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.)
Hmm, I wondered a while back if anyone was keeping track of these. It seems to be a manual list so far, so added my main server, as that's been transmitting the clacks overhead since he died. Can't wait for the crawler to go live and then we'll see how many people did add it, including any big name sites.
Hi Jaruzel, the crawler is live :D you can see in the bottom which page it is crawling right now.
It's basically scraping all links on every page it hits and tests the headers if they are containing the clacks value.
I added the form so people can submit pages to speed up the development of the list, even though I believe eventually the crawler would get to their pages :D
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:
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.)http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/