All of us have been given a record number or an ID of some sort for further reference. For example, the payment receipt, or a reservation number.
It is great to have a way to uniquely identify something, but don’t you hate spelling those numbers over the phone or writing meaningless numbers on paper stickers?
What if the IDs where not so boring? Actually, they don’t have to. Feeling tired of this disconnection between databases and humanity, I suggest to translate unique ids, uniquely to funny interesting, (well yet meaningless) sentences.
I have created a shell script on my mac that generates 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, and 64 bit unique IDs.
Please note that there is no need to store these IDs as long strings in databse, basically every number can easily be translated to a sentence with a discrete and simple mapping:
Assume we have 2 maps of “adj” for Adjectives, and “non” for Nouns. Use the following rule to generate the human readable IDs.
For example a 32 bit ID: adj non “with” adj non
In above every adj, or non translates to 8 bit. We just need to keep two list of 256 words. One for adj and one for non.
Below is some examples for generating random IDs:
Quality of Data 