p2pnet news | Cool Stuff:- For a certain subset of Internet users, ‘Sudo make me a sandwich’ may as well be’Take my wife … please’,” says Noam Cohen in the New York Times, going on >>>

Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog - it can be done, but the frog dies.

Still, he plays along, explaining that ’sudo’ is a command in the Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: ‘The humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like ‘Simon says.’ ‘

Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, ‘Make me a sandwich,’ only to be told, ‘No.’ Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, ‘Sudo make me a sandwich,’ and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.

Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for jokes like this three times a week, informed by computing and the Internet. By speaking the language of geeks — many a strip hinges on crucial differences between the C and Python programming languages — while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world.

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month.

“Warning,” warns the site, “this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”

xkcd.com updates without fail every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, it states, continuing >>>

Who are you?

I’m just this guy, you know? I’m a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts. In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.

Who else are you?

Server maintenance and most of the coding for these sites is done by my friend davean, who tries hard to remain invisible but can be reached at davean@xkcd.com. Most of the comics are edited/proofread by my good friend Sarah.

What does XKCD stand for?

It’s not actually an acronym. It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It stands for the comic and everything the comic stands for!

Where did all this start?

I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn’t want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It’s immensely fun and I really appreciate y’all’s support.

. .Stumble It!

New York Times - This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix May 26, 2008

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 8:53 am and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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