René Rebe

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

It only took 2 years for the contract to expire and endless calls to T-Mobile Germany. Unfortunately the IMEI exchange from the exclusive phone resellers to Apple is a little lazy, works by exchanging spreadsheets or even good old facsimile transmissions and does not appear to be directly database record exchange oriented.

So I had to dictate (wait what, should they not have that in their system to start with?) IMEI to a call center agent, and they pass it along to their Apple contact department, … And after the promised “unlocked in a week” had passed, nothing was unlocked and I called again: to find out that T-Mobile had not even passed it to Apple, yet. Sigh! That second person promissed “it will be activated by Friday night”, that was last Wednesday, … Of course nothing was unlocked by Friday, nor Saturday, or Sunday, … not even this morning, … but now it is!

Got some strange “session timed out” while taking the screenshot:

In case it helps someone the hyperlink pointed to:

https://albert.apple.com/WebObjects/ALUnbrick.woa/wa/default

…

Unfortunately calling T-Mobile is a rather annoying affair. They let you hanging in a to-be-payed-by-minute line and drop you out after some ten minutes, so I had to call them very often (like three or more times, which is over half an hour!) to actually get thru, …

Did not even imagine to find the CPU spec of Apple’s hobby on their website, but they indeed list it: Apple A4!

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 :-)

Normally the performance gain going from 32bit (i386, aka i686 etc.) code to 64bit amd64 (aka x86-64, EM64T, or the likely to mismatch x64, …) is not soo huge. However, unlike classic RISC CPUs -which usually loose performance when comparing their 32 and 64-bit- code due to bigger instructions and thus data bus saturation. For amd64 AMD did a great job defining the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) in a way that 32 and 64bit operations can be freely mixed. Thus normal programs that do not benefit from 64bit operations remain compact, while single instruction can freely utilize 64bit by adding a REX prefix (similar to the 0×66 prefix introduced with the 386). So normally data moving loops benefit from going 64bit, e.g. multi media codecs, encryption and such.

Doing some performance analysis on a new AMD board I spotted an rather extreme case: openssl’s RSA 2048 bit encryption shows an over 300% boost while going 64bit:

From:

rsa 2048 bits 0.007128s 0.000212s 140.3 4722.2

To:

rsa 2048 bits 0.002380s 0.000068s 420.1 14716.7

Yes, that the same machine (AMD Phenom II), exactly same software stack and such, a whooping 312% increase!!!

So we got some new PC server mainboard, and the latest greatest AMD Phenom II X6 CPU. Of course the BIOS would not recognized the CPU, just list an “unknown” CPU, and let it run at a bare 800MHz. Apparently no real OS wanted to boot in protected mode either. So I thought it’d be a good idea to update the BIOS to the latest, greatest. However, turned out that wasn’t so much of an good idea: after the update the board would not boot up anymore. No sign of the BIOS at all, …

The board vendor, however, was so nice to handle our support inquiry nicely and sent out a new 8-pin, serial EEPROM last Friday, and it even arrived the following day, that is Saturday!

So with the new EPROM in the board it actually booted again (puh!), and re-reading the BIOS Release Notes I found that it indicates running the DOS flash EXE with some special arguments, that I obviously did not include when I just run it intuitively the fist time:

PFUDOS.EXE FILENAME /p /b /c

How nice. If I would author some BIOS flash utility, I would rather write it in a way that a run with default, that is without fancy parameters would produce a reasonable, good outcome, …

Anyway, another note: After booting I removed the second, new, good ROM and injected the old, bad flash, and then used above run with fancy parameters to flash it again, and voila: I finally had an BIOS ROM with the latest version that worked :-)!

And yet another note: Flashing from an bootable USB stick with FreeDOS worked just fine.