Recently, I had a need to know if any files or folders had been modified or created on an HFS+ volume in the past N seconds. There are many ways you could generate this type of information on Mac OS X. To begin with, you could try asking Spotlight. Besides Spotlight, Mac OS X has [...]

I discovered a bug in hfsdebug. It causes hfsdebug to crash while printing Access Control Entry (ACE) details for certain files or folders. For example, consider the standard ~/Library/Preferences/ folder on Leopard. $ ls -lde ~/Library/Preferences drwx——@ 167 singh staff … /Users/singh/Library/Preferences 0: group:everyone deny delete This folder has an ACE for the group everyone. [...]

A while ago, I wrote about procfs for Mac OS X, a MacFUSE-based file system. Subsequently, I added more cool features to my procfs implementation. Recently, I had reason to demonstrate procfs again and realized that I needed still more cool features. That need led to GrabFS. In a pinch, GrabFS is a file system [...]

I found some time today to make a certain feature of HFSDebug work on Leopard. The new version is available for download here. The new version should run on both Leopard and Tiger, but there are no visible changes whatsoever for Tiger users. If you use HFSDebug, you might have realized that the -m option [...]

A few weeks ago, I released as open source a MacFUSE-based process file system for Mac OS X. I recently added several new features to this procfs implementation. Some of these features are "cool" in that they put a new twist on certain types of visual information. For example, there’s a folder /proc/system/hardware/displays/ that contains [...]

On the right, we have a PowerMac G5. On the left, we have academic papers and author-prepared notes that were used in the creation of “Mac OS X Internals“. (Recycled paper used when possible. In particular, the book is printed on recycled paper.)

When I replayed this interview of mine, I found a syntax error in one of the things I said. When the interviewer talks about X Window programming on Mac OS X, I said that the communication between “your program and the X server” is specific to Mac OS X. I meant to say the communication [...]

Let us try to make them a little cooler on Mac OS X.

I will be speaking at the following venues in the near future: Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, Germany (December 29, 2006) Macworld Conference & Expo, San Francisco, USA (January 11, 2007)

A discussion on how Apple’s binary protection works in the x86 version of Mac OS X: Understanding Apple’s Binary Protection in Mac OS X