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Irony of ironies: Microsoft now owns a share in the company that Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox, now works for. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make much of a difference in terms of Web browsers, as Blake hasn’t been incredibly active with the project lately. It’ll just be one of those strange corporate relationships that people bring up in conversation, like how Sara Lee makes a brand of shoe polish and how McDonald’s used to own a majority interest in Chipotle.
The other day, as I was finishing up my homework, a curtain crept down my Mac’s display, silently obscuring my problem set behind a veil that, like all things Mac, was gray and slightly translucent. After more than 14 months of daily abuse – and the occasional reboot – the computer finally succumbed to a kernel panic, akin to a Blue Screen of Death in the blissful Windows world. (This, compared to the two days it took for my computer’s Windows partition to BSOD.)
Despite the obvious inconvenience of getting a kernel panic, there’s a lot I like about Mac OS X’s critical error handling, at least compared to Windows. The system takes pains to merely dim the work you had open, rather than wash it out in blue. Powerless to lift the veil, I was at least able to quickly jot down my work before rebooting.
Unlike critical errors on other systems, the Mac kernel panic doesn’t dump a load of hexadecimal gibberish onto the screen. (In fact, the only thing incomprehensible are the error message’s translations into French, German, and Japanese.) The requisite memory dump is only revealed in a “report this error” dialog box that appears once you restart successfully. Though memory addresses in hexadecimal may be of some use to figuring out what’s wrong with the computer, frankly I prefer salvaging a tiny bit of the problem set – due in a matter of minutes – to debugging my computer.
Not surprisingly, the cause of the crash was the OpenAFS component of Stanford Desktop Tools. It hangs Finder on a regular basis, but I still haven’t learned my lesson and switched to SFTP, mainly because AFS fits into the Macintosh Experience™ so well. At least on the few occasions that it works.
To head off the ensuing Windows vs. Mac debate, lemme just say I fondly remember many a “bomb” error message while working with the Classic Macintoshes in third grade. Classic Macs could screw up like nobody’s business.
Intercapping has always bothered me, particularly in the form of “Stanfordized” constructions like HoHo, TresEx, and the abominable HooTow. But then again, I prefer “CompSci” to the more opaque “CS” when describing my major to lay people.
In some industries, it’s become a show of power to sport as many names as possible under your umbrella, with intercaps to economize the use of punctuation. In that respect, PricewaterhouseCoopers is quite the powerful firm: somehow, PwC derived their name from various companies named after Price, Holyland, Waterhouse, Cooper, Lybrand, Ross, Montgomery, McDonald, and Currie. Apparently not everyone could fit under the umbrella. I think this is what competitor Deloitte & Touche had in mind for when they shortened their trade name to Deloitte. (With the trailing period.) Type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones notes how companies have recently begun eschewing intercaps, but in the process have introduced some surprising problems:
When I first saw the banner unfurled on Sixth Avenue, I figured The One Ill Building was the Beastie Boys’ first foray into urban planning. (Long overdue, if you ask me: if Jade Jagger can be an architect’s muse, why not the King Ad-Rock?) If not a real estate development, then surely theoneillbuilding.com was promoting a new documentary about sick building syndrome, perhaps narrated by Al Gore.
Back at Stanford, I’m heartened to find that “Stanfordization” is becoming a bit less prevalent on campus. Since the Undergraduate Library (UGLI) was renamed Meyer Library some years ago, I’ve never heard anyone call it MeLi. (Though it would be fitting to give the home of Stanford’s East Asia collection such an Asian-sounding moniker.) And when the CoHo was replaced by The Axe and Palm, there were no notable attempts at shortening the new eatery’s name to “ThAxPa”. Let’s just hope it stays that way. I wouldn’t want to eat at a place whose name sounds like pain medication.
Via John Gruber.