You’ve read my rant about Java 6 being missing from the recent Leopard release, now you can help make a poor, not-so-humble geek’s wish come true. All you need to do is post a short entry on your blog with a reference to the string ‘13949712720901ForOSX‘. Doing so, means that you are casting your vote to tell Apple to fix it’s cranio-rectal inversion. Plus, you’ll be helping me and the 5 (there’s many, many more out there I am sure) other developers that actually write Java on a Mac out a ton. But why ‘13949712720901ForOSX‘ you ask? The actual meaning of the string is a bit entertaining. Translated from decimal notation to hex, the numeric portion is ‘0xCAFEBABE405'. Yup, you read that correctly. Who says Apple Sun engineers don’t have a sense of humor? What’s more entertaining is that 405 is the HTTP response code for ‘Method not found.’ You can read more about the effort to bring Java 6 to a Mac near you and the meaning behind the magical string at the Sun Babelfish blog.
13949712720901ForOSX
Filed under Apple, Inc., Java, Mac OS X
Carl Sziebert is a loving husband, devoted father, and accomplished software engineer, living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is no stranger to code, having spent the better part of a decade developing software for a diverse range of organizations, including small startups, large corporations, and government agencies. Having built a solid foundation of skills from these experiences, Carl now works as an engineer at 
One Comment
Actually, Sun engineers are the ones to blame for the “humor,” not Apple. The string is the hex value of the the identifier bytes at the beginning of a Java classfile.