René Rebe

My main “workstation”, a 3 year old MacBook Pro, is really reaching the point where something slightly snappier would be nice. As I also use Linux a pretty PC laptop would be sufficed, too. Especially as I do not 100% fall in love with the latest unibody Macs, anyway (I would take a black liquid-metal incarnation, though, … .

With the advent of neat silicon from AMD there should be plenty of slim, light and long battery life PCs, but there aren’t, … The only thing one could barely consider was the previously expensive, and now discontinued Dell Adamo, … With this good design vacuum it is no wonder Apple is selling that well, …

I could consider the new Lenovo X220, the IPS display is certainly appealing, but where the heck is the ultra-portable, slim & light S-series edition of it?

Oh my, guess I have to wait even longer, and if the PC industry continues to fail with good designs, I can just hope to see some nice liquid metal, black & beautiful Apple laptop in a year (or so), …

Again the German Railway took off without us, and it was literally just seconds missing this time! We had like 9 minutes to change the train, and our train was about 5 minutes late. Normally not a problem to still catch the next train; one would think, … But when the DB parks the first train at the second half of the platform behind another, and let you jog it done with all your luggage, to arrive at the net train “just in time”, touch the door sensor, but the ICE just accelerates away, … well, you know that there is something wrong at that public transportation company’s management.

Actually this is not the first time - stuff like this happened to us so often that we rarely used DB railway the last years anyway. Usually flying or rented cars are cheaper anyway. Once we had playing kids on the track, another time environmental activist cut off the electricity line, and worse was a concrete block of said environmental groups. The worst situations ever, however, where when some train had frost damages, the listed replacement went later, but did went into a slightly different direction, and thus did not stop at our destination station and another time when all ticket automats where defect, we where instructed to go down the hall to buy the tickets (not possible in short distance trains, no exceptions, not even when all ticket machines are out of order), and when we arrived back, the next train was already in place, which we mistakenly even entered in all the haste!!!

And this is not even counting in the mess that is the Berliner S-Bahn, nor recent strikes!

We just gave the “Bahn” a chance, because the departure time was more suitable, and we had the luck to get one of those highly discounted tickets.

Guess how often we will use the railway the coming years.

(Posted via 3G, O2 Germany, in before-mentioned ICE.)

Berlin is not only breaking international visitors records year after year, with the Berlinale and similar events it is also attracting movie business and fans.

In time for this year’s Berlinale moviemaker Ralf Schmerberg installed the letters “Holywood” in Berlin Tiergarten, just between Brandenburger Gate and Potsdamer Platz. The installation mimicks the legendary skyline in Los Angeles meassuring 14 meter in height and 53 meter wide.

The creator wants to point out the shrinking number of tree’s in the otherwise green city, apparently due to missing funding in the city’s budgets.

Enjoy even more in my Berlin 2011 gallery.

For some time our office’s Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430dl kept feeding paper worse every week. Sometime one had to multiple clear a virtual “Paper jam in tray 1″ to get a single sheet printer out, … with just 7563 total faces printed on the printer’s internal counters.

It got annoying enough to finally take a look, and apparently it is a known problem! And cleaning the paper pickup rubber roller really helped, for us!

Let’s print on, …

Those who know me, or other fellow readers, may have noticed: I am a little in this low-level computer science stuff, like OS kernel, assembly, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, and such, …

So my latest pet project, for the weekend education was resurrecting the T2 MIPS port. And as such I had some fun porting dietlibc to MIPS64.

And what a fun ride that was, looking forward to see how MIPS develops on the smart-things side of life!

Sony is suing computer scientist and programmer George Hotz for getting Linux to work on his personal PS3, again - performing an in-depth security analysis of the system on the way and uncovering a bunch of beginner programmer mistakes while at it.

If anyone should have sued anyone in this case, then it should have been the general public in a class action suit against Sony for taking away an formerly advertised “Other OS” feature, a function that allowed the use a real OS, such as Linux, on the “computer system” that is the PS3. A feature taken away by Sony on April the 1st 2010.

If anything, Sony should have silently taken the in-depth security analysis by Hotz and the fail0verflow group and hardened their next gen console, such as an PS4 or PSP2, with the lessons learned form all their sloppy mistakes, such as not using random data for the crypto, … [or for delivering rootkits with their Windows software, …]

I would be all for upgrading my fat PS3 that I intentionally did not update since May 2010 to still be able to boot to my Linux, and thereby save some Euro on my electricity bill due to the more efficient PS3 slim. However, Sony’s customer limiting feature removal does prevent my living room setup from going green, …

Due to Sony’s latest actions, I call to boycott Sony, until they stop suing their customers!

Instead there are plenty of other companies delivering aesthetic, feature rich, and often more affordable consumer electronic products for home entertainment and business computer equipment. Until Sony stops their latest actions against free speech, fair use and the internet I recommend supporting more customer oriented companies. Companies that do not sue their customers for doing whatever they want with the expensive equipment investment.

As one can (not) see in the hands on shoots of Engadget, the iPhone 4 Verizon edition apparently does no longer spot a SIM card slot, maybe actication time programmed as rumored earlier?

Finally, with the CES 2011 AMD finally set free the new Fusion APUs built from the power-efficient Bobcat micro architecture. The new AMD C-50 and E-350 set off to finally end the performance stagnation that is the Intel Atom.

One certainly does not need exorbitant number crunching performance while on-the-go. However, enough performance for a snappy web browser and video playback is certainly welcome as are more than 1024×600 pixel real estate to view more than a Twitter tweet as well as to drive more than an aging VGA link on your favorite desktop to do real work.

It looks like the VIA dual-core Nano X2 will again arrive late to the party, and the more performant Bobcat will not leave much niche for VIA to play (abysmal open source 3D drivers will do it’s rest).

Cheers from my side -to booth of them- putting some real pressure on Intel, and I am desperately looking forward to sub 10W, slim & light AMD ultra portables:

Acer Aspire One 522
Acer Iconia Tablet
Fujitsu Lifebook PH50/C
Lenovo ThinkPad X120e
Hewlett Packard DM1
MSI Wind U270
MSI CR650
Sony VAIO Y
Toshiba Satellite C655D

And who knows, maybe we will eventually see AMD’s latest, greatest shipping in one or the other Apple, too …

Update: initial performance impressions!

Update 2: and another one, …

Update 3: wow, just wow, less than an inch thick Compulab PC3, with AMD Fusion Embedded G series APU

Udev did it again. Wasting my time during emergency maintenance at a remote datacenter server. The box was flunky and we eventually decided to exchange the hardware to cure sporadic reboots (may have been a faulty cooling fan, …). The question was:

Would the remote machine come back to remote managed life, or would it not?

In the past we usually had no problem with this, even tested it to be prepared for such disaster. But you probably already guessed so from the headline, … udev was again in between us and the network packet flow !

Remote management kept black, and scheduling a reboot into the maintenance PXE & NFS recovery system revealed udev used it’s default persistent name glue to rename the new boards’s NIC with (obviously) different MAC from eth0 to eth1. Hallelujah!

A:

rm -f etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

and some very unnecessary down-time later an the system was back online running on the new server blade.

And this is even the second time this year the persistent naming got in my way - guess I’ll remove this persistent name gibberish from the default build.

Update: Turned out every new version of udev started to use another just new Linux system-call - as T2 uses dietlibc for the initramfs early-userspace we had to add support for a dozen new system-calls to dietlibc, just to update udev, again, sigh!

As I twittered the other day we are working like night and day and are making awesome progress on all fronts (yeah, there are quite some, more than you probably see right now). One of those bits just made an awesome sprint thru Apple’s iTunes App Store review process:

November 19, 2010 12:35 Pending Developer Release
November 19, 2010 06:33 In Review
November 13, 2010 09:34 Waiting For Review

Which is the fastest round trip time we got so far, yay!

If only the sales numbers would report more consistently, one day they are available at 1pm (CET) and the other days “iTunes” is apologizing for “reports being late” and we just get to see them after 8pm. Strange thing for such a huge server farm. Whatever. Maybe id’s Rage HD just sells too well, …