The best approach to identification seems to be to give up on having the identifier try to prove its own relationship to a “principal” (person or entity). Instead, the relationships are given as external statements made by other principals. The identifier itself can then just be a random unique number (such as a public key, which is easy to generate) with no intrinsic mnemonic value.
Drew Thaler explains more about why he doesn’t like case-insensitivity in filesystems. My somewhat naive opinion on this issue is that putting these smarts in the filesystem smells like bad design. It solves a good part of the problem implicitly, which encourages it to be mostly ignored at higher levels, and makes it likely that some code will accidentally rely on the filesystem where it shouldn’t. In other words, I think the end-to-end argument applies to filesystem case-insensitivity.
MacSanta is coming early this year. Today you can save 20% on DropDMG, EagleFiler, and SpamSieve, and on software from other fine Mac developers. A 10% discount will be available through December 31. Make sure that you sign up for the RSS feed so that you don’t miss the other deals throughout this month. Thanks to Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba for organizing the promotion again this year.
