So my hard drives keep failing. I was annoyed and wanted some kind of warning.
"FAILURE IMMINENT buy a replacement hard disk now" :)

Looking around on the internet, I saw SMARTReporter 
<http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/> 
which looked pretty cool, but did not do what I wanted. So I started to explore
the world of IOKit for the first time. I also had to get my hands on the ATA 
spec, which I found a working draft of, thanks to the wonders of google.com. It
turned out that the data sheets for my own hitachi hard drive were more 
informative though.

I chose the name maxwell because the acronym S.M.A.R.T. reminded me of a TV 
series, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
The TV series, in turn, reminded me of "Get Smart", whose main character was
Maxwell Smart. So, I called this uncle, then when I went to register the
project at sourceforge.net I noticed that they already had an uncle, so I named
it maxwell. It is actually not bad as the program checks that your Mac's well..
and exits with an error if it is not.


To build type 'make'.

To install in /usr/local type 'sudo make install', to install elsewhere, type 
'sudo make install prefix=/elsewhere'

Problems?  Email the list  <maxwell-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net>

Thanks.