No, really, I'm not kidding. Well, okay, I'm kidding a little. I found myself (almost without thinking about it) doodling down a list. Then I realized: Harry's not a hacker! He's a process!
The Top n Reasons Harry Potter is a *ix Process
Fine, so maybe they're more similarities than reasons. And yes, I'll have forgotten some of the names...but you know what I mean. The locations used give away my linux taint.
- Wands are really just various shells suid 0.
- Magic is, in fact, hacking. (Not cracking).
- The Marauder's Map of Hogwarts is ps auxw.
- The Houses are groups.
- Dumbledore's a sysadmin.
- Voldemort is a BOFH.
- Severus Snape is a grey-hat.
- Hogsmeade is IRC.
- Portkeys are softlinks.
- Quiddich is, in fact, one big race condition. Either perl gets all the memory, or java does, or one or the other manages to kill -9 the other's parent process (get the Golden Snitch).
- The owls are, of course, sendmail processes.
- Dobby and the house-elves are collectively /etc/rc.d/init.d daemons. You always forget they're working, and then...
- The ghosts are process monitors.
- The Hogwarts Express is Verizon DSL. If you're not on the platform at *exactly* the right time, it won't show up; and it only runs once or twice a year.
- The Ministry of Magic is outsourced system administration.
- The Floo (?) network is X and rsh (X if you just stick your head through, and rsh if you jump!)
- Muggles are, natch, users.
- The Dursleys are LUSERS.
- Scabbers was in fact a tarred/gzipped suid trojan.
- The inhabitants of the Hogwarts forest are L0pht. Mysterious, maybe on your side.
- Gringott's is /dev/st0.
- Avada Kedavra = kill -9
- The portrait of the Fat Lady is a firewall.
- Potions are C++ (complicated recipes for complex results).
- Howlers = SIGHUP.
- gordonf notes that the Obliviate spell is no doubt rm -rf /. Yup, makes sense.
Whew. I'm tired. I know I'll probably get beat up on details (hey, that's what makes E2 fun!) but this was fun to zip through for ten mins. Now my question is what's rm -rf /*...hmm...man, I'm a complete geek.