Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GNU Terry Pratchett

gnuterrypratchett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 54 posts

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#2

Post by tjohns »

I've had the Chrome extension for this running in my browser for a while now.

The most interesting discovery I've found is that virginamerica.com is sending the "X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett" meta tag on all of their pages.

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#3

Post by mobiuscog »

tjohns wrote: post #2

I've had the Chrome extension for this running in my browser for a while now. The most interesting discovery I've found is that virginamerica.com is sending the "X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett" meta tag on all of their pages.

It'd be interesting to know how many (of us) have snuck such a tag into a product ;)

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#5

Post by dzdt »

I once accidently did this on a university computer system. Something was misconfigured with sendmail routing; when I telneted to an unexpected computer in the lab and sent an email from there it started bouncing in an infinite loop between that and another department server. About two days later the system operator noticed when log files filled the drive. My email had been making trips up and down the building a few hundred times a second. I guess I missed the N tag though!

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#6

Post by Freak_NL »

I would rather not add any additional identifying information to my browser, but I am definitely configuring Thunderbird to do this. It's harmless, quirky, geeky, and it might someday make some kindred spirit smile.

I wonder if this header shows up in the statistics of the big email providers.

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#7

Post by nagvx »

I wonder how people feel about adding other names to the Clacks header? It feels a tad lonely for his name to be the only one passed around in this manner. It seems quite like a virtual graveyard, but with only one gravestone. As much as I respect Pratchett, many others are already commemorating his name, and I would feel compelled to add another. If people put their own loved ones into the Clacks header, perhaps this idea could grow, and become a more permanent part of the internet.

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#8

Post by Jaruzel »

As a long time Pratchett fan, I inserted this in my Web Server headers when it first became a thing after he died. I mostly forget it's there until I'm debugging something and look at a response header and go... 'oh yeah'

It's mostly pointless, but us Pratchett fans are a loyal bunch.

Re: GNU Terry Pratchett

#9

Post by pdjstone »

Shodan finds about 8,000 servers with the X-Clacks-Overhead HTTP header: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=X-Clacks-Overhead

Edit: I ran a query on HTTP Archive (which scans the top 1M sites) using Google BigQuery and got these results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TYWRQWlWPuIWIj3dCHAk...

Post reply on HN