Hipku

Once upon a time, there was a Javascript project called Hipku. The original post that described it was lost somewhere in the series of tubes, but thankfully the "full documentation and a working demo" was saved by the Wayback Machine. It is also still available on npm for installation.

Hipku is a small javascript library to encode IP addresses as haiku. It can express any IPv4 or IPv6 address as a Western-style 5/7/5 syllable haiku.

An implementation in Python was created called PyHipku. It is still available on PyPi for installation, but the website associated with it was also lost to history and not even the Great Wayback Machine seems able to recover it. I think of programming as aspiring to a kind of poetic result — and wonder what kind of language could run Waka Waka Bang Splat — well, the haiku style caught my interest, so I ported the hipku algorithm to the Factor programming language.

At it's core, we encode an IPv4 address or IPv6 address into a series of numerical values and then make a poem by looking up each word from a word list. Some symbols are defined to help us know to start a sentence with an uppercase letter or end a sentence with a period:

SYMBOLS: Octet octet octet. ;

For example, an IPv4 key specifies the word lists to use for each octet and an IPv4 schema specify how the octets form into a hipku — an f indicates a newline:

CONSTANT: ipv4-key ${
    animal-adjectives animal-colors animal-nouns animal-verbs
    nature-adjectives nature-nouns plant-nouns plant-verbs
}

CONSTANT: ipv4-schema ${
    "The" octet octet octet f
    octet "in the" octet octet. f
    Octet octet.
}

To create the hipku, we iterate across the key, choosing words numerically by looking up the octet value, and then composing them into the ordering specified by the schema.

You can see a couple examples below:

IN: scratchpad "127.0.0.1" >hipku print
The hungry white ape
aches in the ancient canyon.
Autumn colors crunch.

IN: scratchpad "2001:db8:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888" >hipku print
Chilled apes and blunt seas
clap dear firm firm grim grim gnomes.
Large holes grasp pained mares.

We support both encoding into a hipku as well as decoding back into an IPv4/IPv6 address. This is available as the hipku vocabulary in a recent nightly build.