Why 1469

Someone asked me why "1469". Is there some deep and meaningful, personal connection with this number? Does it have some incredible/interesting mathematical properties? It it your birthday? Is it your bank card PIN?

I am sorry to disappoint. As it happens, the number 1469 is rather uninteresting (at least to me).

The answer is that it happened to be the numerical UNIX user ID of my computer science account at university.

Why does anyone know their numeric ID? Surely, even back in the age of transistors and 32K RAM expansion cards we had textual IDs...yes of course we did. The only reason to know it is that NFS uses numeric IDs (rather than text); so the numeric ID for your user name has to be the same on all the machines.

As I was frequently setting up or using new machines, if I had not created a non-root account with the right numeric ID on a computer then all my files would be listed as owned by the unknown user 1469.

It's also the 13th Octahedral number (being the sum of the 12th and 13th square pyramidal numbers), and has two prime factors of 13 and 133. Amazing... .

It's a useful number though, mostly because of it's uniqueness - whenever I create an account on the Internet somewhere, I usually add 1469 to the user name, no one else seems to choose it. It also seems that there is no other blog with the same name.

And Happy Christmas to all those who didn't finish work today.