Terry Pratchett: A Man is Not Dead While His Name is Still Spoken

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Having spent the last week diligently wading through the list of site issues which the wonderful Chris at Metalfrog has highlighted for me, this morning I found something a little more "magical" to distract me.

Techie fans of the late, great Terry Pratchett have come up with an innovative and hugely appropriate memorial, creating a code called XClacksOverhead which when added to your website or server sets a hidden header reading "GNU Terry Pratchett", visible to those who are looking for it on sites across the web. Like #SBS, it's a case of the sum being greater than the parts!

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, in his Discworld novel, "Going Postal" a communication system similar to the internet is invented ("the clacks"). The GNU Terry Pratchett code replicates a piece of code called GNU John Dearheart which the inventor of the clacks inserts into the system after his son is murdered, repeating his name through the system for eternity.

You can see the XClacksOverhead code in action at MilkChic (there's also a Google Chrome extension which highlights sites with the code – a kind of geeky treasure hunt!) and if you would like to add to the memorial, you can find the code and various options for adding it on the GNU Terry Pratchett site.

And what does this have to do with breastfeeding and nursing clothes? Nothing at all… but it's good to prioritise the human over the commercial once in a while!

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