A couple of weeks ago, I released HFSDebug 4. I’ve updated it to make HFSDebug’s pathname processing a little more sophisticated. Depending on how (and how seriously) you use HFSDebug, knowing the details could be useful.
When you specify a file system object to HFSDebug using a pathname, how HFSDebug will treat the pathname usually depends [...]

I wrote HFSDebug in early 2004. I initially made it available as a software tool to help understand fragmentation in HFS+ volumes, although it could also be used to analyze several implementation details of HFS+. Eventually, I extended HFSDebug to be able to analyze all on-disk aspects of HFS+, along with the ability to compute [...]

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)

I usually find the security-related smugness of Mac users rather jarring. What’s often even more jarring is the reasoning behind such smugness. That said, I have to say that the recent furor regarding the so called OSX.Macarena “virus” amounts to, well, bullshit. If anti-virus companies are pretending to “recognize the threat” and therefore attempting to [...]

After I published Understanding Apple’s Binary Protection in Mac OS X, eWeek published a story on Apple’s binary encryption:
Apple Places Encrypted Binaries in Mac OS X
Although there’s nothing excessively misleading or incorrect in the story, to me, some parts of the story sounded like I had a conversation with eWeek. I did not. eWeek did [...]

Read about how to enable trusted computing on Mac OS X. The document’s coverage includes:

A discussion of the TPM hardware present in certain Macintosh computers
Release of an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X
Release of a Mac OS X port of an open source trusted computing software stack
An overview of using the driver and [...]

Something to look at:
Mac OS X Internals Flyer

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 copy as of this [...]

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 backlit keyboard
 Initiating [...]

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 [...]