It's April Fool's day and so I spent a bit of time looking at internet sites which have been known in the past to post special things on this day. Internet news sites also listed a number of past April Fool's day pranks, including such things as April Fool's RFCs. The nice thing about April Fool's RFCs is that they are permanently in the RFC databases and can be read at any time.
One that I found particularly amusing today is RFC 2550, titled "Y10K and Beyond", from April 1, 1999. This RFC criticizes Y2K solutions as being just as short-sighted as the practices that created the Y2K problem in the first place. The author also suggested alternate names for the Y10K problem: YAK and YXK. 'A' is the hexadecimal representation of ten while 'X' is the Roman numeral representation.
Later in the document he mentions a Y100K problem (caused by using 5 digits for the year), but doesn't mention the same alternative notations as he did for the Y10K problem. That's too bad, because the hexadecimal representation of one hundred is "64". So writing about the Y64K problem would have been deliciously ambiguous! Especially so because of the confusion about the meaning of 'K'!
2 comments:
To this day, RFC 2549 is my favorite. The title is IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service.
Like a feature film, sometimes the best stuff is in the credits. To that end, don't miss the sections beginning with "Specification of Requirements" ...
That is a good one, and there are many others. One of my favorite parts in RFC 2549 is the ASCII art, which takes the puns, which are rife in this document, to a whole new level.
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