Sylvain Wallez

One of the few cool features that as a Mac user I've been envying to Linux people is FUSE, aka filesystem in userspace. It allows to implement a new filesystem with a simple API in practically whatever language you want, and without requiring kernel privileges. FUSE has allowed the development of an amazing list of fancy real or virtual filesystems.

Thanks to Google, FUSE is now available on the Mac! Checkout MacFUSE, which comes bundled with sshfs, allowing to mount as a network drive any machine you have ssh access to. Awesome!

The presentation video also shows some of the things that are cooking in Google's kitchen: a filesystem for Google docs and Picasa. This effectively totally blurs the frontier between your computer and the network, and I wouldn't be surprised that Google also prepares a Windows port. That would allow Google's offering to look tighly integrated in your desktop computer without having to develop complex file manager-like web applications.

I've been thinking of a FUSE driver for Hadoop, which we are using on the Joost backend. And incidentally, some work started on this a long time ago, but was somehow forgotten because of the work on the webDAV front-end. Now that FUSE is available on the Mac, it's time to revive it!

Via Ask Bjørn Hansen.