Need The Lord Of The Rings Timeline? It's On Your Mac | Hacker News Reader

Need The Lord Of The Rings Timeline? It's On Your Mac

macobserver.com

93 pointsdavethenerd49 comments

Use `man calendar` for details on the file format. It's more of an "on this day in history" type list than actual timeline.

The data itself (LOTR dates) first appeared in 4.4BSD (though it was part of the file `calendar.history` [ http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/2.0.5/usr.bin/calendar... ]), and has since passed to FreeBSD (where the LOTR dates were split off into a separate file [ http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=11... ]) and subsequently Mac OS X.

man calendar says its month/day... http://www-sbras.nsc.ru/cgi-bin/www/unix_help/man-cgi?calend... oh, you mean the adventure took place over more than one calendar year, and so without the years, the high bit of the ordering is lost, and the dates wrap around.

About the format it says "Other lines should begin with a month and day. They may be entered in almost any format, either numeric or as character strings." So "month/day" isn't a requirement.

And there's no reason the dates can't be placed in their true order--calendar.ubuntu is ordered by version number and calendar.debian has multiple groups of dates ordered by year.

Since it includes what seems to be a full Emacs distribution, Mac OS X also contains a few "easter eggs" in /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc:[1]

- What is claimed to be the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe

- How to say hello in many languages

- An interview with Richard Stallman from 1986

- Several adult-themed man pages

[1] 22.1 is the appropriate directory on 10.8.2, it may be different on older versions of OS X.

  NAME
     sex - have sex

  SYNOPSIS
     sex [ options ] ...  [ username ] ...

  DESCRIPTION
     sex allows the invoker to have sex with the user(s) speci-
     fied in the command line.  If no users are specified, they
     are taken from the LOVERS environment variable.  Options to
     make things more interesting are as follows:

     -F   nasal sex with plants

Wut?

The full content of the "man sex" page:

http://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?180

Thanks for posting this, I didn't want to spam the comments with the whole man entry (haha, "man entry").

I'm just super curious where the nasal/plants thing comes from or even how it works. Is this going to be on the next episode of Taboo[0]?

[0] http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/taboo/

Stallman enjoys Rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants:

" Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants)."

http://stallman.org/articles/texas.html

http://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html

Likely a geektastic way of suggesting he likes to snort weed. Marijuana comes from the buds of female cannabis plants.

Maybe cocaine? Who snorts weed?

While it is meant to be humor. Might be cocaine too, but coca is extracted from leaves rather than flowers, and that didn't seem a good fit. On a more innocuous note, he might just as easily have meant tobacco snuff. Or nothing at all. With RMS, all things are possible.

Or smelling dead/died flowers.

Another sorely missed feature from cygwin... Boo hoo hoo!

It's also on my Linux.

So this is not an "Apple" article at all despite the "Mac" in the name. It's a FreeBSD article.

How did FreeBSD stuff get into Linux though?

That's the magic of open source.

>> So this is not an "Apple" article at all despite the "Mac" in the name. It's a FreeBSD article.

The article is hosted on macobserver.com, which explains why it has 'Mac' in the title. Also, looking at the article itself it is clearly intended for casual/non-geek computer users. Seeing that OS X + Windows probably cover ~99% of this group, and the calender is not on windows (I suppose), it's not that strange that the article refers to Macs either.

Indeed. I realize this likely predates OS X entirely, but... you're right: casual audience and.. TMO's Mac focus. But yep, as many here have pointed out, it's certainly not limited to the Mac.

It's provided by bsdmailutils.

    $ dpkg -S /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr 
    bsdmainutils: /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal/i386/bsdmainutils

Where do I file a bug report? The date of "Frodo & Bilbo's birthday" was actually given in the book as September 22nd. In my file it's 09/14.

I also recall seeing the date of the destruction of the ring given as 3/25, not 3/18.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=bsdmainutil...

It would appear this was fixed upstream and OSX just hasn't pulled in the latest. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=224407

The updated version listed there isn't present in the current version for Debian or Ubuntu.

Technically, that's not a bug: Tolkien gave instructions for converting "Shire Calendar" dates to modern calendar dates in one of the appendices. (All hobbit months had 30 days, with some extra "holiday" dates stuck in between months at midsummer and midwinter. Leap days were added in midsummer, too.)

One source for more information is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_Ca...

(Personally, I celebrate on Sept. 22 and Mar. 25 just for simplicity. I'm not sure what I'd do if an important event had fallen on Mid-year's day.)

Interesting, but the timeline seems to be inaccurate.

It's a list of calendar dates, not an actual timeline.

That explains it. I was confused when I read "Destruction of the Ring" a third of the way through, and "Fellowship begins Quest" at the very end.

I wonder whether the developers _could_ have put them in chronological order, ex. 12/13/3019 appearing before 03/18/3021; or if the format requires the ordering it has now.

It's probably out of order on purpose. I'm betting this was some of the test data that the developers used, and they just left it in when they finished.

No, the calendar files are anniversaries not timelines.

Have some fun:

    alias anniversaries="ack -a -h `date +"%m/%d"` /usr/share/calendar | sort"

My system has calendar.ubuntu with dates ordered by version number and calendar.debian with multiple groups of dates ordered by year.

It's because after the destruction of the ring, everyone switched to the Gregorian calendar and added a leap day.

The source for this easter egg is from BSD, not Mac. Likely the import came from FreeBSD, but the LOTR calendar long predates FreeBSD:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=57623

If you need something a bit more detailed, then Randall Munroe has you covered: http://xkcd.com/657/

Possibly some spoilers if you haven't read the books and/or seen the movies.

Do people really still use "cat" for viewing files at the commandline?

Probably not... but I figured that was the easiest way to ensure those unfamiliar with the commandline wouldn't wind up in the middle of a 'less' pager and not know how to get out. ;)

Those who are unfamiliar with the command line ought not be pasting commands from a blog into their terminal emulator without understanding what they are doing.

All the time. My usage is a mixture of cat, tail, less, emacs , depending on the situation. I think cat comes very naturally for any *nix user, as it's a useful building block when constructing shell pipes.

Yes. Of course.

This is a prime example that once again shows old != bad.

You expect me to go to all the extra trouble of typing a 4-letter command instead of a 3-letter command? This is Unix!

Compromise: Vim!

I use cat when I want it to still be there for use with another command (I have more aliased to less).

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music also gives some notable dates in music-history.

Seems like biased towards some bands, while omitting some arguably greater or at least equally important bands of the same era. Not that there's anything wrong with Yes or Jethro Tull being mentioned, but if they are, seems like Genesis and King Crimson should be mentioned as well.

$ cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep Genesis

$ cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep "King Crimson"

$ cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep Yes

02/20 Yes sells out Madison Square Garden...without advertising, 1974

04/18 Yes breaks up after 13 years, 1981

10/25 Jon Anderson (Yes) is born in Lancashire, England, 1944

$ cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music | grep "Jethro Tull"

08/10 Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) is born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1947

I'm sure that you could contribute to the project, if it really bothers you.

Please remember that every time you cat a file and pipe it to grep an innocent process dies. Have you no compassion?

Its OK, an innocent process is born too.

And the address space gets recycled.

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