xlnxminusx

My first real app

2006-09-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

Remote Desktop for Mac
The first app that I've gotten to a point worth releasing. This version is pretty stable, but there are a lot of planned features to make it even better. Keep watching!

Most useful shell script ever

2006-07-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

Here you go tom. I expect this to be run on every mac you come in contact with.

#!/bin/sh
QUACK=~/Library/Sounds/Quack.au
curl http://www.quack-project.com/quack.au > $QUACK
defaults -currentHost write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.sound.beep.sound $QUACK

launchd

2006-06-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

wait4path seems like it could be a cool utility, but it only checks when file systems are mounted, so you can't wait for say, a socket or a pid file to be present. I could have swore that launchd supported this. This seems like it would be much better using /dev/fsevents. This is not an officially supported interface, but it seems like just the thing to use in this case.

Open supports a flag O_EVTONLY now to open a file for kqueue events only.

kqueue supports a new flag (undocumented in the manpage) EVFILT_FS to return on any file system activity. I'm assuming this is the basis of the notification NSWorkspaceDidMountNotification.

The macbook has been good. Screen has been replaced. Annoying backlight and cpu whines, but even with these quirks, still the best laptop I've ever owned.

Photobooth rocks

2006-03-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Probably the most obviously fun new feature of the macbook is the built-in camera and photobooth. Everything else is awesome as well, but this stupid thing is very amusing.

Whoo

2006-03-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Macbook Pro is good. Has one dead pixel, but I'm learning to ignore it. It also is right where my shells usually go, so I don't see it that often. Electrical hiss with both cpu's turned on and idle. It's currently set to only use one core. Security update the first day hosed the machine and I had to reinstall. It is amazingly fast though, and I love all the extra screen space. Backlit keyboard is cool also. It's a Mac. It's fast. What more could I say?

It's here

2006-02-28T08:23:00.000-08:00

Just got the call that my Macbook will be in.

Printing all defaults for a Cocoa Application

2006-02-24T10:59:00.000-08:00

I was reading through this article, and the same thing can be accomplished by running any Cocoa app under gdb, and typing

po [[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation] description]

This can also be made into a macro by putting the following into your .gdbinit

define printdefaults
po [[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation] description]
end

Time killer

2006-02-24T08:15:00.001-08:00

Between offline blogging and GTalk inside of GMail, google is really trying to kill a lot of my time. Too bad GTalk doesn't work inside Safari.

OS X != Linux/AIX/?

2006-02-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

Throwing UNIX tradition out the window, OS X doesn't use /etc/nsswitch.conf (Not all do). To find the order that OS X uses to lookup hosts (among other things) run lookupd -configuration
Default on 10.4.5 is Cache FF DNS NI DS. This can be overridden by placing LookupOrder DNS FF NI DS in /etc/lookupd/hosts and running sudo kill -HUP `cat /var/run/lookupd.pid`. This can also be put into NetInfo under /locations/lookupd/hosts.

Catching up

2006-02-24T07:47:00.000-08:00

I'm not the best at blogging as the two people who read this would know. Honestly it doesn't really fit into my workflow to take time out of my day to log into blogger and write a post. This dashboard widget changes everything. I already use the sticky note widget as my way of keeping track of stupid stuff. Stuff to read, stuff to do, etc. Now I can use this as my online sticky note and just post whenever I feel comfortable. This has made blogger about 1000 times more useful for me.

I'm hoping I'll get the call from the Apple store today. I don't know why I'm so excited, but I am. I realized that I'm mostly fine with the speed of my iBook, but the screen, the harddrive space, and the hope for the future is what's getting me really hyped up. VMWare on OS X will allow me to do anything I need/want, from running 3 different BSD's at the same time, to using windows only tools. I would also like a couple projects to move to OS X with the move to Intel, the first off the top of my head being valgrind, mplayer/vlc with support for the win32 codecs (winelib is already working i think) and fast emulation.

Dashboard Widget?

2006-02-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

I hate waiting for my MacBook.
If this blogger dashboard widget works, maybe I'll be better about posting....

Good at blogging

2006-02-06T20:05:00.000-08:00

I knew I would be good at blogging. One month and three days since my last post.

The baby is doing well. Unfortunately we did not get a new ultrasound at our last visit, and have to wait another month. The wife is doing well. Nothing major, just strange pains which all turn out to be a part of pregnancy. We are also moving into a house in the middle of March. Not bad progress for my New Years wishes.

I know it's not black, but I am on the waiting list to get a MacBook Pro. The name sucks, but I'm getting one anyway. Can't wait to see how fast it actually is. I might be able to play Doom 3. Whoo. Notice no exclamation point at all in there.

I have found the wonder that is RSS. Good thing I'm up on all this technology. It actually helps though that now i can check 100+ websites in the time it used to take me to check 10. No gain in efficiency, just more bloat. I guess it's something. It also means I don't have to let Safari hang around opening and closing tabs all day and becoming a beast.

I was reading through xnu code today, and couldn't for the life of me figure out what libsa is for. I was also wondering why they use Yarrow as a PRNG. Maybe with the new Intel macs they will switch to using the actual random number generator built into the Intel chipset. Maybe this would be a good programming project for me.

New Years

2005-12-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

Happy New Years! Here's to kids, wives, lives, and everything in between. For 2006 I want, a house, a healthy baby, a black Intel Powerbook, and to be an all around better person. We'll see how that all pans out. I miss my dirtbike...

Goings on and what not

2005-12-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

Boy is life ever exciting around these parts. Work is work. Life is better than work. Sleep is not quite so good. Thanks Greta.

We finally got a Christmas tree this weekend. Because we were so late, it was only $9. Awesome. I feel bad that it was so late, but I suppose with all the critters, getting it late is the only way it will last until Christmas. Whoever invented strings of Christmas lights which require all bulbs to work should be shot. What an awful awful invention that is. Our string of white lights is actually two independent circuits, but one is out. It looks great.

Gameboy has been taking up for too much of my time. I finished Zelda: The Minish Cap this weekend finally. I had been on the last boss of that for months. I also finished Mario and Luigi for DS. I feel bad since it was a Christmas present and have finished it before Christmas, but what am I going to do?

I applied for about a million more jobs at Apple. Maybe one will respond. Rumors are flying about of Intel iBooks for MWSF. I know that my current iBook has more power than I need, but I think for the next round I will wait for a Merom based Powerbook. A dual-core Yonah iBook would probably even stomp my iMac 1.8Ghz, but I will wait to get the 64bit goodness of Merom. I've been going back over Cocoa Programming, and picking up some more cool stuff. Still waiting on that great idea for a piece of software.

DragonFly is about to release 1.4 right around Christmas. There were also slides recently put up by Matt for the BayLisa presentation he gave. I feel weird being on the slides, but maybe I will go back to DragonFly development when I move back to an Intel laptop. VMWare is a great piece of software, and I really hope they port it to Mac.

I've been thinking of/starting to write a bunch of apps, basically recreating a basic UNIX environment using Perl. Wouldn't it be nice if all the tools you use worked exactly the same across every OS that supports Perl? If I did a shell in Perl, even Windows would be useful. How crazy would that be? So far I have been doing simple tools like rmdir, echo, sleep, but I eventually want to cover all of /bin, and a good chunk of commands in /usr/bin. head, tail, grep, maybe sed and awk, vi, a shell. I also wonder if I could overcome the disk space of the interpreter and actually make a smaller /bin by using only perl. I believe the interpreter with a couple modules is around 5Megs. Currently I'm saving about 14k / app written in Perl over the native compiled binaries. At that rate I would need to do a couple hundred, but bash is about 600k. Probably not the best reason to do it.

Hopefully the next three days go quick so I can blow out of here for Christmas. Holidays are a lot of driving between the two sides of the family, but it's still fun, and it will be nice to have the next two Monday's off from work.

Life in the fast lane

2005-12-14T22:07:00.000-08:00

So I finished "Advanced Mac OS X Programming" yesterday. Except for a few typos that I found, I thought it was excellent. Not only was it a very good book on Mac programming, it will be a good book to keep around just for Unix programming in general. It has better coverage of gcc, gdb, performance tuning, and subversion than any other book I own. The sysctl program is going well. It has a couple last things for the todo list before I post the code somewhere. I kinda doubt anybody will actually do anything useful with it, but I found it to be a good learning exercise. Maybe someone else will too.

I was looking through my book collection and I'm down to about 5 computer books that I need to read. I'm currently back on "Cocoa Programming" since I skimmed through the second half, and looking through the index, I saw there was a lot of stuff I didn't remember how to do.

Most of my time lately has been sucked into "Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time" for DS. The colors on DS seem so much better than GBA. I don't know if they actually are, but gradients seem much smoother, and between "Mario & Luigi" and Castlevania, the DS can do some awesome 2D. I think the last boss in Castlevania is about the largest, craziest 2D character I've ever seen in a game. It's probably not the best use of time for a father to be with no house, but it's entertaining, and it was a Christmas present.

I have been reading through the Kernel Programming document that comes with the Mac dev tools, and it seems like a crazy kernel. I understand that there are many different roots in Darwin, but the chapter on transferring data to/from the kernel shows how many ways there are to do some things. Also that Mach, IO Kit and BSD all have their own memory management interfaces (even if they are thinly wrapped versions of each other) seems to make things more complicated. Granted this is coming from someone who has not written anything for Darwin, just looking in so far. The sections of the kernel are pretty well defined/split also it seems, so if you were doing work in it, you would know where you were and which interfaces to use. I guess I should look at the KPIs (why would spellcheck think this should be kapok?) available before I comment anymore.

Pregnancy seems like a bitch. The wife is sick all the time ("morning" sickness?), but getting better. She is also tired all the time, and usually falls asleep by 8/8:30. Supposedly things get better for the second trimester, but we'll have to wait and see. The baby should be over an inch long now.

Another day, another ...... something witty

2005-11-30T22:03:00.000-08:00

So apparently apple has changed the sysctl interface from at least FreeBSD 4. I have not downloaded the sysctl utility from Darwin or FreeBSD 5 to see if those match /usr/sbin/sysctl any closer (I would hope the darwin one would), but I suppose that's just what happens when you use undocumented kernel interfaces.

I've been thinking about how hard it's going to be to port mach_inject/mach_override over to intel. Without having looked through the source yet, I would imagine mach_inject shouldn't be too hard as long as it uses mach paradigms, but I don't think mach_override will be quite so easy. There was a paper I found online from Microsoft on a similar library, but the variable instruction length should throw a wrench in the works. The trampoline code might not be needed though since intel can contain full address space relative addresses I believe. Something interesting to look into.

I also continue to be amazed by how cool Quicksilver is. I think the web search module could be more intuitive though. Perhaps instead of having the web searches in the catalog, they could be converted into actions to be run against text. It would seem more intuitive to me. I love the ability to start a new terminal with a command.

The rumor of a Mac mini DVR sounds very cool, but this article seems like a more likely story. Why would apple try to get all buddy buddy with the TV networks so it can have TV shows available through the store, then give away all the shows, from any network, for free? It sounds like a cool idea, but it seems like a conflict of interest for Apple. I guess I'll just have to hope for a series 3 Tivo with Tivo to go that doesn't blow for transfer rates that works with Mac and a video ipod. Not that I even have a video ipod, but it sounds cool.

Baby

2005-11-29T23:08:00.000-08:00

In non dork news, my wife is 6 weeks pregnant, and we saw the baby for the first time today. It's kind of amazing to see and think about. At this point, the baby is less than an inch long, but it's heart is visibly beating on an ultra sound. In two weeks we will get another, and probably a much better view of the baby. Crazyness

Whoo

2005-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

This is just a spot for me to post any interesting things in my life. I unfortunately do not do as much interesting programming stuff as I would like, but I'm getting better at motivating myself. I will try to update this as much as necessary.

I am currently working on an Cocoa frontend to the BSD tool sysctl. It is still early, but coming along nicely. I will post it and it's source code when it is finished (or at least reasonably useful.)