If you’ve ever installed Xcode via the Mac App Store, you know it can take an hour to install. The reason is not due to its size but the large number of individual files. What if it didn’t have so many small files? Could optimizations made here apply to other apps as well?

Overview

The idea is simple: instead of storing apps as a constellation of individual files, instead store a disk image with its own filesystem. The idea isn’t new and has been used elsewhere and so much of what I’m going to outline here is what one familiar with the idea might expect. So instead of an app being a directory, its current representation, the contents of that directory exist in a read-only filesytem stored in a disk image. Then the app is really a single file, the image itself. Accessing contents within the app is simply traversing the filesystem within the image.

It’s no secret that Apple’s Time Machine backup solution is clunky at best. For those who are unaware, it backs up a Mac to an HFS+ filesystem using directory hard links. The biggest problem with this is that HFS+ was an old filesystem when Time Machine was first designed and it’s gotten even older since. These days Apple uses APFS as their filesystem on computers and iOS devices but the Time Machine backup still uses the fragile HFS+ filesystem for its backups. If you select a backup target that’s not HFS+, such as a network share, it creates a sparse disk image there and creates an HFS+ filesystem in that image. I question whether there was a better way. There is but I wouldn’t expect Apple to bother actually implementing it because, well, they don’t actually seem to care about quality anymore.

“You should’ve received a notice in the mail about your car’s warranty.” We’ve all had the calls trying to sell us an “extended warranty” for our cars. They rank among everyone’s favorites right beside the scammers from India who try to steal credit card numbers. Most people hang up on these calls but for several years I didn’t.

The Credit Card Scammers

With many of the Credit Card scammers, I tended to answer a few questions seemingly reasonably (as far as they knew), and then I would ask, “do you feel good with what you do with your life?” This tended to really change the conversation where I would tend to try to get them to admit that they are actually a scammer. Some adamantly refused to give up the ruse, even after being caught in numerous logical contradictions. Most would hang up around this point but I did get a few to start questioning what they were doing.