Mascot

From Cfwiki

We at cfwiki.org think that cfengine should have a mascot.

Linux has the penguin, BSD's got the Demon, perl's got the camel... what animal should represent cfengine?

Here's some ideas we've had. Feel free to add (+1 -yourname) to mascots you think are good ideas! It's a kind of informal wiki voting system if you will. Just to keep things simple, please don't vote for more than two mascots (you can of course change your vote at any time-- it's a wiki!)

Mascot Ideas

• Maybe already used ideas
  • O'Reilly
    • Pigeon (Various pigeons already used for 4 different O'Reilly books)
    • Bee (Honey Bee is already used for O'Rielly's Oracle Performance Tuning, and the Bumble Bee is used for their Oracle8i Internal Services... book)
    • Why stop with one animal? We need a Beowulf cluster of cats. For anyone who has seen that "cat herding" ad, you'll know why (because systems admin is like herding cats :) ). -TimN (Various cats, and even multiple cats, used for O'Reilly)
    • A Octopus or Squid, its one central body with multiple tentacles. Its easy to relate how a squid could manage multiple computers easily since it has so many tentacles. Though a squid was used on the O'Reilly book for the Squid Proxy server. -JeremiahJohnson (+1 Bill Costa)(+1 Scott Lackey)
  • Fox +1 (Here's a picture of a Fox. This bugger is cute too.) (But what about Firefox? - TimN)
• Birds of prey
  • Hawk, condor, some other bird of prey. These kinds of birds watch their territory. If something is wrong or if they find it's prey, they swoop down and get it (or in CFEngine fix it) and then sit back on top and watch again.
  • Condor is also a project by the University of Wisconsin does High Throughput Computing (distributing jobs amongst a network for processing) so kind of related, project-wise! -Matithyahu
  • Buzzards are much like hawks except they tend to go after roadkill. I'm far more likely to have "roadkill" on my servers than actual varmints that need a good swooping.
• Miscellaneous ideas
  • Lichen
  • Lemming: because users are like lemmings (or because cfengine can make a bunch of servers jump off a cliff faster than other systems admin tools :) ). -TimN
  • A phagocyte or other immune system related organism, to keep the theme of computer immunology.
  • Laughing Kookaburra: Because I look like I am working much harder than I am using cfengine. Yearly reviews make me want to laugh or at least giggle :) -krowton
  • Army ants - cfengine across my nodes is like this army of ants, dutifully marching around, nothing can stop them.... -rspence
  • The puppeteer from the godfather; but instead of the trademarked hand holding it, tux in the background holding the strings which underneath spell out cfengine...-bender
  • I think the mascot should be a "Gavel", as the Gavel is the tool used by a Judge to maintain order and control. -Dan Magnuszewski

Related O'Reilly Books, and their animals:

• Aeleen Frisch, Essential System Administration: Armadillo
• David N. Blank-Edelman, Perl for System Administration: Sea Otter
• Kevin Dooley, Designing Large-Scale LANs: Reindeer
• Ellen Siever, Et al., Linux in a Nutshell: Arabian Horse

Add your idea for a cfengine mascot here! For ideas (and used mascots), you might find O'Reilly's Animal Menagerie page interesting.

A note on use of Animal mascots on O'Reilly books, from their Artist Edie Freedman:  
"working with the animal engravings has made me much more aware of what is 
happening to our environment. Many of the animals that appear on our covers are 
endangered--the tarsier from Learning the vi Editor, the lorises from sed & awk, 
the Victoria Crowned Pigeons from lex & yacc, and the Florida panther from Java 
Foundation Classes in a Nutshell, just to name a few. At the time most of the 
engravings were created, in the last century, these animals were plentiful. Perhaps 
our use of animal images on our covers will encourage people to work harder to save 
the species that are still sharing the planet with us." [From
Origin of Species: A History of O'Reilly Animals]

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