FileMon replacement for Mac

Mac OS X 10.5.2

Since switching to a Mac in January of 2008, I've been looking for a replacement of the Sysinternals tools, especially FileMon. For those who don't know, FileMon is a program which shows file activity in real-time (file accesses, changes). I found a utility on the Mac that is almost the same: fseventer. The only thing fseventer lacks is the ability to print file accesses--it only prints file/directory changes. If you need to be able to see file accesses, it seems the only solution on the Mac is to use Instruments, which is a program included with the free Developer Tools (XCode, Interface Builder, Shark, etc.) If you have Leopard and have some experience with dtrace(1), then you can use that utility from the command line. For 10.4, you can look at ktrace(1), but that utility shows system calls, not file accesses/modifications.



Download fseventer

Getting 1Password to work with Safari 3.1

Mac OS X 10.5.2, 1Password 2.5.11 (build 6126), Safari 3.1 (5525.13)





Update: 1Password has released version 2.5.12 which supports Safari 3.1. Open your 1Password program and check for updates to install.

Apple today updated Safari to version 3.1, which breaks 1Password. I'm sure the makers of 1Password will be releasing an update in the next few days to address this, but in the meantime the steps below will get everything working again. You do not need to worry about undoing this when the 1Password update is released.

1. Close Safari and 1Password
   
   
   
2. Open the file /Applications/1Password.app/Contents/Resources/SupportedBrowsers.plist in a text editor
   
   
   
3. For the key Safari, change the MaxBundleVersion to 5525.13
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Open 1Password program, go into Preferences, Browsers tab, make sure Safari is checked as installed. If not, check the box.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Open Safari and you should see the 1Password icon on the toolbar.
   
   
   
   
   
   

Be careful doing this in the future. If Apple were to make major changes to Safari, then this technique could do more harm than good, but I have verified it works with Safari 3.1

Apple Developer Site Hammered?

After Apple announced that a beta of the iPhone SDK was available today, I headed over to developer.apple.com to download a copy.  Only problem is the site is unresponsive.   I dropped down to the terminal and attempted to connect via telnet on port 80: 

ryan@RyanMac~/Music/iTunes$ date
Thu Mar  6 14:41:20 EST 2008
ryan@RyanMac~/Music/iTunes$ telnet developer.apple.com 80
Trying 17.254.2.129...
Connected to developer.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
ryan@RyanMac~/Music/iTunes$ date
Thu Mar  6 14:41:24 EST 2008

The server is dropping the connection immediately!  Guess demand is much higher than they anticipated, which is a good thing if you are Apple.