René Rebe

Hey, LLVM 2.8 is out, and of course T2 already got it!.

Enjoy!

Apple’s free (up to 50 per version) iTunes Connect App promotional codes unfortunately are currently for the US store, only. At first I thought this is no big deal, just switch to the US store (at the very bottom of every iTunes page: “Change Country”). However, it is not that easy, as iTunes requires to sign in with an US store count, as soon as you sign in with your non-US (read international) account it would not let you redeem the code.

Some web guides (mostly even from 2009) explain to simply setup an US account, however, iTunes wants an valid US credit card, or PayPal account. The “None” choose for payment method usually does not appear too easily (anymore).

However, the trick is: you have to be in the “App” store part of the US iTunes store, and best click to load a Free App. Only then the new account creation will show to you the “None” payment option.

Apple even has a knowledge base article about this – I just found it by accident after I already had given up on this!

I for myself find this hilarious, why could they not just let anyone redeem their code in their country’s store? Especially as this way they get zillions of ghost US account, just used to redeem free iOS Apps for review, …. Maybe some database access problem with sloppy code, unless they want to artificially increase their US market share numbers – until they have more US accounts than citizens

I already teased it the other day, but given Apple’s careful review I had no idea how long it would take to get accepted into iTunes.

While we are waiting for the extern review of the one more big thing, we continued to work on our remaining schedules and are proud to announce the release of a new version of OCRKit for Mac.

Again we addressed the #1 request from our users: saving to other, directly editable text files. We even added all the top 3 most wanted file formats: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Rich Text Format (RTF), as well as UTF-8 encoded plain text files.

Along the way we also made various improvements all over the application, including improved recognition, improved stability, updated user-interface translations, and miscellaneous other changes.

Just try out the no-stirng-attached 14-days trial of OCRKit. If you find anything we could do better just let us know! We listen to our user.

So I wanted to see the Ping (:-) and update to iTunes 10 (though that will probably not bring back syncing to my [secondary] Palm Pré, sigh). The iTunes built-in software update tells me “This version of iTunes (9.2.1) is the current version.” – hm, really? I really have to go to Apple’s website to pull it manually? How easy and streamlined is that? Ok, let’s check the system software update, and indeed “New software is available for your computer.”:

iTunes 10 comes with many new features and improvements, including:

• Introducing Ping. Use Ping to follow your favorite artists and friends or connect with the world’s most passionate music fans. Discover the music everyone is talking about, listening to, and downloading.

• Rent HD TV episodes for just 99¢ each. Watch them on your Mac or PC, on-the-go with iPhone or iPod touch, or in your living room with the all new Apple TV.

• Play your favorites on the all new iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, and Apple TV.

• Play music wirelessly with AirPlay on AirPlay-enabled speakers, home theater receivers, and iPod accessories.

• Explore many look-and-feel improvements throughout iTunes.

• Enjoy performance improvements which make iTunes faster and more responsive.

• Additional voice support with VoiceOver Kit for iPod.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

At least, unlike Safari, it does not require a reboot, just to quit Xcode, and iTunes itself (do I really have to be notified of the later, and quit it myself?), …

Update: Oh my god! What have they done to the window controls! This traffic lights look ugly! And so does the new icon, oh my, oh my, …

Update 2: In the meantime the iTunes App feed directly get’s the 10 update, too, … and it looks like I hit a nerve with the icon and window decoration criticism, … Personally I do not like the icon, because it simply does not match with any other icon in my dock, neither the Finder, Mail, Safari, Cal, Preview, Xcode, et al. Mostly because the others are not as round. Whatever. The window decoration, however, is really annoying. The fragmentation of Mac UI elements, where every App brings it’s own variants, really contradicts usability and users getting to a look and feel. This really is not what the Mac user experience once meant to be and reminds me on the Unix world, where each X11 environment brings it’s own toolkits, usability, and look’n feel, …

This overzealous review process and random rejections of Apple’s iTunes iOS App store has been discussed in all lengths all over the internet by now. It is just that recently we found enough time to finish the first App to be submitted into said App store.

You may wonder how long their review process does take, and so do I, … Until now it took them 7 full days to answer a basic question regarding a minor application meta info detail, and it has been a whole week the App is still pending for review on their side!

The sad thing is that by now we even have a version with the first post release polishing, but are afraid to reject and reload the binary, as according to the iTunes connect documents this would make the updated binary start at the very end of the review queue, again

Sigh^2!

Update: just after posting this the iTunes connect status flipped to “In Review”, keeping my fingers crossed!

Update 2: now “In Review” for 24h, fun, … (more…)

Recently Roger Mason sent in a patch for T2 adding a new compressor named xz, apparently a successor of lzma.

The google results where a bit brief on comparison between xz, lzma, and the well known bzip2 (and gzip).

So here goes a tiny test, I modified T2 to add support to compress the binary packages with xz, and got this results for a quick test (all compressors are run with -9 for best compression):

204800 lzma-4.32.7.tar
75248 lzma-4.32.7.tar.gz
74304 lzma-4.32.7.tar.bz2
62736 lzma-4.32.7.tar.xz
62655 lzma-4.32.7.tar.lzma

Bzip2 does not particularly shine, and xz neither, … Ok, let us try with something bigger, containing some more raw test, the apache package:

14090240 apache-2.2.16.tar
3098510 apache-2.2.16.tar.gz user 0m1.040s
2331497 apache-2.2.16.tar.bz2 user 0m2.124s
2069252 apache-2.2.16.tar.xz user 0m6.700s
2037338 apache-2.2.16.tar.lzma user 0m13.089s

Hm, xz still does not come out smallest, at least it is not as exorbitant slow as lzma, …

One last try for xz to show it’s potential, let’s use the millions of lines of code that form the current linux kernel:

412897280 linux-2.6.35.tar
88300782 linux-2.6.35.tar.gz user 0m35.118s
69305709 linux-2.6.35.tar.bz2 user 0m54.431s
57065123 linux-2.6.35.tar.lzma user 7m50.453s
56921708 linux-2.6.35.tar.xz user 5m44.266s

Finally! Some 140kB smaller, still slightly faster than lzma, but 10 times(!!!) slower than bzip2, sigh.

All run on an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5365 @ 3.00GHz, while apparently even the new tools (lzma, xz) only used one of it’s cores (by default).

Your milage may vary.

You need to add Linux system (router, server, etc.) directly onto an 802.1q VLAN trunk? Well, for one there is this old (read: deprecated) vlan, the new way is simply via iproute2’s ip:

ip link add link eth0 name eth0.1234 type vlan id 1234

As usual: just substitute the ethernet interface name, alias, and VLAN ID as needed

So after a whooping 10k change-sets in the SVN repository and two more years than we wanted, it is finally here: T2 8.0.

You may wonder what took us so long. Indeed so do we! It is mostly an issue of free time to work on T2. After all it is a monstrous effort, maintaining all the thousands of packages and taking care (of most) CPU architectures, … And then we even open it all up like no other – with the easiest to locate, use, review, develop and cut’n paste source tree (the most popular vendors notoriously kept their build scripts, ISO generating glue pretty covered, even their source trees are often not too easy to get access to, nor elaborative, …)!

While T2 became recently more and more successful in appliance and embedded space (heck all popular companies appear in our web log: Palm, Nokia, Motorola, … I assume they are longing for some inspiration), few companies keep in contact with us, nor contract or sponsor the project. So pushing the huge project that is T2 forward is a night-shift, weekend-fun, or 20% @work project for many of us (even including myself)!

Another contributing factor is upstream breakage. Half a decade ago most source packages just worked, more then less. These days my personal impression is that it is now rather the other way round: KDE, GNOME, heck even GCC and the C library or just the Linux kernel have more and more source incompatibility with each new release. Incompatibility or bugs that we have to tidy up before it even just builds all together.

It is therefore most irritating when a cooperate users without an support agreement occasionally even call me personally at work, and bug me about bugs in the release candidate, random build issues of non-primary (read not even secondary, GNOME or KDE) packages in the trunk, and when a new stable release will finally be out.

I personally consider this a pretty dark and troublesome side of the Open Source medal, a trend that I saw rather increasing over the last years (and mind you, I am with Linux and Open Source since back in the last millennium’s 90th, when most people did not even know how to spell Linux).

And when I kindly ask to invoice the time or about donations some even get insulting and start to talk about not being open and artificially keeping the trunk broken.

However, fact told: it is exactly the other way round: for minor part we also had no T2 stable release, because our SVN trunk just worked so freaking great! We used T2 trunk builds in-house, for our own projects, servers, and customer projects all the time!

Given the shear modularity and flexibility we even cherry picked single package updates, new packages, and the like into shipping customer products trees all the time, too.

When I continue to receive those unsolicited phone calls I’ll think about getting our company such an expensive pay per call number – and better a secretary with it, too

So you got some virtual machines for the your development, tests. Need to extract some files, do a backup, without messing with the other messy OS?

For one thing there is some qemu fuse code patch (or so), floating around. However, the simple, robust and straight forward way is to simply loop-back mount the partition on a RAW file at the given offset. You can determine the offset with your favorite partition editor, or disktype. Once you know the sector offset you simply multiply it with 512 (usual sector size) as the offset like so:

mount -o loop,offset=$((123456* 512)) img.raw /mnt/tmp