Did a 'sort' to list names from least chars to most and didn't like any, except the few that were already gone. Though the many better ones seem to be reserved keywords like 'nill'.
This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi-thought-experiments I came up with:
1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users - This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at https://twitter.com/verified/following . We could iterate over this list, and find the minimum.
2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter handles?
2) I think you'd be likely to find it by just crawling the graph, but it'd be very hard to prove that you had found it. For example, @sockington https://twitter.com/sockington has 1.4M followers.
I share your frustration. No reasonable permutation of my name and initials or usual handles is available, and most are inactive accounts.
Besides their developer-relations problem, namespace pollution and stagnation is a big problem for Twitter going forward. Who wants to join and use a service when the closest thing they can get to their desired username is a second-class moniker like @ffffirst_last1 or @L4stF1rst88 ?? I've heard this complaint from several of my friends who were late to the Twitter scene. The name availability issue is the main reason I think app.net has any chance of succeeding.
More importantly, thats something I should have thought to do before running this script for 8 hours. Would have eliminated about an hour of requests :)
One short-ish reasonable sounding one I was surprised wasn't taken was "kobold"...you'd think that some tabletop gaming fan somewhere would have gotten that one!
I love that I'm always being shown quicker ways of doing this. Using Perl for this wouldn't have occurred to me, so I'm pleased I saw this today.
What it's doing:
One of the call types of the sort function takes a block as its fist parameter and a list as its second. When called this way, the block should operate on two special variables ($a and $b), returning a -1, 0 or 1 depending upon whether $a should be placed before, beside or after $b in the sorted list. The "<=>" operator does this comparison on numbers, the numbers in question being the lengths of the two variables.
The second parameter here is a read of a file handle (the syntax for this is "<filehandlename>"). When the file handle read is used with no named file handle, it reads the the contents of each parameter the script was passed in turn (or STDIN if none). Perl reads files as lists of strings, with each string being a line in the file.
