RIP Terry Pratchett

I was thinking last night about a comment that I think someone else wrote on here yesterday….

I’ve never had this with another book series or TV series before, but the dawning realisation that there will effectively be no more ‘news’ about the Discworld is really quite sad. Strange concept really; that you can feel sad/disappointed knowing you’ll never hear more tales from the lives of some fictional characters!

What will happen to the Clacks? How does Vimes & the rest of the Watch carry on keeping Ankh Morpork ‘safe’, do Captain Carrot & Angua stay together, does CMOT Dibbler open a Gregg’s franchise, what scrapes is Rincewind destined for, where the hell does the Luggage end up…..!?

I almost hope that someone takes over the baton to keep the story going. But, is there anyone who could do that?! Probably not.

On a more positive note, the “Death in the Kitchen” figurine I ordered from eBay yesterday has been posted this morning! Woop!

I have read that his daughter Rhianna (think that’s her name) will be carrying on his work. She already writes the online gaming stuff.

There’s the last Tiffany Aching book to come.
I found Raising Steam hard to read thinking he was trying to get a nod to as many characters as he could.
I think his daughter has a production company looking at rights to the books, The Watch as a TV series may happen.
The Troll Bridge is still in post production?

It’s an odd thing, I haven’t read anything of his for about 15 years (maybe less). But, if someone said to me they were a Pratchett fan, I’d automatically assume they were a nice person. There’s a certain type of humour/intelligence in his work.

what will happen to the clacks…?

clacks overhead

^Awesome!

Almightydutch – also awesome!

RIP Terry. Not awesome. For a while I wondered if I actually cared when people died until the absolute sense of loss hit me on this one. Not sure how I feel about his work being continued.

My Death In The Kitchen Clarecraft figure turned up.

Well pleased. The Wife isn’t quite so happy; it’s got pride of place on a shelf in the living room at the moment. I’m sure she’ll ‘tidy’ it away at some point.

Co-incidentally this has just appeared about a guy in our running club with the same condition. Paul’s a top fella, facing this rotten condition with cheery determination… http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/healthadvice/11467655/Losing-control-is-my-greatest-fear.html

^^^ sounds terrible.

Being diagnosed with something like that and know it’s coming but nothing can be done to help.
Dunno how people stay so ‘normal’ – human spirit, I suppose.

Awww – STW now has the clacks overhead.

Great stuff!

AdamW – Member
Awww – STW now has the clacks overhead.

Great stuff!

Is that the GNU clacks thing…? How does it work, then?

Its just a header in the HTML, GNU Terry Pratchett, where G=”pass message on”, N=”Do not log” and U=”Turn around at end of line” from the books containing the clacks system.

X-Clacks-Overhead is the directive.

Certain plugins for browsers (I’m using my Chromebook so have it for chrome) can detect it and just flag up if it is present.

AdamW – Member
Its just a header in the HTML, GNU Terry Pratchett, where G=”pass message on”, N=”Do not log” and U=”Turn around at end of line” from the books containing the clacks system.

X-Clacks-Overhead is the directive.

Certain plugins for browsers (I’m using my Chromebook so have it for chrome) can detect it and just flag up if it is present.

I get the clacks bit and the GNU nomenclature.
But I don’t get the rest of it; the header in the html, plug-in for browsers….etc 🙂

So are you supposed to see GNU Terry Pratchett somewhere? Do you have to have a plug-in to see it? Where do you see it etc?
‘Scuse my thick-ness…

So are you supposed to see GNU Terry Pratchett somewhere? Do you have to have a plug-in to see it? Where do you see it etc?

You don’t – which is kind of the point. It’s a hidden message passed around the overhead of the web for as long as people remember.

Its just a header in the HTML

You mean http rather than html.

Apologies, I meant HTTP header.

So are you supposed to see GNU Terry Pratchett somewhere? Do you have to have a plug-in to see it? Where do you see it etc?

If you really do want to see it, you probably can by hitting f12 in your browser, going to the network tab, reloading the page, finding the entry for something served from the singletrack domain and expanding the response headers then looking for “X-Clacks-Overhead:GNU Terry Pratchett”.

you can get a chrome extension

Chrome extension sounds easier than all that other stuff! Cheers.

Just curious what it was all about (apart from the simple answer of a message that goes about in the code).

I wondered how AdamW knew this…

Awww – STW now has the clacks overhead.

Great stuff!

…whether it was something I was obviously missing or something a bit more cryptic!

Cheers all….

Just curious what it was all about (apart from the simple answer of a message that goes about in the code).

Ok, a slightly more longwinded answer is that when your computer communicates with a web server (in both directions) the communications involve various “headers” which include information about, amongst potentially many other things, the software running on the server, the browser running on the client, when the page was last modified and how long to cache it for. Some of these headers are vital, some of them are trivial.

What’s happening now is that people are adding an extra one of those “headers” which does nothing other than pass Terry Pratchett’s name to your computer in an echo of the plot device in Going Postal whereby clacksmen pass the names of those who died in the service of the clacks around in the invisible overhead of the clacks network.

For example, here are the headers for a stylesheet on this page:

Cache-Control:max-age=604800
Connection:keep-alive
Date:Wed, 18 Mar 2015 22:20:34 GMT
ETag:”528f77f1-26e4″
Expires:Wed, 25 Mar 2015 22:20:34 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=60
Last-Modified:Fri, 22 Nov 2013 15:27:45 GMT
Server:nginx
X-Clacks-Overhead:GNU Terry Pratchett

In the Discworld saga, a clever mechanism was devised to keep alive the memory of someone inspirational.

In the real word, a similarly clever mechanism was devised to keep alive the memory of someone inspirational, based on the brilliance of the aforementioned fictional universe.

If you ever read “GNU Terry Pratchett” and don’t get it, trust me, explanations aside it’s just Right.

lemonysam – Member

Ok, a slightly more longwinded answer……….

Much appreciated; that explains it great. I thought that was the sort of thing it was doing.

Cougar – Moderator

In the Discworld saga, a clever mechanism was devised to keep alive the memory of someone inspirational.

In the real word, a similarly clever mechanism was devised to keep alive the memory of someone inspirational, based on the brilliance of the aforementioned fictional universe.

If you ever read “GNU Terry Pratchett” and don’t get it, trust me, explanations aside it’s just Right.

Yeah. As I said before, I get the Discworld & I get Going Postal & I get the clacks with the messages running up & down the line.
I’ve been reading the books for about 18yrs, so know about the Discworld side of it.
I was just curious as to how it was applied within the internet & how
people knew it had been added to a website.

Ok.

When you go to a website, there’s a dialogue which takes place to negotiate what data is sent (so, for example, the server knows when to provide a mobile-friendly version of the page). Your browser goes “hi, I’m a web browser,” the server replies with “great, I’m a web server!” and so on and so forth. It’s into this metadata that the GNU TP code has been added.

Under normal circumstances, a regular user would never see this code. However, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a browser plugin which showed you.

… and there is. Here’s the Chrome plugin, there’s probably others.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clacks-overhead-gnu-terry/lnndfmobdoobjfcalkmfojmanbeoegab

yes you get a very small icon to let you know it happened

Incidentally,

http://www.pcgamer.com/terry-pratchett-tribute-added-to-elite-dangerous/

Frontier Developments has paid tribute to the late author Terry Pratchett by adding a new space station to Elite: Dangerous called Pratchett’s Disc.

The station was added with little fanfare, noted only by a single, short sentence in the Wings Update 1.2.05 patch notes: “Added Pratchett’s Disc starport.” But Executive Producer Michael Brookes told Eurogamer that the author had a great impact on many people at the studio.

“At Frontier we have a great many Pratchett fans on staff and we were all saddened to learn of his passing,” he said. “The sentiment was reflected by our community so we felt it would be right to remember him in Elite: Dangerous.”