René Rebe

Sooo, with the latest AMD V105, Nile platform come the AMD Netbooks. 64bit, and such, nice, finally! If, well, if the manufactures would just learn that 1024×600 (or even worse x560) doesn’t really cut it, anymore. Never did. Heck, even the iPad got more pixels real estate! Without Intel’s silly Atom screen resolution restriction at least 1024×768 should be in order (while even that is so last millennium). There is so much screen bezel to cut down.

Personally, though, I find the Nokia Booket’s 1280×720 pretty usable abroad. Wouldn’t want to miss a single pixel of it. It’s Just it’s (Intel Z-series Atom) CPU could be a little more performant, …

Is that they apparently are often only not so well integrated facades, with poor error handling. When they work, they are nice and pretty, but woe some system-call returns an error, or backend program quits unexpectedly. Then those shiny facades become annoying, hard to control monsters. Two cases in point:

As I write this I’m trying to sync my father’s in law iBook files to a brand new MacBook. Thanks to the dismiss of Firewire I may do so by the means of the Migration Assistant via Ethernet. So far so good. Until you hit the “an system call returns an error” condition: Turned out the assistant just did not want to run thru yesterday. Hanging at 99%, 1 minute remaining the whole afternoon. One could not even cancel or quit it (the “woe something goes wrong and your are lost” condition). I’d thought I give it a second run over the night, maybe it completes. Of course it didn’t, … The iBook system log revealed, i/o error, certainly some sectors gone bad. How nice. It certainly could have skipped some unreadable files. As resolution I unpacked my Unix skills and rsync‘ed the whole user’s home directory to our office file server. Turned out it where just 2 files (images in the photo library) rsync spotted with i/o errors and skipped over gracefully, warned about at the end. Actually rsync was coded with some extra intelligence, to re-try files with errors a second time at the end! Btw, from the system log it looked that the Migration Assitent uses Racoon/IPsec internally to encrypt the transfer internally, over the air or on the wire. I somehow get the feeling the errors handling in Apple’s assistant is not so well tested after all.

Which brings me to the second example. Actually also a bad hard disk: My brother recently got a brand new Mac mini. He unpacked it and wanted to apply his Time Machine backup from the sold MacBook (Pro I think). He tried all, again and again, but it just did not want to run thru. So without his files restored he started to work on the machine, which inhabited a pretty odd behavior, even I had not seen before: every now and then, like every few minutes, or just once an hour the whole machine would lock solid, with just the colorful mouse cursor ball spinning around, no audio playback, nothing, for a could of minutes. And then, suddenly, as if nothing happened, it would continue to operate normally. My brother was already totally perplex and mad on the just new Mac mini when I came over the other day (it’s 300km, IIRC it was around CeBIT 2010). I’d also not know what to make of it. Running too hot? Noisy PCB wires resulting in stray, random memory content? Though the later would shure rather result in kernel panics. Anyway, my first loved click on the Console to browse the famous system log an there it was: i/o errors every now and then, … (on a just onboxed Mac mini!). The world’s most advanced operating system, that just got even better really could have pop’ed up some nice information dialog, or put some yellow exclamation mark on the hard disk icon, or the top menu, whatever, ….

Somehow I see a repeating pattern here: disk quality issues paired with notorious bad habit not to check for, and handle system call error conditions gracefully.

Finally. So it’s only about 1½ years until we “might” actually get our hands on them, …

ExactCODE just released another major ExactScan product family update: the new version 2.10 brings the teased major surpise Most notably is the new and novel TWAIN Bridge. It allows to utilize the many built-in drivers built into ExactScan from other, third-party TWAIN applications.

Another magical feature is the new flatbed de-skew. While previous versions of ExactScan already came with, what I would call, industry leading auto-crop and de-skew for scan with the built-in drivers from the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder), recent advancements in our in-house R&D (Research & Development) allowed us to add truely revolutionary de-skew even for flatbed scans! It allows to intelligently track objects on the flatbed glass and auto-crop and de-skew sufficient rectangular objects, such as: letters, receipts, post-cards, CD covers, coaster, etc.

Of course we also continue work as usual on the next maintenance update.

Read more: ExactScan homepage

So Android 2.2 adds JIT, Just-In-Time compilation of the Dalvik Java VM. This must be a joke. They tried to compete on the mobile space with that slow apps? Against other, native, frameworks. No wonder Android was that lagging. And it took them over 5 years to get to JIT? I’m feeling lucky I didn’t got an Android phone :-)

A long long time ago, 2+ years or so, I got the Apple Bluetooth Headset to accompany my iPhone. The Apple Bluetooth headset is pretty, astonishing, and awesome(!) tiny, slim and sexy. One could say of superb design –a design icon– that could live in a museum (like near the G4 Cube at the Museum Of Modern Art).

However: It features the worst audio quality I experienced, ever. Even worse than an IBM PC XT/AT PC speaker. Noisy, damped, and other block artifacts that sound like skipped, dropped Bluetooth packets. Absolutely uncomfortable to talk over. Some is certainly due to the monophonic and low bandwidth Bluetooth Headset Profile (HSP). However, other headsets sound at least somewhat better, and usually do not have that many gaps, due poor Bluetooth signal, dropped packets, whatever.

Battery life is also not that stellar, some some hours of talk time, and a day standby (or so). Which is certainly no surprise given the tiny nature of the device, and the therefore absolutely miniature battery somehow squeezed into it.

The biggest selling point certainly is the smooth iPhone integration, including the automatic pairing when connected to the dock connector, and battery level indication in the status bar, and recharge lock screen.

In retrospect, the Apple Bluetooth Headset is actually the gadget I least used, ever. Given the poor Bluetooth connection and battery life it is certainly no wonder even Apple stopped sales and took it off the market just months after it went on sale.

I wanted to try out Bluetooth stereo audio for some time, now, and just got myself my first bluetooth headset, ever (more on that in another post). As audiophile my first impressions where a little mixed, but eventually I figured out why they where worse under Apple’s Mac OS X, even compared to Apple’s iPhone 3G. Some excessive research turned out why (beside the crappy SBC codec mandatory in A2DP): OS X’s “BluetoothAudioAgent” may use forbidable low bit-rates for the forbidable bad audio codec by default! The straight-forward, cut’n past-able tweak is as simply as running this in your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 52

The max may be 64, however, 56 did resulted in the agent to connect to my headset, 52 worked. Please post a comment if a higher rate works for you, or you need an ever lower value (btw. the default appears to be as low as 2! …). Now with the tweaked setting a lot of the noise, hissing, and other compression artifacts experienced with A2DP under Mac OS X are gone! :-)

On the way I found out something likewise interesting: The menu extra’s (the little widgets in the top-right area of the menu) show alternate versions when clicked with the Option key hold down (unlike other, regular, option-click context menus for this easter egg a possibly enabled, real right click is not enough, you have to Option-click).

For example the WiFi one shows some internals: BSSID, PHY mode, channel, encryption, … the Audio one lets you switch your audio sources (!!!), the Battery one shows the condition, and the Bluetooth one display the version, and entries for the Bluetooth Explorer, Diagnostics Utility, and PacketLogger. Neat!

Which finally brings me to the UI way to do this tweak: Option-click the Bluetooth Menu Extra : Open Bluetooth Explorer : Utilities : Special Options… : Audio Options : For A2DP connections use these bitpool values: Minimum : 52

Personally I find the “Special Options…” particularly amusing.

By-the-way: performance metric on the side, on an underperforming Atom Z530 iTunes consumes 11% CPU (3% on a 2.2GHz MacBookPro) decoding an average MP3, and the BluetoothAudioAgent a little more than 16% (5% on a 2.2GHz MacBookPro) to encode the audio stream into the sub-standard SBC (Sub-Band-Codec). Not only would MP3 codec over A2DP support in more headsets and Bluetooth stacks save at least those 16% of the re-encoding, it would also save some of the 11% initial decoding, and improve audio quality by magnitudes!

Hardware vendors, please? Guess it’s time to bring my own advanced-codec Bluetooth headsets to the market :-)

I do not believe it, until I see it.

This would be way too strange to become real. I mean what would they gain? Not much actually, they can produce their own, optimized, ARM flavor already. The only benefit would be to take ARM away from competing companies. And in that case they would end up with a huge, unprofitable subsidy – unless they lay off most of the ARM staff.

However, if Apple really would cease ARM supplies to competitors it would certainly hurt the whole embedded industry – given that nearly any crapgadget, from your mobile phone, router, access-point to the NAS near you is powered by an ARM cpu.

Well, then, if that really turns out to be true, and Apple would indeed stop licensing ARM to others, there still are MIPS, SuperH, AVR32, heck, even PowerPC. Well, even x86 gets more energy efficient, (think post Atom silicon) … So the other companies still have options to continue their business.

So instead they could also directly burn their money. But still, I get to think that is an good Aprils fool – just 21 days off, …

PS: From my own experience AVR32 is pretty competitive on the performance per watt scale, if they just would scale their core IP to the GHz range (up from the current 140-200 MHz), …

My current displays are a little aging, and with Apple not coming out with updated Cinema Display, and disqualifying itself with those glossy ones I can not work with (too many reflections, need my eyes some more years, …) I got to think about what be the perfect display color. White (light, grey, silver, aluminum, etc.), or black. Some argue for some improved visual screen contrast with black border. Currently my very old ViewSonic display are kind of silver (plastic), and the likewise, but less, aging Apple Cinema Display is aluminum:

Just comment, what do you think?