René Rebe

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.

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

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, …

I am constantly working on bringing up interesting topics and telling stories. August 2010 was the best month for this site, yet!

Thank you all for visiting!

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…)

Ok, it is the time. Some German people keep bugging me why the heck I do write in English, for example even when I am commenting German topics?

Well, this is due multiple reasons:

First of all I mostly discuss non-German subjects, such as computer science stuff, and other international topics. And I would rather not switch between English and German in every second post. It would also rather confuse readers.

Then, there are also so few people who speak German, according to Wikipedia approximately some 200 million of the nearly 7 billion people on earth. I could rather write in Spanish or Chinese and reach more people than writing in German, … after all I do not want to write a minority report.

Last but not least it is also an protest against the 23 official languages as used in the EU, into which all official papers have to be translated. A process which apparently cost over a billion Euro in 2005!

I find it particularly embarrassing that many politicians in the EU do not speak English, or at least not very well. Even many employees in the food court of the Q205 where I often go for lunch speak better English with tourists than this!!!

I’m all for a United States of Europe, with just English being the official language. This would not only help inter-cultural communication, but also free some billion worth of € for more useful projects, such as education, research and infrastructure development. All certainly more important than producing tons of translated paper every year.

Recently a radio broadcast of “Gossip’s Music for Men” made me curious to go to a nearby music store (yeah, I love those old fashioned CDs that you actually own, can listen to in a decade, not until some DRM server goes down), and it struck me: They must be watching too much “Knight Rider” in the 80’s – the base theme line of “Heavy Cross” and “Vertical rhythm” resembles the series’ soundtrack pretty much, … :-)

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 :-)

In 2006 I started this blog with a just 1.6GB of photos, in 2007 the photos stacked up to 4.6GB. Today, after sorting in our latest vacations, we got some 24GB of images on this site!!!

The rise of the mega-pixels, SLR, and RAW certainly play their role :-)

Among the latest greatest shoots I got moon craters:

And a last millenium Borgward Isabella:

Enjoy!

PS: Yes, I hacked the photo gallery to grok RAW imagery and in various other ways, nearly no code line was left unmodified, …

So you got to be some desperate soccer fan and want to watch the FIFA World Cup™ on your PC at work?

Well, bad news. the live streams are so busy, you barely get to log into one. Certainly see more time outs than tune in, …

You know what? It is (mostly) just because the telcos where so unbelievable lazy adopting IPv6 and with it proper multicasting.

This way the humble server farms need to send out a dedicated high bandwidth video data stream to each of your video clients. Unlucky you, I feel with you – though for all the bits going wasted on this!

Update: The H covers it, now, too.