Terry Pratchett’s name lives on in ‘the clacks’ with hidden web code

[muriel_volestrangler]

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.

Pratchett’s 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 “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s 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

[niyad]

1. terry created his own memorial--how fitting.

[flying rabbit]

2. Wow,

[Hekate]

3. The Smoking GNU! This makes me so happy I could just cry

Last edited Wed Mar 18, 2015, 03:16 AM - Edit history (1)

Live forever, Sir Terry.