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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » Old News & Rumors
The Return of _why?
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CreativeEmbassy
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Joined: 12 Jan 2005
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Location: State College, Pa, USA

 		The Return of _why?
His disappearance was mysterious enough. But his return is far more bizarre.
Hello Unfiction! I haven't been here in... years. Let me get you up to speed.

"Why the Lucky Stiff" (or _why for short) was an incredibly prolific contributor to the Ruby (programming language) community for many years. _why was obviously a pseudonym, but few people minded, and even fewer people knew his actual identity.

Here's a great article on Smashing about him.
And here's a more brief page on Wikipedia.

With me so far? Cool. We haven't had _why's presence in a few years now.

Until now. His former website came online back in January. Someone recognized it as a print spool; like the "waiting list" of documents you'd send to your printer. People decoded the PCL (page control language) files on the site and discovered some interesting images. (Which I can't find right now. Please bear with me, I'm trying to piece everything that we have together here and build a coherent OP. Smile )

A few days ago, the site changed again. Someone else discovered the source to the site lies on github here.

- One of the PCL files on the site showed some OCaml code. (Someone conveniently fixed parts of it and transcribed it here.) If you run that code continuously, it automatically watches the site for new pages, and sends them to your printer automatically. Cool stuff!

- If you go there and click on the "network" tab, it takes you to a diagram showing the history of commits made to the project, as well as people's forks of the project. There's one notable fork by "thdvl" on April 12th. (The commit message says "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.")

- There are some bizarre messages in the issue tracker for that repo as well, located here.

- Thdvl's pull request for cwales has the commit message says "i am available. did you ever read fravia's websites?". Some people think it refers to this Fravia, although this probably isn't within the rabbit hole. But who knows?

- If you look at thdvl's other repository, it appears to be the source for a website. If you go to thdvl.com, it redirects you to... http://celebsbukkake.com/thdvl. It's SFW so far, and possibly the most bizarre thing we've seen so far?

---

So. Everyone is busy trying to figure out what _why is trying to tell us, whether or not he's "coming back"... and it's looking like he chose a very ARG-ish way to jump back into the community. In any case, a bunch of us are having a LOT of fun diving into this one.

- Clinton
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:45 pm
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CreativeEmbassy
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Joined: 12 Jan 2005
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Location: State College, Pa, USA

 		You can also see a fairly up-to-date list of converted PCL documents here, if you don't feel like hooking up your own printer.

http://www.scribd.com/collections/4230124/-why-s-return
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:48 pm
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