Today's update of OS X Leopard, 10.5.3. brings an excellent new feature:

Remote TimeMachine Backups!

All you need is one Mac with a TimeMachine Backup Volume, and it will be detected by all other machines running 10.5.3.

My hint for the first backup is however to connect the machines by ethernet, rather than wireless. The inital backup can take a loooong time.

Inspirered by an entry on the CocoaDex Weblog, I made a little sample application for the rotation gesture. I still am not sure what the "standardRotationThreshold" is used for.

Rotate View Project

EDIT: URL has been fixed

Today there was some rich spam in my filters. Addressed to someone named "a8f0e" it said:

Based on your excellent publication record, we are pleased to invite you
to submit a paper to one of the following multi, inter, and trans
disciplinary conferences

I don't know anybody here by the name of "a8f0e", and google could not find a publication record either.

What google could find was that the conference this was for, "VIPSI", has already accepted a SCIGen paper, the infamous generator for important looking but completely meaningless reasearch papers.

On the weblog entry above, a "Prof. V. Milutinovic." defends the conference. I believe that VIPSI is a real conference when he shows me the "excellent publication record" for Mr. or Ms. a8f0e.

After yesterday's port of ElectropaintOSX, here is the other Mac incarnation of it: StonerView, originally ported to the Mac by Tommaso Pecorella

Download 53,814 byte Disk Image (dmg)
Source 50,723 byte Disk Image (dmg)

Without modifications, you will need Xcode 2.5 or better to build the source. For Xcode 2.4, the SDK paths will have to be adjusted

In the early nineties I worked with Silicon Graphics machines, and was very imporessed with the screen saver: Electropaint. In those days it was well suited to show off the graphics power of the machine.
Luckily, a few years ago, Electropaint has been ported in various forms. A friend of mine made the Windows port of StonerView and now I finally got around to the Universal port of ElectropaintOSX. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the current source code for StonerView Mac. When I do, I will port that to OS X as well.

Download ElectropaintOSX 0.3 207,501 byte Image (DMG)

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later

Electropaint™ is a US Trademark of Tristram Visual, www.tristram.com

This morning, I walked up to my mirror and did the usual routine:

"Mirror, mirror upon the wall: Who is the geekiest of them all?"
And the mirror replied:
"Oh Alex Geek, though geeky ye be, fuzic is geekier far to see
Over the hills and far away, he built a freaking jet-engine today:"

Not sure if anybody but me needs that, but I find the setup time for Kernel Debugging quite taxing. So, to make life a little easier, I made the following startup script on my target machine:

#!/bin/sh
KitPath="$HOME/KernelDebugKit/"
address=`/usr/sbin/kextstat | perl -ne 'if (m/(0x\w+)\s+0x\w+\s+0x\w+\s+com\.apple\.iokit\.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily/) { print "$1\n"} ' `

/sbin/kextload -c -e -k "${KitPath}mach_kernel" -n -z -r "${KitPath}" -a com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily@$address -s /tmp/ ~/KernelDebugKit/IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext

scp /tmp/com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.sym DEBUGMACHINE.local:/tmp/

This script will find the load address and generate the symbols from the IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily and push them onto my debugging machine for gdb. The script is quick and dirty, but maybe it is of use to someone

A friend of mine has managed to get his music published on the iTunes Store!

I think that is big news, and you should go an check it out: Cathedrale Sainte-Marie EP

Way to go Thom!

While I was debugging my driver, I found out that you can raise the verbosity of the IOKit. As I did not find this tip documented anywhere on the Web, I thought I share it with you.

Many parts of the IOKit check the variable gIOKitDebug for certain bits, and log accordingly.


Continue reading "A more chatty IOKit"

Wir sollten auch ein offizielles OSXEntwicklerforum.de Treffen veranstalten, ich habe im Forum ja schon Vorschläge gemacht: Montag Abend, 20:30, und wahrscheinlich ist das Chevy's die beste Idee.

Wer kommen will kann ja an diesen Beitrag einen Kommentar (am besten mit eMail) anhängen.

Now that just a year has passed, here is a new entry!

I will be attending the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2007 in San Francisco, arriving June 8th and staying till June 16th.
If you would like to schedule a meeting in San Francisco in that timeframe, just drop me a note.

Especially for this event I have added a new category, I which I and members of the German OSX Entwicklerforum might post some entries.

If you would like to post entries in that categorie, just let me know.

The EOS is a nice place for fusion cuisine.

Between May 10th and May 18th I will be in the Bay Area, i.e. San Francisco and Berkeley.

I now have local numbers for San Francisco, drop me a note if you would like to meet!

A friend had the problem that he could not drag items into an NSTextField that was not the First Responder, and asked me if I had a solution. And I found one:
The trick is, to call makeFirstResponder in the draggingEntered method.

Sample Project

Just recently I discovered that some software would fail to work on partitions that are case-sensitive. My partitions are mostly case-sensitive because I develop some stuff for Linux (which often has case-sensitive file systems).

So, be sure to test your applications on case-sensitive partitions. You can easily create a disk image and mount it for this purpose.

In the case your application needs to know if it is running on a case sensitive partition, here is some sample code. There are many ways to find out the vRefNum, depending on what you have to start with. In this case, I am assuming a path, but you can also get a vRefNum for a BSD partition or other things.

Sample Code follows:
Continue reading "Pitfall for Developers: HFS+ Case-Sensitive"