I’m working on a small project at home where I need to write a small HTTP client. I was collecting a bunch of HTTP headers so I could have a bunch of test data that I can learn from. I was just poking around at Slashdot when I saw this header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2006 04:11:50 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000136
X-Bender: In the event of an emergency, my ass can be used as a flotation device.
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

I guess they’re Futurama fans, huh? Keep in mind that this is something that almost no one would see except for programmers debugging HTTP connection issues. Not even their own programmers would see this in any normal working situation. I rarely see or saw the headers that ESPN.com puts out and I spent 2+ years working on an HTTP-based protocol that powers RealTime and FantasyCast.

That’s a hard-core fan.

I didn’t realize it, because I’m apparently not cool enough, but there’s a long tradition of embedding the randomest stuff in HTTP headers. Who knew?