AmitSingh
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MacFusion: a GUI for MacFUSE
We mentioned MacFUSE many times here on TUAW. It's a very cool utility (from Amit Singh at Google) which brings the Linux FUSE project to the Mac for easily expanding file system support (for more background on Singh and MacFUSE check out this interview at IT Conversation). Unfortunately, however, MacFUSE is a rather geeky project that requires some command line chops to get things going. That's where MacFusion comes in, as a GUI front-end for MacFUSE that puts easy access to MacFUSE network mounts in your menubar. It's still early in development but it will already "show a Secure Shell or Secure FTP share from another computer on your macs desktop, letting you manipulate the files on it as if they were on your own computer. MacFusion can also do the same for any File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, giving read/write FTP in the finder for the first time!"Of course you'll need to install MacFUSE first, then download MacFusion and install it as a normal application. MacFusion is free and open source.[via Daring Fireball]
Macfuse: FUSE File System for the Mac
This one is for the real Mac geeks out there. Amit Singh, author or Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, is widely recognized as an über Mac-geek and possibly the person outside of Apple that knows the most about Mac OS X. He is now employed by Google as their Mac Engineering Manager. As he just announced on the Official Google Mac Blog, he used part of his "20 percent time" to implement the "FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism" for OS X (it was originally developed for Linux). He explains, "FUSE makes it possible to implement a very functional file system in a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to the operating system." He links to the FUSE project wiki listing of applications. While this won't have an immediate impact on most of us users, it has a lot of potential. As pointed out on MacSlash this may eventually bring full read/write support for Windows NTFS formatted disks to OS X (Mac OS X can read, but not write to, NTFS disks) or even "filesystems which run over ssh and gmail."[Via the Official Google Mac Blog]
Apple Drops Trusted Computing
When Apple announced the move to Intel processors, there was a good deal of talk regarding whether the company would make use of the content protection offered through Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to ensure OSx86 could only be run on Apple's own hardware. Although Apple did eventually include the Trusted Computing chips in the machines, it seems that they never actually used them. For some however, the mere presence of the chip without a a statement from Apple as to what it was being used for was enough to make them switch away from Macs. Amit Singh brings news that with the introduction of the Mac Pro, the TPM is absent from the motherboards of Apple's new machines; something that should lay to rest any remaining conspiratorial fears. Singh had previously released a piece of software that allowed users of machines containing the TPM to use Trusted Computing to protect their own data. [via BoingBoing]
