OrchardNest

Introduction Since 2015, I've been working on improving FreeBSD support for Broadcom Wi-Fi devices and SoCs, including authoring the bhnd(4) driver family, which provides a unified bus and driver programming interface for these...

On Mac OS X, application signing entitlements enforce client-side constraints on non-AppStore (or non-Apple-distributed) applications. This is used, for instance, to prevent a non-AppStore application from using the MapKit APIs. Recently,...

I just published beta sources for XSmallTest (XSM), a minimal single-header implementation of a test DSL that generates test cases compatible with Xcode's XCTest: #import "XSmallTest.h" xsm_given("an integer value") { int v; ...

I decided to sit down and solve a problem that has troubled me since I first started working with Scala almost 6 years ago: Checked exceptions, and specifically, the lack thereof. The result is NX ("No Exceptions") a Scala compiler plugin...

Introduction Last year, I wrote a swizzling API for my own use in patching Xcode; I wanted an easy way to define new method patches, and the API wound up being pretty nice: [UIWindow pl_patchInstanceSelector: @selector(sendEvent:)...

Over at Mike Ash's blog, he's posted my first issue of "Tales From The Crash Mines". I'll be writing this as an intermittent series on the interesting bugs we've tracked down on iOS and Mac OS X, interpreting crash reports, and software...

In response to my post on iOS Static Libraries, a number of people have asked for a radar they can easily submit to follow up with Apple. In the spirit of Fix Radar or GTFO, here's a template you can use to submit a bug asking Apple to fix...

Introduction When I first documented static frameworks as a partial workaround for the lack of shared libraries and frameworks on iOS, it was 2008. Nearly six years later, we still don't have a solution on-par with Mac OS X...

Running 10.4.11 under VMWare Fusion 6 Introduction I recently agreed to port a small piece of code to Tiger (10.4), assuming that it would be relatively easy to bring up Tiger up in VMWare Fusion on my Mavericks desktop; I already...

It took me almost 13 years, but I finally sat down and solved a problem that has annoyed me since Mac OS X 10 Public Beta: synchronizing OpenSSL's trusted certificate authorities with Mac OS X's trusted certificate authorities. The issue...

On Mac OS X, mach_override is used to implement runtime patching of functions. It essentially works by marking the executable page as writable, and actually inserting a new function prologue into the target function. On iOS, pages are...

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a blog post on Reliable Crash Reporting, documenting the complexity of reliably generating crash reports and how seemingly innocuous decisions could lead to failure in the crash reporter, or even...

Introduction One of the handy features in Mac OS X's universal binary support is the ability to easily compile a binary for multiple architectures with one command. This simplifies the process of producing a binary for multiple devices,...

Introduction One of the features that I think has been critical to Apple's ability to leverage improvements in underlying CPUs -- as well as weather migrations to completely new architectures -- has been their Universal Binary...

Who could not like BeOS? Haiku Alpha 4 was recently released, to the excitement of everyone. Or, at least those of us that maintain a strong sense of nostalgia for pervasive multithreading and yellow window tabs. If you feel the urge to...

Introduction Some months ago, I picked up a an Aeon Labs Z-Stick Series 2. The Z-Stick is USB-equipped Z-Wave controller, using CP210x chipset to provide access to the Z-Wave module's UART over USB. The official driver from Silicon Labs...

Introduction PLCrashReporter is a standalone open-source library for generating crash reports on iOS. When I first wrote the library in 2008, it was the only option for automatically generating and gathering crash reports from an iOS...

In iOS 4.3, Apple introduced a new API to support the use of blocks as Objective-C method implementations. The API provides similar functionality as Mike Ash's MABlockClosure, which uses libffi (or libffi-ios) to implement support for...

When I started Plausible Labs in 2008, we were working out of our homes, paying our rent out of savings while we figured out how to bootstrap worker-owned software cooperative without external funding. A year or so later, I'm part of a...

Introduction Thanks to the work of Gary Benson on implementing and merging the Zero-Assembler Project, and Greg Lewis' work bringing it to OpenJDK BSD Port, it's now possible to bootstrap OpenJDK 7 on Mac OS X 10.5/PPC. Gary Benson's...

Introduction I just finished uploading PLBlocks 1.0-beta2, which adds support for iPhoneOS 2.2, iPhone 3GS armv7-optimized binaries, and host support for PPC systems (release announcement). This seems like a good time a good time to...

Introduction On Friday, Plausible Labs released PLBlocks, an SDK that allows you to immediately begin experimenting with blocks (also known as closures) on Mac OS X 10.5 and iPhone OS 3.0. While the original announcement included a very...

Over the weekend (and for some of the week) I've been working on back-porting block support from the Snow Leopard toolchain, with the goal of leveraging blocks for our iPhone and Mac OS X 10.5 development at Plausible Labs. If you're...

We just released a new design for the Plausible Labs website, home of the fine worker-owned cooperative that keeps me gainfully employed so that I can spend my free time (such as it exists) working on open source software.

Introduction Five months ago, CVE-2008-5353 and other vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed, and fixed by Sun. CVE-2008-5353 allows malicious code to escape the Java sandbox and run arbitrary commands with the permissions of the...

As part of the OpenJDK project, various organizations have been working on OpenJDK 6, a freely distributable Java 6 implementation based on the open source OpenJDK 7 code base. Most Linux distributions are now shipping OpenJDK 6...

There's a lot of talk lately about preventing application piracy on the iPhone. Automated tools have been released to strip Apple's DRM, and a new anti-piracy product (which charges royalty fees on your sales) has been released. As an...

Introduction Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I ship software with bugs. After unit testing and integration testing, the bugs that tend to slip through are tricky ones -- race conditions, crashes triggered by bugs in platform...

Plausible Labs' clone of Apple's CoverFlow™ is now available for off-the-shelf licensing. You can also download a demonstration version of the library (limited to rendering every other cover) to try it out for yourself. I would...

Within a few hours of its 1.0 release, our iPhone application was stripped of its DRM by a customer, and made available via http://appulo.us for use on jailbroken iPhones. Appulo.us serves as a comprehensive repository of pirated iPhone...

On other platforms, I've found valgrind to be indispensable when it comes to discovering and fixing bugs. With Greg Parker's port of valgrind for Mac OS X now available, it's now possible to test your Mac and iPhone applications with...

An update to Safari Bookbag has been posted, using the CoverFlow implementation from Peeps to replace the previous UICoverFlowLayer implementation. Apple appears to be getting more serious about checking for private APIs -- the previous...