I reported a few days ago that we (my friends Mark A. Smith and Benjamin Reed, and myself) had Linux booting on the Intel-based Macintosh. We also released a test-drive mini-distribution that can be trivially booted by anybody interested. The subject says it all regarding this update. Pictures and some details are available here. Please [...]
I do have strange friends. Take Mark Smith, for example. Mark is essentially a Windows Internals guy — I would call him OS-agnostic at best. In particular, he is certainly not a “Macintosh person”. However, he recently purchased an Intel-based Macintosh because he felt like running Linux (an operating system that he does not normally [...]
Given the level of interest generated by the PowerBook motion sensor experiments ([1], [2]), this should be of interest to many: Mark Smith has published a document titled The ThinkPad APS Accelerometer Interface, which discusses the workings of the “Airbag” motion sensor in ThinkPad notebooks. This should be of particular use to those who are [...]
The result page for the Mac OS X Expert Challenge is live. Result and Report: The Mac OS X Expert Challenge 2005.1
The challenge encompasses two partially overlapping areas of expertise: Operating System Internals Security My goals for this endeavor are the following: Probe popular interest in system-level Mac OS X topics. Knowledge of such interest is currently valuable to me as I am creating a book on such topics. Gauge the inquisitiveness and initiative of the [...]
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I can point people to something cool we did in our group at IBM Research. What I am referring to was demonstrated at IBM PartnerWorld 2005 a couple of days ago in Las Vegas, calling it a “personal jumper cable” to counter the “Blue Screen of Death” [...]
gbaunix is a rather contrived experiment in which we run an ancient version of the UNIX operating system on a popular hand-held game system using a simulator. Specifically, it is 5th edition UNIX (1974) running on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, with SIMH as the core simulator.
Given the nature and scope of the field of Computer Security, it would require one or more books to even briefly touch upon all that is known in the area. A Taste of Computer Security gives you, well, a taste of (a subset of) the subject. The contents are not uniform in their depth or [...]
My original intent with More Power to Firmware was to put up some sample Forth code for doing graphics with mouse input in the Open Firmware implementation that Apple uses. I have included a discussion of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), broadening the document’s scope. Three complete (though prototypical) examples are included: Towers of Hanoi [...]
A History of Apple’s Operating Systems discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create, including some technologies that eventually led to Mac OS X. Goals of the document include better understanding the reasons, and wherever possible, the rationale behind Mac OS X and its important components. [...]