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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTerry Pratchett’s name lives on in ‘the clacks’ with hidden web code
Tech-savvy admirers of the late Terry Pratchett have hit upon an idea for a particularly appropriate memorial. It will be everywhere and nowhere, hiding in the code of the internet.
Pratchetts 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called the clacks. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called GNU John Dearheart to echo his name up and down the lines. G means that the message must be passed on, N means not logged, and U means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is an open-source operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for GNUs not Unix.) The code causes Dearhearts name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than GNU Terry Pratchett? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites(anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading GNU Terry Pratchett. If you had to be dead, thinks a character in Going Postal, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. And so Pratchett is, in a way.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code
Pratchetts 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called the clacks. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called GNU John Dearheart to echo his name up and down the lines. G means that the message must be passed on, N means not logged, and U means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is an open-source operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for GNUs not Unix.) The code causes Dearhearts name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than GNU Terry Pratchett? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites(anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading GNU Terry Pratchett. If you had to be dead, thinks a character in Going Postal, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. And so Pratchett is, in a way.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code
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Terry Pratchett’s name lives on in ‘the clacks’ with hidden web code (Original Post)
muriel_volestrangler
Mar 2015
OP
niyad
(113,556 posts)1. terry created his own memorial--how fitting.
flying rabbit
(4,639 posts)2. Wow,
Hekate
(90,793 posts)3. The Smoking GNU! This makes me so happy I could just cry