounce his name.

Old Plato hit the editor on the head with his "correct name by nature" stuff. Take James Hack, for instance. Dr. Hack, who is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was recently appointed director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Lab. How great is that? A computer scientist named "Hack." Okay, I should be offering congratulations to Dr. Hack instead of having fun with his name. But I doubt that I'm the first person Dr. Hack has run into who's pointed out the irony of this.

As for me, I've already received congratulations for the release of the second edition of my book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. It's a great book. Everyone should buy it. But one thing to note: I'm not that Jon Erickson. I'm another Jon Erickson. I didn't write that book, but another Jon Erickson did. And it is a fine book. However, if the publisher needs a postal address to send the royalty checks to, well, I can help out there.

This isn't the first time I've been confused with another (or two) Jon Erickson's. Years ago, I actually did receive a royalty check meant for another Jon Erickson. Oddly enough, we shared not only the same publisher, but the same editor. But since that Jon Erickson was making less money on his books than I, I sent the check back.

In any event, congratulations again to Jim Hack, or as Richard Stallman likes to say, "happy hacking."

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 06:35 PM  Permalink