The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac
As Hobbitmania continues to build in anticipation of the worldwide release of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, OS X users can slake their thirst for Tolkien lore by firing up their Mac's Terminal app, typing cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr at the prompt, and hitting Return. They'll then be treated to a …
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Re: Nope...not correct
I doubt any of that will bother Mr. Jackson anyway, who's intent on screwing all over LoTR canon in his own quest for lots and lots of lovely gold!
On Raspbian, too
That file--and a bunch of others--are in the Raspbian distro for the Raspberry Pi.
It's not a "timeline", just a(n apparently inaccurate) list of anniversaries.
More fodder for geektool...
And another bit of desktop gets scrawled upon.
I remember a time
when all unix (well solaris at least) hosts were called "gandalf"
None of this "I don't know what subdomains are for so I called the server UKACCFS1"
Who is up for a bit of nethack?
Re: I remember a time
Boy that would have been confusing in my neighbourhood. Back then "Gandalf" was a prominent brand of comms gear. Boxen usually had names following a theme (my Uni used cheeses).
Re: I remember a time
that's in the days of Bitnet and UUCP..... all the LAN boxes at CERN were Gandalf...there was a day in the 80's when IBM gave us a transatlantic 2 megabits data-link - we didn't know what to do with it, but Tim had an idea!
Re: I remember a time
My company (an online bookseller with a very common surname!) used authors :-)
Re: I remember a time
One of our servers was called Gandalf, but we used characters from Ibsens plays....
Re: I remember a time
When I was a student in Edinburgh, he AI department used fish for the workstations, ran out of common ones, and started onto methods of cooking them. The CS department used Scottish islands but were running out of names and was resorting to various little skerries and sea rocks on the admiralty charts....
Re: I remember a time
Mine had a bizarre combination of themes. Red Dwarf and Disney characters, with the odd God (specifically Atlas and Zeus) thrown in.
Then they switched to Greek philosophers when they got a new head Unix guy in, although the pace of change was rather slow as systems were renamed as and when they were upgraded.
Re: I remember a time
Our first generation (Vax) network had names from the Greek pantheon: Ares and Hera were main servers, Eos and Io were VaxStations, and there were a bunch (presumably <= 9) of terminal servers called Calliope, Melpomene, Terpsichore etc.
When all this got upgraded, we had Odin and Thor, but terminal servers were a thing of the past, so fortunately we didn't have to find out the names of all the Valkyries.
Our Gandalf was some kind of comms device, but it was a proprietary name, not one we assigned.
Oldtimer alert!
I remember the online manual page for 'tunefs' (file system performance tuning utility) used to have in the 'bugs' section the text "You can tune a filesystem, but you cant tuna fish". Also, in the NROFF comments of the raw manual file, was an addition comment "If you remove this, a UNIX daemon will dog your steps until the time_ts wrap over".
The entry was still present in AIX3, but by AIX4 it had gone. Is no longer present in linux either (probably never inherited that documentation...). It may still be in OSX is that has tunefs...
I also remember that in the message description file (this was OS/400!) error 13 was "Insufficient user IQ" with recommended action "Upgrade keyboard/chain interface module". Error 1701 was "The engines canna take it" with solution "Reverse polarity of the dilithium matrix". I wonder if these are still in production somewhere.
Re: Oldtimer alert!
Solaris used to have the tunefs snippet, long since excised unfortunately.
I seem to recall old versions of emacs having man pages for some odd subjects like "sex" and possibly "condom" - haven't used emacs in years so can't tell if they're still there.
Other fun error codes - does the linux kernel still have the "printer on fire" error? ISTR it was for a return code which would never occur....
Re: Oldtimer alert!
The tunefs "you can't tune a fish" joke was removed around the time of SunOS4 (BSD) -> Solaris 2.0 (SVR4) transition.
In response, there was a bug raised in the Sun bug database - I can't remember whether it was externally visible - but it was titled "AT&T are humorless jerks" and the bug went on to demand the tunefs manpage joke be restored.
Re: Oldtimer alert!
IIRC, the "printer on fire?" message was associated with an undefined combination of status pin values on a Centronics port. Only that combination turned out to be more common than Linus anticipated...
Re: Oldtimer alert!
The "can't tune a fish" quote came from 4.4BSD, it was present in any OS based on that until taken out. It's never been taken out of FreeBSD, for instance:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8#HISTORY
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8?view=log
It wouldn't have ever been in the Linux manpage, I don't think.
all our sunOS and Solaris boxen had hostnames from various comic book heros and villans.
management took a dim view, so the IT director had a new naming convention installed.
names of irish towns. brilliant. names that seemingly can only be spelt and typed correctly when the requesit amount of irish fighting juice has been consumed.
also the root password was the name of whatever brand of watch he'd bought himself.
Barucci was the last one that has been burned indeleably on my cortex, and i've not had to use it in nearly 20 years. while an annoying reminder of someone elses pay packet being larger than ones own, the main problem we had was no longer having the excuse to shout the old root password (transvestite) down the phone at each other.
happy days...
Irish town names... Could have been worse.... Imagine if they'd been called Siobhán, Niamh or Caoimhín....
much more evilly
I once was contracting and had a French boss who seemed to confirm, if not enhance, all the unflattering stereotypes of the French. So I made a class called Maginot and had all methods names of battles lost by the French.
This software has been in production for years and, at least as of six years ago, no one had changed the names.
bless
Well it is completely wrong, and includes hobbit timelines.
However just goes to show that when Linux was created the nerds that created it were all trekkies and tolkienites.
Nothing changes much.
Re: bless
Aww bless, you think this is to do with Linux. This predates the penguin fanciers.
No...
... it's the config file for the Tolkein Ring network
Legal implications...?
Is it just me that thinks it would be utterly hilarious if Apple got ripped open by the Tolkien estate for this one...?
Deeper magic?
Nice to get a Narnia reference thrown in the mix just to cause a millisecond pause - "Where in LOTR is that? Is it something Galadriel said once?"
calendar
I just installed calendar on my RHEL workstation, but no LOTR for me.
There is however a calendar.openbsd file, so RH must have taken their calendar from OpenBSD, not FreeBSD.
Anyway I do have the Discordian calendar, so I really couldn't care less about not having the LOTR one.
calendar.fictional
calendar.fictional Fantasy and fiction dates (mostly LOTR).
OpenBSD calendar has it too.
IRIX audiopanel
My favorite is on IRIX when you run the audiopanel application (mixer volume controls etc) from command line with the parameter "-spinaltap"
This makes all sliders to scale to 11!
So this is where all the badge commentards lurk....
I guess LOTR + OS X + Easter Egg is to frequent el reg readers what a a ginormous honeypot is to a slightly porky bee. Not saying readers are porky, just might be.
I salute you el reg for knowing your audience. And I want my damn badge.... WAAAAAhhh
Unsurprisingly, this also works on FreeBSD ;)
Am I the only person still using this OS?
In the vein of sharing, here's an oldy but goodie
Windows systems have Easter eggs too, e.g. as the admin user issue:
deltree /y c:*.*
Enjoy the ensuing hilarity!
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