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23 awesome license plates for computer geeks

Posted in Main on August 25th, 2008 by Pingdom

We here at Pingdom are computer geeks, and proud of it. None of us have any geeky vanity plates (custom license plates) on our cars, though. But others have, and we love those. This post is a gallery of pictures of some of the coolest vanity plates we have ever seen, collected from around the Web.

Some of the pictures have explanations, but mostly they are pretty self explanatory.

Enjoy! :)

This guy googled his own car

Apparently Google did NOT approve and in the end he didn’t get to keep it. (This happened in Sweden, home of Pingdom.)

080822-google
Photo by Joakim Jardenberg.

Good, old-fashioned networking

080822-ethrnet
Photo by John C Abell.

But others prefer wireless

080822-80211n
Photo by John C Abell.

Could this guy possibly be an Apple fan?

080822-macgeek
Photo by Darrin Dishong.

A fresh start in life

080822-reboot
Photo by wRen.

Leet speak hacker pride

080822-tehhckr
Photo by Erica Douglass.

Is the car Open Source too?

080822-opnsrc
Found over at Oddee.

Someone who’s into graphics

RGBA is the RGB color model (red, green, blue) with added alpha (transparency). It is a common format in the graphics field, used for example in the PNG image format.

080822-rgba
Photo by Ori Neidich.

A programmer’s definition of white

#FFFFFF is the hexadecimal color code for white.

080822-ffffff
Photo by Jon Canady.

Geek Away From Keyboard

080822-geekafk
Photo by Arnold Sandoval.

The plate every sysadmin wants

080822-suroot
Photo by Tony.

Don’t shut down that car

For people not familiar with Windows, Alt-F4 shuts down a program, or Windows itself if no programs are running.

080822-altf4
Photo by Brandon Debes.

Geek, and proud of it

080822-mrgeek
Photo by Ripbud.

A PHP programmer hits the road

080822-phpdude
Photo by John C Abell.

When 32 bits just aren’t enough

080822-64bits
Photo by Marc Nozell.

Hopefully he won’t get Syntax Error behind the wheel

080822-syntxerr
Photo by Jon.

Markup fanatic?

080822-xml
Photo by Anirvan.

http://my.car

080822-http
Photo by Steven Pam.

Someone who likes to talk?

080822-podcast
Photo by Dan York.

Geek lover

If this is a woman’s car, did her boyfriend buy it for her (especially the license plate)?
080822-geeklvr
Photo by computationally.intr actable.

Showing some Linux love

080822-lnxgeek
Photo by Adam Vandenberg.

More Linux love

080822-tux
Photo by Amarand Agasi.

Dig(g) this bike

080822-digg
Photo by Cybersleeper.

Do you feel that we missed out on an awesome vanity plate you have seen somewhere? Post a link in the comments!

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Well, I still drive around with the GOOGLE-plates. The case is not settled in court yet (crazy, I know) - and the police just gives my a thumbs up whenever they spot me;)

I believe my old Virginia license plate qualifies. :) http://www.natuba.com/photo/V72Mfk/

These are awesome. Maybe a few more over here http://chat.vanityplat.es/

great complilation of plates :)

Don’t want to be overcritical but……TEH HCKR isn’t leet. It’s lolspeak.

also a nice one:

I used to have PERL -W when I lived in Virginia

I was very envious of one I saw here in Texas - TECHZN.

I’ve seen a “/DEV/CAR” plate running around here in NC, as well as “.EXE” (a program car, perhaps?)

Took this on the way home from work about a month ago..
http://xexyz.com/temp/Plates.jpg

If I see the guy in my lot with the ASP.NET one I will send it to you. LOL.

Cool collection.

Just a little tip:

Sorry if I sound like a smarty pants here - but normally it’s good manners, and helps to avoid prosecution, to ask permission before reproducing other people’s work on your site. Especially if it is clearly marked as “© All rights reserved”.

I know you’re trying to do the right thing by giving credit and linking back to the original sources, but I’m afraid that doesn’t really count as “asking for permission” :-)

Cheers,
Steven

I had 468×60 once. I’m not proud. :)

Pet peeve, but why assume the “geek lover” plate is a woman? I know you said “if” but come on.

- female geek AND lover-of-geeks

great plates
alt-f4 was the best

For all of you gamer geeks………..this is the plate on my jeep.
http://g.photos.cx/QQNOOB2-ed.jpg

Here is my EBCDIC plate, posing with UNICODE:

http://pics.livejournal.com/enf/pic/0001gwsa/g1

Also, no one seems to have posted Bob Bemer’s ASCII license plate:

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/bemer_bob.htm

You’ll need to scroll down, but it is an awesome plate for a VW ‘bug’. Here’s the link, remember to scroll down.

http://barelybad.com/fplicense.htm

There is a Mini that parks in my garage at home (Dallas, TX) with the plate “MAC FAN”.

A buddy of mine has STDIN and STDOUT on his two cars (NY plates - Long Island).

Mine might qualify…CHIXOR :-p

I have a friend here in Atlanta with /dev/null as his license plate.

I don’t have a photo handy, but when I lived in NY and now in TX I have “MAC FAN” with an Apple logo on the bumper.

There is a guy at my office whose plate says “Unix & C” I think hes the coolest guy I know.

My friend has the license plate “D EV 1337″, which I find incredibly cool! (German, the D represents Duesseldorf).

Where is R21 ??

I posted this license plate a couple weeks ago on my blog, for those who love Cascading Style Sheets

http://www.modsuperstar.ca/archive/2008/08/11/CSS_Windstar_Van

Great collection. Slightly dubious of the las motorbike one, as this is the only one that looks ’shopped. I could well be wrong.

I know a guy in Ohio who has had the same plate since the 70s:
IEFBR14
Which is from the IBM System 360/370 days - still in use today:
It literally means “a safe vehicle to execute JCL (Job Control Language)”
See http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zoslnctr/v1r7/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zsysprog.doc/zsysprog_63.html

how long before we see:

iphnr
iph0ne

and other such variants?

Please, can somebody tell me the model of the bike please. PLEASEEE :)

awesome… i want to have it too…

since when has there been a state called Victoria?

joyrex:

kawasaki zx-14

@ minamisan
Victoria is the south eastern most state in Australia.

The vehicle is a Toyota Camry.

My favorite is the VW Bug with the license plate FEATURE.

2 plates that I see on a regular basis:

(1) DEBUG — On a VW Bug.
(2) 69LSDRNR — This one is clever!

Wish I had pictures to show, I’ll get them one of these days.

so interesting….i love those

I’ve TOTALLY seen that REBOOT guy around here (Omaha).

1 good 4D

one good time!

My plate has said AFK for almost 10 years. I’m a female geek.

No pic, but a friend with a silver Saturn Ion has a plate reading “AG PLUS”. He had to explain it to me: AG+ is a silver ion.

I nearly went off the road laughing when I saw a bearded linux god Utah:

License: RTFM.

Mine is: 1101001

Mine says: devnull

Check out my license plate: GEEEK

Saw this in my parent’s neighborhood. May or may not be related to the Rspec BDD Framework: http://bakineggs.com/rspec1.jpg

This is my current plate:
http://www.me.com/ro/sabalsam/Galleries/100031/photo/web.jpg?ver=12204520330001

But I have also had:
MCSE2B and MCPSE

Seth

Mine says, “FRAKKR”

WORD!

Some guy in the northern suburbs of Chicago has SGML on his little Rav-4. And somewhere in Austin, there’s a HAXOR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadhorse/422553247/

WWW on a Porsche in Denver -
I have no idea who owns this, but they must have got it a LONG time ago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noneviltwin/2831587897/

I had a friend who used to have a plate that read F1 4HLP

I have a friend who’s plate says 101010, which is binary for 42. He’s a programmer geek and loves Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! :)

Mine just says DRUNK

No pic, but i have 2718282 on my mercedes E class. Math nerds would appreciate that one. My other car has 31415926 :)

I knew a guy that had MC68000 on his acura.

I also remember seeing one at an Exodus datacenter in El Segundo that said “setuid.” I thought that was cute.

mine is 0101010

I know someone with the license plate “PRD GEEK”… I’ll get a picture of it soon.

Love it. My fav one is “PHP DUDE”.

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Major Google App Engine hiccup reveals weaknesses

Posted in Main on July 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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Pingdom adds FREE website monitoring

Posted in Pingdom on July 1st, 2009 by Pingdom

We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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5 Comments

A gallery of geeky galleries

Posted in Main on June 30th, 2009 by Pingdom

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com set to grow past 10 million blogs in 2009

Posted in Main on June 26th, 2009 by Pingdom

Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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2 Comments

The triumph of Linux as a supercomputer OS

Posted in Main on June 24th, 2009 by Pingdom

Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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