In <BAY138-DS135DABA00DDBE77CA0F0E9F740 at phx.gbl> "T.J. Yang" <tj_yang at hotmail.com> writes:

Can't wait until decision made by Henrik. I am betting the new name will be hobbitmon. Thus I am using hobbitmon in my current development work. but would it be HobbitMon or hobbitmon ?

Don't bet on it.

I've been going over the various suggestions this past week, and I've setup a few loose criteria for judging the names. In no particular order:

*) No references to Tolkien characters. Although I might be able to get away with "hobbitmon" or Gandalfr (thanks, Anna - didn't know those names came from the Edda), I do not want to push my luck any further. *) Likewise, no names that might infringe on existing characters from movies, books etc. *) Nothing that is trademark'ed. *) The name should be somewhat meaningful. Not necessarily obvious, but enough that it is understandable. Also, somewhat "business- like". (Sorry Vernon - I enjoyed Your ventures into Mesopotamian astronomy and egyptology, since those are also hobby-interests of mine, but very few would know who "Horus" is, or what was the role of Aldebaran). *) The name should be short. Preferably two or three syllables, and fit into the space currently on the webpages where it says "Hobbit" now. This is because the name is frequently used in speech; I often have people at work asking me "what's on Hobbit right now?" if they need to know what issues there are currently. It just wouldn't feel right if that was "what's on smart-and-open-systems-monitor right now" ... *) .com, .net and .org should preferably be available.

Of the suggestions I've seen on the list, there are only a few that fit these criteria: savemon, hobmon, Tibboh (not obvious, but I like it), OpenGuardian.

Of those, OpenGuardian is my current favourite - enough so that I've registered the openguardian.com and openguardian.eu domains. It does have something against it, though: OpenGuardian is a component of a product called "HostGuardian", which is described on hostguardian.com:

"HostGuardian offers a complete set of monitoring tools that 
 verify not only a machine on the internet is responding, 
 but that it is delivering the correct content, replying to 
 processes, and connected without latency or packet loss."

This is similar enough to what Hobbit does that using the name for Hobbit could be a problem. It isn't trademarked, according to the USPTO trademark website, but there's a potential for conflict.

I have two other names that I've come up with. The first is "G-Lance" meaning "viGiLance", "monitoring at a G-Lance", and the 'G' could also mean GNU, GPL, Gratis etc. g-lance.com is registered to someone doing graphics free-lance work, but I've grabbed .net, .org and .eu.

I won't tell you the second one yet. The domain is currently registered by someone else, but appears to be completely inactive. It expires on Friday (Aug. 15th), and if it becomes available I'll take it.

So stay tuned ...

Regards, Henrik