Slashdot Mirror
'I'm a Teapot' Error Code Saved From Extinction By Public Outcry (gizmodo.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
It started back in 1998 as an April Fool's Day gag. Written up by Larry Masinter of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), error code 418 -- "I'm a teapot" -- was nothing more than a poke at the "many bad HTTP extensions that had been proposed". Despite its existence as a joke, a number of major software projects, including Node.js, ASP.NET and Google's Go language, implemented it as an Easter egg. A recent attempt to excise the fictitious code from these projects ended up doing the opposite, cementing it as a "reserved" error by the IETF...
Mark Nottingham, IETF chair for the HTTP and QUIC working groups, flagged the code's removal as an "issue" for Google's Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft's ASP.NET... Nottingham's argument was that 418 was "polluting [the] core protocol" of these projects... It didn't take long for a "Save 418" website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will "revisit" the situation with the next major version of Go.
The Save 418 site argued that "the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It's a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It'd be a real shame to see 418 go."
Mark Nottingham, IETF chair for the HTTP and QUIC working groups, flagged the code's removal as an "issue" for Google's Go language, the Node.js Javascript runtime and Microsoft's ASP.NET... Nottingham's argument was that 418 was "polluting [the] core protocol" of these projects... It didn't take long for a "Save 418" website to go live and through the efforts of interested internet historians (and jokers), all three of the aforementioned projects have decided to keep the code as it is, though Google will "revisit" the situation with the next major version of Go.
The Save 418 site argued that "the application of such an status code is boundless. Its utility, quite simply, is astonishingly unparalleled. It's a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It'd be a real shame to see 418 go."
This was just very forward thinking in preparation for IoT. Now, when your teapot can't connect to cloud it can tell you what the problem is ... "I am trying to connect to the internet and E418"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
To be fair, Nottingham also wrote the draft that's now reserving the error code.
He recognized there was popular support for the error code, and revised his position to remove the error code only if every other three-digit error code starting with 4 is taken.
The work that software developers do is extremely mentally challenging. We're often under pressure to not only create a product that is good enough to be profitable (or at least helpful), but also to not make extremely subtle mistakes that results in security vulnerabilities, information exposure, or denial of service.
That's why we like putting little jokes in our software. It helps us cope with the pressure. It's why song lyrics, movie quotes and ASCII art find their way into code comments. It's why JIRA's about page is presented as an 8-bit video game. It's why we have an RFC describing an "evil bit". It's why error pages for popular source code repository have anthropomorphic robots. Hell, even MS Excel had a freakin' flight simulator built into it at one point!
The world is bad enough as it is without the misery-mongers demanding we excise all forms of fun from our line of work. Leave us alone. Let us have our fun. We know what we're doing.
Actually, it could have been used almost from the start of the web. As a grad student at CERN, I was introduced to the web very early on in its history and what was possibly the worlds first webcam was used to monitor the coffee pot in the Cambridge Computer Science department. I even surprised one of my friends when I got back to the UK by asking to see it - he was amazed anyone over in physics had heard of it!.
Seeing ICBM in a web page header, giving the geolocation of the website/server, always made me chuckle.
Starving kids in Africa could be eating these error codes.
We're talking Russell's teapot, right?!
To be fair, Nottingham also wrote the draft that's now reserving the error code.
He recognized there was popular support for the error code, and revised his position to remove the error code only if every other three-digit error code starting with 4 is taken.
Yes, a classy response to the issue, unlike the humourless maintainer who removed the ddate (Discordian Date) tool from util-linux: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/sh...
Yes, a classy response to the issue, unlike the humourless maintainer who removed the ddate (Discordian Date) tool from util-linux: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/sh...
Eh? (checks.....)
WTF man?, no ddate? ok, so the last time I used it in anger was in a server added header on the MTAs I used to look after many, many years ago...
them: we got spam from your servers..
me: No worries, got an example in front of you?, good, tell me the contents of the X-MTA-FNORD header...
them:(typie typity type....)Errr, what X-MTA-FNORD header?
me: there's your problem, not my circus, monkeys etc. etc..
Really, again, WTF?, you know I'm now in the crazy position that the only machines that have ddate on them here in my house are the windows boxes and not one of my Linux boxes has it now by default?
Time to dig out the sources...fucking Greyfaces...GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE!