At the recent W3C Technical plenary in Cannes, I was discussing issues of literal translation. A Japanese delegate came up with a phrase that was new to me. “緑の黒髪 （みどりのくろいかみ）” The phrase literally means green/black hair, but has an idiomatic meaning that the hair is very dark and lustrous.

Debian release a new version of Linux on 23^rd October 2008.

As I run an Apache testing web server on my Debian box, I installed the most recent updates. Then came the simple question of How can I be sure that I have the most recent version of Debian Linux.

The simplest way is to open the file /etc/debian_version . On a correctly installed Debian System, this has a single line entry showing the version number, as defined by the package base files.