Apple on galvanist

OS X and the Unremovable File

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 19:34:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a Fuse filesystem project for quite some time. Now that OS X v10.9 is out, one of my major roadblocks has been removed. But I’ve still been experiencing some difficulty getting OS X to treat my filesystem like a first-class citizen. So to debug it I’ve been banging on it with Tuxera’s port of Pawel Jakub Dawidek’s POSIX file system test suite.

During this process, I made some baselines of my non-FUSE HFS+ boot volume and I came across a “fun” HFS+ surprise:

/Users/Shared/adi

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 22:28:00 +0000

This is one for the search engines.

If you’re running Mac OS X ~v10.8 (or later), you’ve probably got a folder at the path /Users/Shared/adi. Like me, you might be wondering what it is. I did some googling and got nothing. I dug a little further and found (part of) the answer: It is used by the Mac App Store and the new iBooks app.

In case you’re interested, here are the steps I took to arrive at this answer:

Where Apple TTS Draws The Line (Numerically)

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Apple’s OS X text-to-speech supports reading some big numbers. But they have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is just before one hundred sextillion. You can hear for yourself using the handy OS X “say” command.

Bare digit strings

Numbering on bare digit strings stops at one million.

$ say 1000000

You hear: “one million”

$ say 1000001

You hear: “one zero zero zero zero zero one”

Formatted number strings

Nicely formatted number strings get a bit more scale: