Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Interesting (New?) Easter Egg in Mac OS 10.6.2 Sync Services Log

So I was browsing in System Profiler (as I often do.  Don't you?), and came across the following.  Note the highlighted text at the top (last) of the syncservices.log entries, and please excuse the smudging.  The window grab has been modified in no other way:






For those unaware, the late George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen had a schtick where, at the end of their comedy act, George would say, "Say goodnight, Gracie", and she is supposed to have replied, "Goodnight, Gracie."

She never actually did reply this way: her reply was always simply, "Goodnight."  Some other comedy troupes of the era had done this joke in the past, and apparently it stuck in the popular ethos as having been her.  And so it has, apparently, for Apple's SyncServices programmers.

Don't be too harsh on them, Apple.  The server had to report something, and this probably saves code over several more boring things it could have said.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks Jon. This is so true and I love that they use this as it keeps the actual human touch and feel to things... thank you for writing this for others whom are too young to know of the late George Burns...

ccm2048 said...

Hi Jon -- I am also a system_profiler browser -- I thought everyone was! In fact, I save copies of my system_profiler command line output and compare them. Yes, really. Anyway, I found the same message in OS X 10.10.2. I wanted to 'second' John Montalvo's post. I like it when there is a human touch and humor to log messages. I must really be getting old because I found many google searches where folks seemingly didn't understand the reference -- and I found that to be interesting. It shows cultural-generation changes in action.

Of course, being an old UNIX guy, my favorite is from the SunOS 4.x days of the tunefs man page. You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish. :^)

Removal Expert said...

I remember the database wars between dBase and Paradox. on one dBase version if you held a certain key instead of the normal opening logo you would get a short animation of two ducks circling in a pond and being shot by a hunter. paradox=pair of ducks, get it lame geek humour but cute ironic.

Unknown said...

Hi, before i stsrted typing i saw that im logged in under another user in my home, okay so i also seen this on my hysbands laptop but the file was my name? He has recorded my calls and social interactions before is he doing it again? Im well aware that u cant be certain of the answer to tjis but i guess my question is wht was this file saved as my name