#!/bin/bash # memoriam.sh: generate a `X-Clacks-Overhead` HTTP header nginx configuration line based on day-of-year & list of deceased. # Author: Gwern Branwen # Date: 2024-02-24 # When: Time-stamp: "2024-07-21 16:50:07 gwern" # License: CC-0 # # memoriam.sh is intended for generating HTTP headers () which memorialize a dead person. # (For other exotic HTTP headers seen in the wild, see .) # It was based on a Terry Pratchett steampunk anecdote about optical telegraph signaling semaphore towers, # and originally introduced to commemorate Terry Pratchett's death: # # # # # The traditional `X-Clacks-Overhead` is hardwired to "Terry Pratchett" (which also substantially simplifies implementation). # I generalize it to multiple people, with the obvious choice of commemorating death-date (picking randomly for tiebreakers). # # For efficiency, the header is hardwired into a 1-line nginx configuration file, which is called from the main nginx configuration. # (nginx doesn't seem to have a reasonable 'native' way to do it, and shelling out to an executable like a Perl would cost # at least 50ms.) The nginx header looks like `add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "$AUTHOR";`, and the call is # `include /etc/nginx/conf.d/memoriam.conf;`. # The separate memorial configuration file is simply overwritten each day by a root cron job, and nginx restarted: # `@daily rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/memoriam.conf && /home/gwern/gwern.net/static/nginx/memoriam.sh > /etc/nginx/conf.d/memoriam.conf && systemctl reload nginx`. # # Thus, the header will change each day at 0 runtime cost while still being fairly straightforward to implement. # The actual database/selection/overwriting is done by this Bash script. # (Death-less days are handled automatically: the memorial configuration file is empty, and so the nginx inclusion simply does nothing, and no header is set.) # # Example: # $ bash memoriam.sh # add_header X-Clacks-Overhead "Claude Shannon"; # # Requires: bash. set -eo pipefail # Define an associative array with MM-DD as keys and names separated by ", " as values declare -A memorials=( ["01-01"]="Niklaus Wirth" ["01-02"]="Derek Parfit" ["01-04"]="T. S. Eliot" ["01-06"]="George R. Price" ["01-07"]="Richard Hamming" ["01-08"]="Robert Baden-Powell" ["01-11"]="Aaron Swartz" ["01-14"]="Kurt Gödel, Lewis Carroll" ["01-16"]="John C. Bogle" ["01-17"]="Francis Galton" ["01-19"]="Frank Ramsey" ["01-21"]="Terry Jones" ["01-22"]="Ursula K. Le Guin" ["01-24"]="Marvin Minsky" ["01-28"]="W. B. Yeats" ["01-31"]="A. A. Milne" ["02-02"]="Bertrand Russell" ["02-06"]="Raymond Smullyan" ["02-07"]="Alan Perlis" ["02-08"]="John von Neumann" ["02-09"]="Herbert A. Simon" ["02-11"]="Frank Herbert" ["02-14"]="Julian Huxley" ["02-15"]="Richard Feynman" ["02-19"]="Umberto Eco, Deng Xiaoping" ["02-21"]="Baruch Spinoza" ["02-23"]="John Keats" ["02-24"]="Claude Shannon" ["02-28"]="Freeman Dyson" ["02-29"]="Robert H. Brower" ["03-03"]="Sewall Wright" ["03-04"]="Gary Gygax" ["03-07"]="W. D. Hamilton" ["03-13"]="David Rumelhart" ["03-18"]="R. A. Lafferty" ["03-19"]="Richard Bellman" ["03-20"]="Vernor Vinge" ["03-23"]="Pierre-Simon Laplace" ["03-24"]="Gordon Moore" ["03-27"]="Stanisław Lem, Daniel Kahneman" ["04-05"]="I. J. Good, Isao Takahata" ["04-06"]="Isaac Asimov" ["04-07"]="Thomas Bayes" ["04-09"]="Francis Bacon" ["04-11"]="John Conway" ["04-14"]="Gene Wolfe" ["04-19"]="Charles Darwin, Daniel Dennett" ["04-27"]="Karl Pearson" ["04-28"]="Terry Pratchett" ["04-29"]="Ludwig Wittgenstein" ["04-30"]="E. T. Jaynes" ["05-05"]="Ritsuko Okazaki" ["05-07"]="John Stuart Mill" ["05-11"]="Douglas Adams" ["05-14"]="Walter Pitts" ["05-19"]="Stanislav Petrov" ["05-28"]="Phil Hartman" ["06-02"]="Alexander Shulgin" ["06-07"]="Alan Turing" ["06-14"]="Jorge Luis Borges, G. K. Chesterton" ["07-02"]="Douglas Engelbart" ["07-07"]="Arthur Conan Doyle" ["07-08"]="Howard Raiffa" ["07-11"]="Frank Rosenblatt" ["07-19"]="James C. Scott" ["07-20"]="Bruno de Finetti, Neil Armstrong" ["07-23"]="Robert Ettinger" ["07-26"]="John Tukey" ["07-29"]="R. A. Fisher" ["08-11"]="Robin Williams" ["08-12"]="Julian C. Stanley" ["08-24"]="Satoshi Kon" ["08-25"]="David Hume" ["08-28"]="Hal Finney" ["08-30"]="Seamus Heaney, Mikhail Gorbachev" ["09-12"]="Norman Borlaug" ["09-16"]="Robert Jordan" ["09-20"]="J. R. R. Tolkien" ["09-26"]="Fujiwara no Teika" ["10-01"]="Robert Bakewell" ["10-07"]="Peter H. Rossi" ["10-19"]="Jonathan Swift" ["10-20"]="Andrey Kolmogorov" ["10-20"]="Richard Francis Burton" ["10-22"]="Arthur Jensen" ["10-24"]="John McCarthy" ["11-01"]="L. J. Savage, Yehuda Yudkowsky" ["11-17"]="Fred Brooks" ["12-07"]="Ray Solomonoff" ["12-26"]="Charles Babbage" ["12-28"]="Ian Murdock" ) # Validate configuration data: Check for unique values and key-value pairs declare -A value_check=() declare -A pair_check=() for key in "${!memorials[@]}"; do value="${memorials[$key]}" # Check for unique value if [[ -n "${value_check[$value]}" ]]; then echo "Duplicate value found: $value" >&2 exit 1 else value_check["$value"]=1 fi # Check for unique key-value pair pair="$key: $value" if [[ -n "${pair_check[$pair]}" ]]; then echo "Duplicate key-value pair found: $pair" >&2 exit 1 else pair_check["$pair"]=1 fi done today=$(TZ="America/New_York" date +%m-%d) # Function to pick a random name from a list separated by ", " pick_random_name() { # Replace ", " with newline; this assumes ", " does not appear within names themselves local names_string="${1//, /$'\n'}" # Read names into an array, splitting on newline IFS=$'\n' read -r -d '' -a NAMES <<< "$names_string" # Pick a random name from the array echo "${NAMES[$RANDOM % ${#NAMES[@]}]}" } # Check if today's date has an entry in the memorials if [[ -v memorials[$today] ]]; then # If today's date has multiple names, pick one at random: author=$(pick_random_name "${memorials[$today]}") echo "add_header X-Clacks-Overhead \"$author\";" fi