Apple annouces Boot Camp, multiboot support for OS X and Windows XP.

Boot Camp Banner

Suddenly that 12″ MacBook can’t arrive fast enough. :-)

I know a lot of people have speculated about this; and I think it will help swing a lot of arguments around what to carry in that laptop bag.

Update: John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has an excellent mini-essay on the appearance of Boot Camp. Of particular note are his observations around the psychological  positioning (supposed, but likely) that Boot Camp is getting from Apple. His post is a coherent and interesting way to look at what Apple might be up to with their long term ideas for the platform.

I discovered this by accident today while backing up a Subversion repository. I had written a small script to automate the generation of sane-sized incrementals and decided to given them a filename that was in the form:


lower:upper

Where lower and upper are whole, positive numbers. [ eg) 1:499, 500:999 ].
Since my script had a few errors while I was writing and testing it, I decided to carefully open the storage directory in the Finder and manually clean things up.

Finder.app a bit confused

I was fairly surprised when I saw the directory (see image).

Apparently the colon character is not permitted in HFS filenames, however, nothing will stop you from making these files in the shell. I suspect that Finder.app is using a backward compatibiliy mode to display these files in the GUI in case they are on volumes from OS 9 and earlier.

Looking at the output of ls shows quite a different story, namely, the one I expected:


$ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 1:2
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 2:3
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 3:4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 4:5
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 5:6
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 6:7
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 7:8
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:47 8:9
-rw-r--r-- 1 user wheel 0 Apr 4 18:59 9:10
machine:/tmp/1571.foo

It gets moderately more intesting: if you try to create a file (or folder) via the GUI; you will get a warning indicating that you cannot create a filename with punctuation (or try making the name shorter)

A somewhat humourous spoof of the infamous inspirational photo theme. Click on the image for a full-sized version.

Realizations

Courtesy of Herb.