René Rebe

Not too many noticed, but after going all digital with the analog TV (now being broadcasted via DVB-T only for some time here in Germany), your loved UKW radio is next on the list. I personally hope we can stick to the schedule of 2012 to 1025 and use the frequencies more efficently.

Hint: Don’t invest in analog radio (e.g. alarm clock, car radio, etc.) anymore, :-)

So I update my main workstation running Linux to the latest, greatest X.org release. To my surprise the already not so fast xf86-video-nv driver stopped working entirely. I get no video signal either on the laptop’s internal LVDS panel, nor the external, DVI port. As quick, even slower, fallback at least xf86-video-vesa still worked. Just on the internal display, of course. At least something. However, my biggest surprise was still ahead: The keyboard layout kept constantly changing! Between English(US) and German(DE) !!!! How am I supposed to type, work, that way, heh? Even entering my login password became a challenge only cut’n paste could solve, …

How the heck can software regress that majorly. Ok, well. Random hacking might explain it. Too many cooks spoil the broth. But really. ‘nough is ‘nough. The X.org machinery worked better 10 years ago in the days of XFree86 on my then 120MHz Intel Pentium, 233MHz IDT Winchip 2(a or so). Certainly some S3 Virge3D, later Matrox graphic cards.

Update: Good old modeline stuff segfaulting, yuck:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
(gdb) bt
#0 0×0000000000000000 in ?? ()
#1 0×0000000000487813 in xf86CrtcSetModeTransform (crtc=0×7f3f80, mode=0×7f4068, rotation=1,
transform=0×3, x=0, y=0) at xf86Crtc.c:358
#2 0×0000000000487b65 in xf86SetDesiredModes (scrn=0×7f1de0) at xf86Crtc.c:2608
#3 0×00002b700de77b12 in AcquireDisplay (pScrn=0×7f1de0) at g80_driver.c:467
#4 0×00002b700de77eb3 in G80ScreenInit (scrnIndex=, pScreen=0×7f6f10,
argc=, argv=) at g80_driver.c:894
#5 0×000000000044df45 in AddScreen (pfnInit=0×2b700de77b80 , argc=1,
argv=0×7fff7bce36e8) at dispatch.c:4062
#6 0×0000000000478519 in InitOutput (pScreenInfo=0×7d3300, argc=1, argv=0×7fff7bce36e8)
at xf86Init.c:1043
#7 0×00000000004224e5 in main (argc=1, argv=0×7fff7bce36e8, envp=0×7fff7bce36f8) at main.c:204

Update 2: Not soo much good-old-modeline as guessed at first - more so newly added gamma fluff, …

X.org bug - so basically the whole X server setup is crashing in many combinations and cards since last November??? What a fun.

You asked for it, we deliver it. A streamlined and native, Intel Cocoa application for Mac OS X to convert your non-searchable PDFs or other images to searchable PDFs with the recognized text.

Simply dag’n drop your files on the OCRKit application icon, for example in the system dock – or open the file form within the application’s menu: File -> Open File.

Of course multiple OCR and UI languages are supported.

When it was announced, released, back in the other year, the Via Nano (x86) CPU had so much potential:

• 64bit (x86-64, AMD64, Intel EM64T, …)
• VT (Virtualization Technology) extension (ok, unfinished in the early silicon, said to be in the 3rd stepping)
• quite power efficient, yet reasonable performance

Too bad they somehow did not manage to get into the market. Very strange given that the Taiwan company (Via) is located exactly where most of the devices are actually manufactured (Taiwan, China). On the other hand even the way bigger AMD struggles to gain in the ultra-portable, mobile market.

I guess Intel is just too established, pressuring, buying the manufactures.

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-01/msg00260.html

Daily one encounters strange stuff on the web, or email. People try to get quick money by scamming you with pharmacy or other replicas (think Rolex) – from what I heard they often would not even deliver anything at all.

The other day I encountered a (Germany) site that wanted to verify the identify and age via an external service available at sofortident.de. I was cautious. A second look made me wonder even more: The first step requires to fill a form with name, address, age and the bank institute. I wondered what the heck they need the bank institute for. But the second form quickly enlightened me: Depending on the institute they then ask for your bank online account information, to (AS FAR AS I COULD FIND OUT) LOG INTO YOUR ONLINE BANK ACCOUNT and certainly parse out your birth date (or more) for verification.

To me this sounds like the worst thing to do on the internet: Telling some third party site your bank account information. Certainly they do not get the TAN (or other means of per-transaction authentication information). However, giving third parties any of my account data and let them mess with the system does not sound like the most sane idea to me either. And in the worst case some sloppy web coder accidentally left the input data in some log, or temporary file (or in some database intentionally). You’ll never know until it’s to late, the next scandal in your evening news broadcast.

Take care!

Now on one Mac I have a strange issue I never had before: Sporadically, e.g. after a fresh boot, name resolution does not work. While nearly every kind of application is effected, Safari, Mail, etc. even ping. To my surprise, though, dig(1) does reliable work in this kind of stuck system state. After some review it turned out that Mac OS X provides different DNS resolution services of the classic Unix / Posix services - that apparently can get out-of-sync from what the classic resolution configuration would use. To flush them:

10.4: lookupd -flushcache
10.5: dscacheutil -flushchache
10.6: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

For me, under Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6), killing the mDNSResponder did actually indeed help! I’ll have to keep an eye on the situation, if it’s getting too annoying I’ll have to try a clean re-install. Sigh!

The first Pine Trail Atoms, N450 and the like, are trickeling leaking out. And guess what, the performance meter did not move a bit: Just some randomly picked Geekbench results:

score 916
ASUSTeK Computer INC. 901 6 days ago
Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 994
Hewlett-Packard HP Mini 311-1000 5 days ago
Intel Atom N280 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 934
Acer AO532h 7 days ago
Intel Atom N450 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

I wished Moore’s law would still be in effect as the Atom performance is barely endurable. At least the new Atoms finally come with the AMD64 (x86_64, EM64T) enabled, and might be slightly more performant in 64bit mode due to more general purpose registers being around, potentially shuffling more data per instruction, clock cycle (e.g. rendering your browser content, text, graphics et al.).

To my greatest amusement this is about exactly the performance of the Transmeta Efficieon, announced in 2003, and started to ship in 2004:

score 956
Linux PC (Transmeta Efficeon(tm) Processor TM8000) 20 months ago
Transmeta Efficeon TM8000 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, threads)
Geekbench 2.0.15 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

I wished more companies would switch to more competitive solutions, such as the AMD Neo and Neo X2 series that comes with a way higher performance envelope for some time, now, …

score 1687
Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv2 Notebook PC 4 months ago
AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.3 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Update:

While at it, the Via Nano does not appear to be that much of a screamer in this regard, likewise:

score 1064
LENOVO 20021,2959 7 days ago
VIA Nano U2250 (1.6GHz Capable) @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Oh, and you are looking for decent reference score?

score 18996
Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8384 5 months ago
Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8384 @ 2.69 GHz (8 processors, 32 cores, threads)
Geekbench 2.1.2 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

score 9777
iMac11,1 4 hours ago
Apple Inc. Mac-F2268DAE
Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.80 GHz (1 processor, 4 cores, 8 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)

score 1872
Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)
PowerMac11,2
PowerPC G5 (970MP) @ 2.00 GHz (2 processors)
Geekbench 2.1.6 for Mac OS X PPC (32-bit)

Limited time, post Black Friday sales of ExactScan, enjoy!

If you are even just a bit interested in document scanning on the Mac it’s a chance to get a huge discount on the most professional capture application specifically made for Mac. An update to the Pro version with OCR, barcode recognition and batch file processing is just 29€.

Just needed to fixup some photos. Basically because I was sorting some 1600 pictures, from various cameras and people, mostly to bring them in-order and pick the best shots. Unfortunately some cameras even did not had the date set properly. Some where up to 2 year and something off (manufacturing date reset?), another just 4 months and something, yet one more about 2 and a half dayo, and the last was still running on daylight saving (winter time) and thus was one hour off, :-(

As a reminder for myself, for the next batch:

Adjust the timestamp:

exiv2 -Y 2 -O 3 -a -8:10 adjust *

Remove some random comment noise:

exiv2 -M”set Exif.Photo.UserComment charset=Ascii” *

Normalize the filenames:

exiv2 -r ‘%Y%m%d_%H%M%S_:basename:’ *