FYI: I will be holding a Mac OS X Internals workshop on Thursday, August 10th, 12:00 noon at the San Francisco Apple Store. This is a part of Apple’s “WWDC: Meet the Authors” line of Apple-store events. More details here (look for the August 10 calendar entry).

The very first chapter I wrote for Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach was the “history” chapter. My goal was to create a comprehensive and detailed book. I deemed it important for the reader to understand the long and eventful journey toward Mac OS X. Therefore, I wrote the chapter as a technical history [...]

I will be there at the July 13 meeting of the CocoaHeads Silicon Valley Cocoa Programmer’s Group. From what I read on their web page, the meeting takes place at the Apple campus in Cupertino. Developers of all levels are welcome and there are no fees.

This source code is an example of programmatically receiving keyboard events, with the option of filtering and modifying them, on Mac OS X 10.4 and up.

The book’s status is officially “published”—as stated on Addison-Wesley’s page for the book. Note also that it is listed as shipping. Amazon’s page usually takes some time to sync. If I understand things correctly, stores should have it soon enough—after whatever time it takes to ship, etc. Happy reading… PS: No, I don’t have a [...]

Since I keep receiving queries on accessing the light-related data associated with the ambient light sensor and the backlit keyboard on Apple notebook computers, here is a more detailed discussion, along with source code, on performing the following operations.  Retrieving readings from the ambient light sensor  Retrieving and setting the LED brightness value of the [...]

Since someone asked: this source code is an example of programmatically receiving mouse events, with the option of filtering and modifying them, on Mac OS X 10.4 and up.

I have released a new version (2.5) of hfsdebug. The new version fixes a bug in the calculation of free space blocks on a volume, and now all features are supported on both the PowerPC and x86 versions of Mac OS X. In particular, hfsdebug no longer uses the /dev/kmem device for displaying kernel-memory-resident mount [...]

We have developed software (“BAMBIOS”) that allows such legacy booting on the Intel-based Macintoshes. For example, a regular (that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using this software. A mini presentation on the design of BAMBIOS is available.

Yes, it works. In fact, it works really, really well (performance-wise). Please go here for the initial announcement and a customary screenshot of Windows XP running under the Linux version of VMware. The hardware in question is a 17-inch iMac.