Bluescreen is a screen saver that not only authentically mimics a BSOD, but will simulate startup screens seen during a system boot.

* On NT 4.0 installations it simulates chkdsk of disk drives with errors!
* On Win2K and Windows 9x it presents the Win2K startup splash screen, complete with rotating progress band and progress control updates!
* On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it presents the XP/Server 2003 startup splash screen with progress bar!

Now that’s cool! :-)

robots.txt
User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

Happy Halloween!

Hats of for finding it: GoogleWatchBlog & Blogoscoped.

Ps; if you don’t get it, read more on robotstxt.org.

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

How do you come up with this stuff?!

*Edit; this has been getting a bit more attention than I anticipated, and wasn’t ment to be this “popular”. A lot of the comics were found on StackOverflow.com, where I added some of my personal favorites.

You get a regular expression that replaces “\\t” instead of “\t”, and it produces a silly website for Cisco. Notice any “T”s missing on that website?

We're missing a few "T"s here.

Soruce-code looked like this. Every occurence of “T” was stripped.

Missing T's in Cisco Sourcode

Even the big guys occasionaly blunder!

[root@vps ~]# curl --head http://www.mattiasgeniar.be
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:58:15 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
X-Pingback: http://www.mattiasgeniar.be/xmlrpc.php
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=sudpae35dbuesipfiouipcbue0; path=/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Nothing special about it, perhaps the X-Pingback is a bit odd – it’s added by wordpress to allowed automatic pingbacks to certain articles. You have your typical date, server, connection & content-type shown to you.

Some sites however … like to add some special things. Slashdot for instance adds a new Futurama quote with every page you load. It’s hidden to 99,9% of the users out there – only the geeks who actually look at the headers will see this.

[root@vps ~]# curl --head http://slashdot.org          
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:02:27 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001217
X-Bender: They're tormenting me with uptempo singing and dancing!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Note the X-Bender: They’re tormenting me with uptempo singing and dancing! quote in there! You’ll also find quotes by Leela & Fry.

• X-Bender: I only know enough binary to ask where the bathroom is.
• X-Bender: Gimme your biggest, strongest, cheapest drink.
• X-Leela: This is by a wide margin the least likely thing that has ever happened.
• X-Leela: This toads the wet sprocket.
• X-Fry: You mean Bender is the evil Bender? I’m shocked! Shocked! Well not that shocked.
• X-Fry: I must be a robot. Why else would human women refuse to date me?

It’s probably been known for a while, but it was knew to me. Kinda cool – now I’m looking at ways to add fancy headers for this server as well … :-) You can read more about it on this Fun With HTTP Headers article!

Edit: turns out it is incredibly easy to add a custom http header to apache. Just enable the use of .htaccess and you can add all the headers you like. Add the following line, to create a “X-Who-Rocks”-header!

Header set X-Who-Rocks "Mattias Geniar"

This is what the headers for this site now look like! Muchos better! :-)

[root@vps httpdocs]# curl --head http://www.mattiasgeniar.be
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:23:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
X-Pingback: http://www.mattiasgeniar.be/xmlrpc.php
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=ibmsf43qjjnkc6h6fudfok0sp5; path=/
X-Who-Rocks: Mattias Geniar
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Yarrr!

It originated from the SEGA Genesis game “Zero Wind”, launched in 2001. The intro to the game was created in Japanese, and mistranslated. Somehow, this managed to cause quite the hype throughout the internet.

Here’s the original opening cutscene.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IORpKl8WUc]

And now for some copy/paste, the lousy English translations :-)

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It’s you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ….
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move ‘ZIG’.
Captain: For great justice.

And this is what it should have been – and compared to the translation, these are actually pretty well thought off.

AD 2101―
A war has begun.
Captain: Tell me what has happened on Earth!
Engineer: It seems someone has installed explosives unnoticed.
Communication operator: Captain! We’ve received a signal!
Captain: What!?
Communication operator: Visual incoming on the main screen.
Captain: You!?
CATS: You seem to be fairly preoccupied, gentlemen? (with sarcasm)
CATS: With help from the Federation Government forces, we, CATS, have taken over all of your bases.
CATS: Before long, your ship will meet its end as well.
Captain: It-It can’t be…!
CATS: I thank you for your cooperation.
CATS: Cherish these few remaining moments of your lives.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha…
Communication operator: Captain….
Captain: I order all ZIG units to launch!!
Captain: They’re all we have left―
Captain: ―to entrust the hope of our future…
Captain: We’re counting on you, ZIG!!

A fair amount of remixes emerged as well, including this techno-version.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-41ve90rks8]

Funny how such a monstrosity can actually catch on … :-)

It took me 60 minutes, to travel 6 km …