Out of Cheese

Passing almost unnoticed in the news a couple of days ago was the 40th birthday of the Berenstain Bears. The Berenstains have written an autobiography, which I’m sure is a terrific Philadelphia story.

I’m off to California for the weekend, coming back Monday night. Looks like it’s still summer there, which’ll be quite nice.

John Gruber scripts an amusing scenario describing the lack of HFS type and creator codes on the Mac OS X install CD. I could really see this happening exactly as he describes it.

DarwinPorts looks terrific — finally, a ports system effectively endorsed by Apple and with experienced folks running it. That’s not a slap against Fink, but any ports system that Jordan Hubbard is working on is likely to be successful.

Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to help out on DarwinPorts, I can’t. Washington state employment law is really awful.

Google is four years old today. Happy birthday!

I’m proud of myself — I just figured out how to upgrade the kernel on Debian woody. That may not sound like much, but I managed to get through the process without asking anyone any questions. I don’t think that’s too shabby for a first-time Linux user. I still can’t get X windows to work, but that’s another story (and far less important).

Macintouch discusses the etymology of the word “bug” in the context of computers, noting that the popular myth that it came from an actual moth found by Grace Hopper, while true, is not the first use of the term. Wilton’s Word & Phrase Origins and the Jargon File both provide a more accurate derivation. The first link even has a picture from a lab book of Hopper’s real-life bug.

Brian Jepson reports that Mac OS X 10.2.1 fixes the problems that caused Virtual PC to pause every thirty seconds or so. That’s really good news, since that’d been bothering me quite a bit when running OpenBSD and NetBSD with Virtual PC on 10.2.

This page is the first entry on Google for how to hack into exchange mailbox. Isn’t the Internet great?

(Apologies to all would-be Exchange hackers, by the way. Y’all might want to look elsewhere….)

Eugene Volokh prints a note from Rebecca Meyer, a linguistics instructor at UCSD, about prescriptivism in language and how English changes over time.