My first Easter egg for this website – GNU Terry Pratchett

I enjoy adding Easter eggs to my personal websites, so I thought I’d start by joining in with that tribute. Allow me to explain. In ‘Going Postal’ (and elsewhere in the Discworld series), there’s a long-distance semaphore network called the Clacks that sends telegraph-like messages between towers.

In the story, when a worker named John Dearheart dies, his name is kept alive by adding the message “GNU John Dearheart” into the Clacks overhead (a section of the message reserved for the system, essentially the header or other metadata). The prefix is a bit of Discworld wordplay (and a Unix reference) and means:

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

So it acts as a piece of metadata that never gets dropped. This is done in the belief that “a man is not dead while his name is still spoken”.

There are many ways to do this (see gnuterrypratchett.com for more), the one I’ve chosen is a few simple lines added to my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Terry Pratchett"
</IfModule>

Where to find it (Google Chrome example)

1. Load any page on this site
2. Right-click and select ‘Inspect’
3. Select the ‘Network’ tab and reload
4. At the top of the listing of loaded items, click the page URL at the top
5. Select the ‘Headers’ tab and you’ll find it under ‘Response Headers’

‘X-’ headers are custom, non-standard headers. They’re completely harmless and meant for experiments, debugging, or other fun things. Technically that prefix is deprecated (developer-speak for outdated and no longer recommended) since 2012, but in this case it’s part of the tribute to retain the old style.

So Sir Terry is now “riding the Clacks” on this site for as long as it exists. Little remembrances like this remind me that the web isn’t just about tech, it has a history and culture of its own.