GNU Terry Pratchett
This post is a break from the technical show-and-tell theme I've adopted of late and is much more personal. Please feel free to skip if that's likely to bug you.
Today marks ten years since the passing of Terry Pratchett.
I grew up with his work; the first Discworld novel was published when I was just 3 months old. I spent my adolescence reading his books, playing the video games, and wishing that Sky TV and the BBC did something more with their adaptations than just throwing large sums of money at the casting directors.
I now find myself parenting a two-year-old with an insatiable appetite for books. We obviously get through our fair share of classics like The Gruffalo and We're Going on a Bear Hunt, but none of them make me smile like being asked for "daddy's book" at bedtime. The 20 minutes spent reading from our latest Anhk-Morporkian adventure as the little one drifts off are the best 20 minutes of my day.
In honour of the impact he's had on my life, I have joined the ranks of similarly nerdy sysadmins and enabled the x-clacks-overhead header on all of my websites and services. GNU Terry Pratchett.
For those not in the know about clacks and GNU, daggerdragon has written this explanation on gnuterrypratchett.com.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the clacks are a series of semaphore towers loosely based on the concept of the telegraph. Invented by an artificer named Robert Dearheart, the towers could send messages "at the speed of light" using standardized codes. Three of these codes are of particular import:
- G: send the message on
- N: do not log the message
- U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again
When Dearheart's son John died due to an accident while working on a clacks tower, Dearheart inserted John's name into the overhead of the clacks with a "GNU" in front of it as a way to memorialize his son forever (or for at least as long as the clacks are standing.)
If you want to spot other sites out there using the clacks to honour Terry's legacy, there are extensions for both Firefox and Chromium based browsers that pick up the header and flash the message in their icon.
2025-03-12