Good Old Slashdot

Back in the days (like in the 90's) I used to read Slashdot, the geek news site. I don't anymore, I waste my time elsewhere these days.

But today I found out a pretty cute thing about Slashdot. They send random silly quotes in their response HTTP headers. If you don't understand what I just said, it means that when Slashdot talks to your browser it includes some stuff that is unnecessary and which the browser will simply throw away. But this extra stuff is actually silly quotes.

If you're on linux you can do curl -I slashdot.org to watch all the headers.

Here are some examples:


X-Fry: Sweet justice! Sweet, juicy justice!
X-Bender: Stop doing the right thing, you jerk!
X-Fry: But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world.
X-Fry: The butter in my pocket is melting!
X-Bender: I'm tired of this room and everyone in it!
X-Bender: My full name is Bender Bending Rodriguez.


Wow, these guys really have a thing for inserting silliness everywhere.

Wordle

Wordle is a nice online service for creating word clouds. Here's some words from my blog:

From this there are a number of feature that I would like wordle to improve on. First of all, when reading off a blog it's clear that they're just concatenating the different posts. But it seems that they forget to insert a space between the posts which results in some funny words with a period in the middle. Secondly it would be nice to be able to treat several words as a single one. In the above example you can see that I've written "Star Wars" quite a lot. But the words "Star" and "Wars" are treated separately. It would be swell if I could say that any occurrence of the word "Star" before "Wars" should be treated as a single word.