title: Naming nodes in Erlang
body: <p>I'm playing with the <a href="http://www.erlang.org/doc/getting_started/conc_prog.html#3.4" rel="noreferrer">distributed programming tutorial</a> from the 5.4 documentation, and have run into a problem with node names.</p>
  
  <p>My MacBook's default name (<code>jamess-macbook</code>) does not play well with Erlang's node-naming scheme, due to the dash:</p>
  
  <pre><code>(salt@jamess-macbook)4&gt; {my_process, pepper@jamess-macbook} ! start
  ** exception error: bad argument in an arithmetic expression
       in operator  -/2
          called as pepper@jamess - macbook
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm sure there's an easy way to get around this, short of renaming all the machines I want to run Erlang on, but I can't see it in the documentation.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>