Monday, November 05, 2007

A chat with ben and pete - podcast episode 2

Episode 2

We discuss our thoughts on MacOS X 10.5 a week into installing it. Topics covered include Time machine experiences, launchd, Mac malware, XCode 3 and more DTrace. The big news of the week is Google's OpenSocial API and we chat about our thoughts on all things social.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The mention of data transfer via audio tones reminded me of that iPodLinux developer (Nils Schneider) who dumped the bootloader firmware out of an 4th generation iPod in 2005 by squawking it out through the piezo for the clicker.

Love the podcast guys, will be subscribing for sure. I like the format; two geeks and a recording device :) it will be interesting to see where you take it. The audio is great quality, even better this week. Ep'1 was a little sharp on the sibilants at times.

Alastair said...

Another great show, thanks guys.

re launchd: I just wanted to question Pete's assertion that launchd starts the system quicker because of the service dependency graph traversal (correct me if I misheard this). As I understand it, this does not make the system start any quicker, and nor is it unique to launchd (Windows, BSD, and Linux all do something similar). However, it is the "OnDemand" bit of the service which delays the launch of the service and hence speeds up the boot. And as you note the addition of X11 to the OnDemand services is a welcome one, but this doesn't seem to be a launchd addition?

(On a related issue did they fix that rather nasty launchd/kernel bug which basically makes launchd useless as a cron replacement?)

re the python compilation problem: Perhaps this was related to Apple's changes to Mandatory Access Control (another unfortunate overload of the MAC acronym :) in Leopard? I don't know the details but you could imagine there being some API breakage here...

Also, Pete made a side comment about Apple turning into the next Microsoft and I just wanted to highlight a Gruber article entitled Apple Needs a Nikon, which is spot-on. Obviously I'm a big Apple fan as you guys, but their domination of certain key markets is not good for anyone in the long term.

Peter Marks said...

Thanks folks.

On launchd, I think it makes the system faster to log in to for two reasons: 1. processes that don't need to be up because other things are dependent on them can be deferred, 2. the login window comes up as soon as it can.

As you say, all OSs play tricks to make them look like they start up faster than they really do. I notice a bit of "updating boot caches" after updates on Leopard recently.

Thanks for the links.

Marxy.

Alastair said...

All I'm saying is that it's not the dependency traversal that is making the startup quicker - it's the deferred service startup.

Also did you know that (in Tiger anyway) the startup progress bar is a placebo? It's not measuring anything, as described here.