In Through The Out Door

ZFS Overview from Sun:Here’s a PDF overview of ZFS by Jeff Bonwick of Sun Microsystems. The 128-bit ZFS file system will apparently be used in Leopard to provide multi-disk data pools as well as to create data snapshots for backups. ZFS provides fast data access with lots of data integrity features. It’s a nice, easy-to-follow overview that’s well worth a look if you have any interesting in learning more about ZFS.

launchd in Depth:Nice article about launchd.“Fast forward several years and Apple is now the highest volume UNIX vendor in the world. Furthermore the base of Mac OS X is open source and Apple uses many OSS projects in Darwin. Apple also has created projects and turned them out into the OSS world. (I’m well aware of the issues that some in the community have with Apple’s OSS participation level, it’s just not the focus of this article.) Recently Apple has loosed a new beast onto the world.

Web Design Tools for Free:I don’t consider myself a design guru, but I do like to dabble in CSS, PHP, and Javascript — at least enough to make my blog look nice…. Luckily, I use a Mac, which means I don’t have to shell out big bucks for simple applications.My top five design tools are available exclusively for OSX — and they’re all free too.TextWranglerOf all the programs that I use most on my Powerbook, TextWrangler is second only to Firefox…. Like the rest, it’s free.WebKit InspectorIf you’re brave enough to grab a nightly build of WebKit, the open-source engine behind Apple’s Safari, you’ll be rewarded with one of the slickest-looking DOM inspectors on the block. In a style befitting Apple’s pro line of applications, the inspector gives you a quick look into your website’s DOM tree.If you have WebKit on your machine (it’s beta, but it’s remarkably stable, so don’t worry yourself much about runnign it), you can spawn the inspector by Ctrl-clicking an element and selecting “Inspect Element.” If you’re into CSS or Javascript and consider yourself a power-user, it’s a must-have.FireBugOkay, so FireBug isn’t Mac exclusive at all, but I’m pretty sure Jow Hewitt wrote it on a Mac…. The Firefox addon effectively combines Javascript/AJAX, DOM, CSS, and XHTML debugging into one console, meaning you can spend less time navigating through your debugger and more time fixing bugs.

Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” Developer Improvements.:AeroXperience (heh): Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” Developer Improvements. “A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation.” Let the nitpicking begin!

Apple releases new website:“Mac OS X includes a wide variety of open source software from FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the GNU Project, and many more projects each its own vibrant developer community.Mac OS Forge is dedicated to supporting the developer community surrounding open source components specific to Mac OS X. Here you will find resources for working with the source code to popular Apple-original projects, as well as third party projects that are closely related to the Macintosh operating system.”The site also includes Launchd, now under an Apache license, version 2.0.

Less Than a Minute to Hijack a MacBook’s Wireless:Kadin2048 writes “As reported by Ars Technica and the Washington Post, two hackers have found an exploitable vulnerability in the wireless drivers used by Apple’s MacBook. Machines are vulnerable if they have wireless enabled and are set to connect to any available wireless network, fairly close to their default state, and the exploit allows an attacker to gain ”total access“ -— apparently a remote root. Although the demo, performed via video at the BlackHat conference, takes aim at what one of the hackers calls the ”Mac userbase aura of smugness on security,“ Windows users shouldn’t get too smug themselves: according to the Post article, ”the two have found at least two similar flaws in device drivers for wireless cards either designed for or embedded in machines running the Windows OS.“ Ultimately, it may be the attacks against embedded devices which are the most threatening, since those devices are the hardest to upgrade…. According to this story at ITwire.com, they were able to exploit Linux and Windows machines, too.

Parallels Desktop for OS X Reviewed:phaedo00 writes “Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels’ virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: ‘Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it’s hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It’s no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host’s processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it’s cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.’”

The Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps:As someone in the Macintosh shareware business, as part of my job, I make the daily crawl through MacUpdate to look for the latest and greatest in Mac software. One thing I’ve been noticing recently is a renaissance of extremely polished and beautiful Mac apps, so I thought I’d share some of these finds with you guys. Without further ado, presenting the top ten most beautiful OS X apps. Hopefully you’ll find some new gems in there, even I found a few surprises while compiling this list. Enjoy!

Security company gives Mac a boost:In the just released Sophos Security Threat Management Report (requires registration), the dominant cybersecurity threat is from Trojans, which the report said outnumber viruses and worms by 4:1, compared to 2:1 a year ago. In light of the Trojan horses and the dominance of Windows-based threats,  Sophos suggests that home users should consider purchasing a [...]

Want Security? Make The Switch:Security firm Sophos Security has released a report claiming that Macs will be more secure than Windows for some time to come. The report listed the 10 most common kinds of malware, and noted that they can only infect Windows systems.

Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August:Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named ‘Leopard’ in the upcoming World Developer’s Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If ‘Leopard’ is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple’s remarkable market share gain next year.“

UNIX Tips for Mac OS X

Understanding OS X Kernel Internals:The OS X kernel has been in the news alot this past year, whether it’s why its slow, Mach/micro-kernel makes it bad, it’s going closed source and what not. Amit Singh has put up a new presentation on the innards of OS X. It does a pretty good job of summing up the OS X kernel architecture, and has some pretty detailed diagrams… for instance they show that there are so many process/threads layers in OS X. So if you are in the mood for doing some OS studying then head over.“

Intel Macs Vulnerable To ‘Chip Level’ Threats:

Ars Technica Reviews the MacBook:phaedo00 writes “Ars Technica has performed another of their in-depth and thorough hardware reviews…. From the article: ‘The Apple portable web site proudly announces that the ”family is finally complete.“ What began with an announcement from Steve Jobs at the MacWorld conference in January has come full circle with the release of the MacBook this week. Every Apple laptop is Intel powered and moving in what I would consider is the right direction. The laptop line is finally better delineated by pro and consumer features, and the prices have been fixed at points that better reflect the minute differences in the models.’”

Mac OS X Kernel Source Now Closed:littleghoti writes “Macworld is reporting that ”Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple’s OS X is now a proprietary operating system.“ Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code.”

Top 8 OS X Safety Tips

Tip of the Week:The Secret Screen Capture ShortcutOkay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want. (I use this to paste screen captures right into Photoshop.)

Mac OS X to get integrated BitTorrent support:Rumors says that according to some of their “oldest and most reliable sources,” Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” will be shipping with an integrated BitTorrent system that will be utilized for delivering software updates and iTunes content. For sharing their bandwidth, Leopard users would get rewards like credit at the iTunes Music Store and Apple would save “hundreds of thousandsif not millions of dollars per year” in bandwidth costs.

Everything is under control:Around a week ago the following at the Internet Storm Center popped up in my feeds… Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Apple Mac OS X and applications. Proof of Concept code has already been posted along with the information regarding the vulnerabilities. At this time no patches or…