Category SoftDev

Software Engineering and Development

Phrack Issue 64

In the latest issue of Phrack, you can find, among others, a very interesting 'paper' on shellcode and rootkit authoring for Mac OS X. While some of the techniques presented are not new, there are few --- if any --- publicly available texts that present them in such a concise manner. The paper focuses mostly on the Intel platform although there are descriptions and some code for PowerPC too. Worth a read.

VMWare Workstation 6.0

Back in 2005 I needed VMWare to be able to test a piece of software on multiple separate installations so I went and bought VMWare Workstation 5.5.x for Linux. One of the annoying things with Workstation 5.5 was its complete lack of support for USB 2.0 and somewhat arcane configuration which occasionally necessitated ini file […]

'Leftovers' can be oh-so polished.

Yes, you guessed it. The most visible highlight of this year’s WWDC keynote is a brand spanking new web site for Apple.com. That’s it folks. Nothing to see here. Move along now. Or is it? More seriously, I bet the average Mac user is going to be baffled, still waiting for those über-features that were […]

The Xcode Bugs

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Xcode has been seriously misbehaving lately. In most cases the problems had to do with its buggy parser/writer and required me to open the .xcodeproj files with TextMate and fix them. One example, that tortured me the other day, had to do with spurious compiler flags added there for no […]

A critique on modern GUI design.

Don Norman, a usability design specialist, writes about how the GUI has become a very complex part of modern programs and argues that the general-purpose computer is now inappropriate, as the GUI paradigm as we know it is incapable of efficiently encapsulating all the information we require for our daily work. I disagree. I believe […]

Ximian Gnome — Linux Desktops

I recently tried Ximian Gnome 2. What do I think? Well, it is definitely a good try, but it is very similar to the Gnome desktop I had on my machine more than 18 months ago. I don’t know whether it is me or it is really happening, but I find the Linux Desktop developments […]

Java development on OS X. Things that need to be done.

Part of my development efforts in the past few months has been based on Java and since MacOS X is the operating system of choice for me I usually use it for Java development. On the C/C++ and of course Objective-C front, MacOS X is doing alright, despite the largely obsolete development tools involved. It […]