Developers, and some power users who are reading this have probably heard of launchd. It’s Apple’s “mama process,” responsible for launching other processes at startup, login, at regular intervals, or on demand. If you open the Activity Monitor application, and view “All Processes, Hierarchically,” you’ll see that there are only two top-level processes: kernel_task, and […]

A few months ago, Cameron Hayne told me about his nifty AppleScript Shell (ash), which offers an interactive command-line interface to AppleScript, and lets you do some nifty tricks like “tracing” a script’s execution, printing the resulting value for each executed statement. But I just discovered something about ash that’s truly magical. Think “Remote Script […]

Greg Miller describes in excruciating detail (or glorious detail, depending on your perspective) the steps required to compile, load, and unload a simple OS X Kernel Extension. It’s this kind of detailed analysis combined with a casual writing style that makes for great technical blog entries. File this one under “understanding what the eff is […]

I really love NetNewsWire – it fits the bill for (almost) all of my aggregation needs. It even has a rather sophisticated syncing mechanism, which got even more advanced after the the product was purchased by NewsGator. But syncing isn’t really for me. Don’t get me wrong, I want to read news from more than […]