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 …
that does seem to be the case if Appendix D of the Return of the King is to be trusted.
And Sauron falls on the 25th March
And Ellessar is crowned on 1st May not 23 April
and Elessar marries Arwen on "Mid-years day" not 23 June
end of the War of the Ring is 3 November with the death of Sauron.not 25 October.
good job all this is fictional and not at all important.
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Once upon a time I had a desktop gadget in Linux (this was before Microsoft had thought of desktop gadgets) that was a Faerunian calendar. That was slightly nerdier than this I think, if only because I was actually USING a fictional calendar from D&D as opposed to mapping one from LOTR into the real world.
On a related note, can I have back some of that time I had way too much of in my early 20s?
In "The Hobbit": chapter 6, if my information is correct. Shortly after winning the ring from Gollum and escaping from the tunnels under the Misty Mountains, Bilbo meets up with the rest of the crew and they make it as far as a nearby forest where they are attacked by Wargs, allies of the Goblins of the Misty Mountains. They climb up trees to hide, the Goblins arrive and start to set fire to the trees, the eagles - old friends of Gandalf - swoop in and rescue them.
Your are correct AC. The Goblins were riding the Wargs though; Wargs are kind of like big dogs.. There's an awfully corny song that accompanies that scene in the book. I hope the songs don't get into "There and Back Again", which is the name of the story.
There's a lovely image floating around the internet of Gandalf holding an AK-47, caption is "When you absolutely have to kill ALL the orcs in the room". Remember, LOTR is a fantasy (it is?) so there are a number of geek-sites devoted to alternatives. Sauron vs. The Galactic Empire, etc. ("nuke 'em from orbit"). Technology trumps magic every time - Sauron and all the orcs/wargs/trolls/balrogs/you-name-its going up against any reasonably competent modern military is going to be over in a few hours at most. If the modern military decides to get really serious and starts by nuking Isengard and the Dark Tower, it will be like Bambi meets Godzilla plus radioactive fallout. Part of the appeal of LOTR is that for the most part, the outcome is seriously in doubt. The bad guys have a very good chance of winning this, grabbing the ring, and ruling Middle Earth forever. I, for one, would love to make a deal with Elrond for a few dozen Stinger missiles, part of the price will involve a few elf maidens ;-) oh and by the way, would you like to look at the REST of my arms catalog, sir?
"Technology trumps magic every time - Sauron and all the orcs/wargs/trolls/balrogs/you-name-its going up against any reasonably competent modern military is going to be over in a few hours at most."
But that's missing Tolkien's point. That's exactly what Saruman does. Then you become Sauron.
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Eg:
> $ calendar -f calendar.lotr -A 10
5 Dec Death of Smaug
> $ calendar -f calendar.computer -A 10
8 Dec First Ph.D. awarded by Computer Science Dept, Univ. of Penna, 1965
> $ calendar -f calendar.music -A 10
30 Nov George Harrison dies at 13:30 in L.A., 2001
4 Dec Frank Zappa dies in his Laurel Canyon home shortly before 18:00, 1993
5 Dec Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies in Vienna, Austria, 1791
6 Dec The Rolling Stones play Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, 1969
6 Dec First sound recording made by Thomas Edison, 1877
7 Dec Harry Chapin is born in New York City, 1942
8 Dec John Lennon is shot and killed in New York City, 1980
8 Dec Jim Morrison is born in Melbourne, Florida, 1943
9 Dec The Who's "Tommy" premieres in London, 1973
Any reg types reading this, you need to sort out the line spacing in PRE blocks :/
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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.
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.
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....
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.
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....
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.
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...
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.
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
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