Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Badblocks

I was looking into mechanisms to test out new hard drives and ran across the program badblocks which can perform such testing and even a script which wraps this. Though it seems that badblocks has an issue with the block count being only a 32-bit integer so if you want to perform the test on a drive bigger than 16TB, you need to use a block size of 8192 or larger.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, August 10, 2024

App Disk Images

If you’ve ever installed Xcode via the Mac App Store, you know it can take an hour to install. The reason is not due to its size but the large number of individual files. What if it didn’t have so many small files? Could optimizations made here apply to other apps as well? Overview The idea is simple: instead of storing apps as a constellation of individual files, instead store a disk image with its own filesystem.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, September 23, 2022

Redesign of Time Machine

It’s no secret that Apple’s Time Machine backup solution is clunky at best. For those who are unaware, it backs up a Mac to an HFS+ filesystem using directory hard links. The biggest problem with this is that HFS+ was an old filesystem when Time Machine was first designed and it’s gotten even older since. These days Apple uses APFS as their filesystem on computers and iOS devices but the Time Machine backup still uses the fragile HFS+ filesystem for its backups.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, September 9, 2022

A Month with AppCode

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 29, 2013

What Objective-C Has Learned

In a few of my recent posts, I outlined some things which I believe that Objective-C can learn from Java, the most recent discussing error handling. In order to avoid the impression that I may not like Objective-C, I figured I should outline some of what I believe are the most important improvements Objective-C has made. Properties When properties were first introduced, I read several who described them as simply syntax sugar.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, February 5, 2013