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Nov 27, 2006

And it gets a name!


First developer tarball that globally gave the GUI the current look and feel and which introduced the Aventurin{e} images.

Category: General
Posted by: mstauber

First developer tarball that globally gave the GUI the current look and feel and which introduced the {Aventurin} images. Basically I went through Sausalito with a fine toothed comb and replaced all the BlueQuartz related images with the new ones.

How did we come up with the name Aventurin{e}?

Both Brian and I come from the Sun Cobalt consulting and development corner and then went on to make our money with BlueQuartz related consulting and software. Finding a name that would somehow continue the legacy formed by Cobalt and BlueQuartz was desirable. So I started Google'ing and also browsed Wikipedia for related topics.

Cobalt = Chemical element of the periodic table, group transition metals (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt ).

(Blue)Quartz = Silica (silicon dioxide, mineral, chemical formula SiO2) (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_quartz ). I played with a couple of mineral names and chemical element names (in specific from the group of transitional metals). Looked 'em up in Google, checked what came up and if some of the names were used for software projects already.

The period table of elements has some interesting names in it, like "Onxy", "Mercury", "Rhodium", "Iridium" and so on. However, most of them are already taken and have been "abused" by other IT companies to hell and back.

So I went back to minerals, searched for names of different forms of "Quartz":  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals 

There are a few interesting ones on that list. One that stuck out was:

Aventurine. The name Aventurine derives from the Italian "a ventura", meaning "by chance". Which is not too far off, because with a project as large as this (and figuring in our busy schedule!) we were of course pulling chances that this was something bigger than we could handle. But that fortunately turned out to be wrong.

Another quote from Wikipedia: "Because aventurine is a rock, its physical properties vary [...] and its hardness is somewhat lower than single-crystal quartz [...]".

That also fits the project description somewhat, because the really early builds were a bit unstable thanks to the latest development kernels.

Finally, the synonym for the mineral aventurine is "Sunstone". Considering that the Sausalito interface used by Aventurine{e}'s GUI was developed by Sun Cobalt, this fits as well.

Another big benefit: Throw "Aventurine" into Google and nothing even remotely related to software, Linux, hosting, OS or ISP comes up. Just the usual jewelry and/or mineral related stuff. So if someone is ever looking for the product by name, it should be very easy to find.

Now you may wonder why the {e} got "trapped" inside the curly brackets? Basically because the mineral is spelled Aventurine in English and in German we call it Aventurin - without the "e". To make the product name really stick out ouf the ordinary and to match both spelling instances it was just adequate to name our software Aventurin{e}.

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