Unix OS Development

"One of the most frequently used Cocoa classes is NSImage which, as the name suggests, is all about displaying and manipulating image data.

The imageNamed: method of this class retrieves an image reference for you - provided that you know the name of the image you're after.

Many of the images that can be retrieved via the imageNamed: method have well documented names, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's not well-known.

It's those images - including some for Windows - that I'll be digging into here.

Think you the truth about Mac OS X Server? Find out as Ryan Faas counts down the top ten commonly held myths about Apple's server platform.

Warning: while it's a decent article, it will make you click through 10 pages to get the 10 reasons.

An interesting article has been making its way around the internet the past few days, titled "Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS".

Mac OS X indeed does some things very, very right, just like many other operating systems and graphical environments do some things very, very right.

The issue with the list of the article in question is that many of the items on the list are not exactly examples of "Usability Highs" at all.

The April - June, 2008 Status Reports are now available with 14 entries.

The FreeBSD Foundation has published their Semi-Annual July 2008 newsletter which summarizes what they have done to help the FreeBSD Project and community.

Work has started on making repeat builds bit-identical. So far this has involved removing code which embeds build dates into the binaries.

[Perry E. Metzger]

UDF: Implement directory hashing to speed up directory traversals. Speed improvements of at least 4 times in untarring and roughly 100 to 500 times on file creation in big directories.

[Reinoud Zandijk]

While openpam overwrites possible sensitive data on cleanup, it misses the buffers used in the password dialog.

Clean them too.[Matthias Drochner]

Work has started on making repeat builds bit-identical. So far this has involved removing code which embeds build dates into the binaries.

[Perry E. Metzger]

UDF: Implement directory hashing to speed up directory traversals. Speed improvements of at least 4 times in untarring and roughly 100 to 500 times on file creation in big directories.

[Reinoud Zandijk]

While openpam overwrites possible sensitive data on cleanup, it misses the buffers used in the password dialog.

Clean them too.[Matthias Drochner]

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the conclusion of our fourth consecutive democratic election of project leadership.

The FreeBSD Core Team constitutes the project's "Board of Directors" and is responsible for vetting new src committers, arbitrating technical disagreements, weighing in on policy and administrative issues, and appointing sub-committees for handling specific duties (security officer, release engineers, port managers, webmasters, etc..).

The core team has been democratically elected every 2 years by active FreeBSD committers since 2000.

VirtualBox is an open-source virtualization alternative to Parallels and VMWare in the MacOS X arena. Here is a step-by-step screenshot tutorial to installing Windows XP using VirtualBox in MacOS X.

haad-dm: Import of the device-mapper driver. This driver is a BSD rewrite of the linux dm driver. For now only error, linear and zero targets are supported.

This driver uses NetBSD specific ioctls based on proplib. Adam Hamsik was able to create a logical volume (with lvm2tools lvcreate utility) with this version of the driver, newfs it and mount it.

[Adam Hamsik]

ddb: Add a show files command that prints the vnodes associated with a given struct proc and, if LOCKDEBUG is built in, the lock status of the uvmobject.

[Brett Lymn]