The #Shell

Userspace Filesystem Drivers are becoming more and more popular since they’re portable and have less headache of platform specific filesystem driver issues. For example, NTFS-3G project provides the full read/write support for NTFS under Linux and MacOSX while living in userspace.

I recently discovered an open source project called “fuse-ext2” which is an implementation of Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 filesystem driver in userspace. Before this one, there was an ext2-only native kernel extension (kext) implementation. So I had no write access to my Ext3 and no read access to Ext4 file-system at all.

To use and enable experimental write support for your Ext2 partition, follow these steps :

1. Download and install NTFS-3G Package which includes FUSE libraries.
   AFAIK NTFS-3G has been renamed into Tuxera NTFS and is a shareware now. But any way you can download the old GPL version here. it works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
   .
2. Download fuse-ext2 package
   .
3. Use Disk Utility to un-mount current Ext2 filesystems if there are any
   .
4. Remove any old filesystem drivers for ext2 from /System/Library/FileSystems (it was ext2.fs for me)
   .
5. Install fuse-ext2 package
   .
6. Since write support is experimental, it is not enabled by default. To enable it, open /System/Library/Filesystems/fuse-ext2.fs/fuse-ext2.util for edit while having super user privileges.
   .
7. Edit the OPTIONS variable at line 207 from
   OPTIONS="auto_xattr,defer_permissions"
   to
   OPTIONS="auto_xattr,defer_permissions,rw+"
   .
8. Open Disk Utility and choose Mount for your filesystem and have fun !

Tags: Apple, Linux, MacOSX, Open Source
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As you probably know, we’ve released our first iPhone application named Persian Poems one month ago. Today we decided to push the first update for it to introduce some new features and fix minor bugs we had found and release a second version with new books and graphics. So I started with creating and dumping and organizing the new books for the second edition and we all three were testing and fixing bugs there in the garage. It will hopefully turn into a faster and more stable application since the poem catching process is now being done in a background worker thread and have almost no impact on user scrolling experience.

I’ve also done some performance tests on Movie Buff and Persian Poems to find the funny memory leaks. This page helped me a lot to start off the play with Apple Instruments tool and as a result both applications are completely clean now ! and I have to wash my hands !

Unfortunately the micro-transaction system needs more work and the exams will start in near 3-4 days and this is the fact that why we decided to do some time-boxing for the features we’re going to present in this update.

There were also some critical problems with the Movie Buff which is available on App-store for a week or so. We’ve fixed them and hope that apple will release the update soon to prevent these 1-start ratings.

Tags: Apple, Bugs, iPhone, Movie Buff, Persian Poems, SuperMonko
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