SMSRotateD is a demonstration application that triggers screen rotation based on the orientation data it retrieves from the Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) built into newer Apple notebook models.
A new version (2.4) of hfsdebug is out. Besides bug fixes, this version has some useful new features whose utility is seen in Chapter 12 of “Mac OS X Internals”.
This blog is the accompanying blog of my forthcoming book titled “Mac OS X Internals”. More information can be found by visiting the top-level page of this site:
www.osxbook.com
As an “opening item” for this site/blog, I’m making iremoted available. It is a command-line program that receives and displays events corresponding to button-presses on Apple’s IR remote. [...]
Without any ado:
The accompanying website (osxbook.com) of my forthcoming book (Mac OS X Internals) is up. Although the site is preliminary at the moment, it has useful information related to the book. In particular, a detailed table of contents is available for browsing.
osxbook.com also has a blog, which will eventually cause this blog to retire. [...]
A quick FYI… it’s done.
My apologies to all who have sent me emails that I couldn’t respond to — I am almost entirely off email for over a month.
I hope to be able to say “done” in a matter of days now, if you know what I’m talking about.
I know the motion sensor software doesn’t work on Mac OS [...]
A Tour of the Mac OS X Kernel is a flash conversion — and a minor edit — of a recent talk I gave at the NSA. Although I think the conversion is fine, since it allows the presentation to be “driven” within a web browser, it is far from being a visually faithful conversion. [...]
This is sort of rushed, since I’m traveling starting today, but I want to share a hopefully useful program for monitoring (in near real-time) file system activity on “Tiger”. The program, called “fslogger”, uses the same underlying mechanism as Spotlight to retrieve file system change information from the kernel.
Here is the relevant discussion and the [...]
I’ve just updated HFSDebug for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”.
I think this is a pretty exciting update, even for something as unexciting as a “debugger”. The following primary changes have happened:
hfsdebug now understands and displays the on-disk raw structures corresponding to HFS Plus extended attributes.
In particular, hfsdebug can process Access Control Lists (ACLs) from scratch, [...]
AMS2HID is software that allows you to use a PowerBook with a motion sensor in new ways. You can play games such as Neverball and driving simulators by using the PowerBook itself as an input controller. The motion of the PowerBook in physical space provides input to such games through AMS2HID. You can also use [...]
I recently looked at the motion sensor based disk drive protection feature added to Apple’s PowerBook line. Here is a discussion along with some examples of using the orientation data provided by the sensor.
The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it [...]
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. [...]