René Rebe

Joke from the IDF: Intel to open Intel Atom (Moblin) App store. Any they really expect apps to be submitted and sold in quantities over there?

According to my this mornings newspaper, even Vodafone is about to open their own App store.

I really wonder how so many companies (Google, RIM, Palm, Nokia, …) manage to copy Apple that badly. Do they really expect to gain more than a single digit percentage of that market and sell thru this kind of channel?

Companies: If you have not noticed, Apple’s App store is successful only because they have a single, compatible platform that even sold well.

Where are the Intel Atom Moblin devices? And where is the single, compatible and coherent platform Nokia and Vodafone want to target?

I wonder where all those zillion app stores will be in a year. My bet: All lonely, forgotten, buried under dust like an old ghost town – until the power is finally switched of at their dedicated servers, …

Side anecdote: I recently even tried out some Intel Moblin Beta: On non-Intel graphic chips it run in software rendering mode slower than an i386 run Windows 3.11, and on three different Intel GMA systems I had around the shipped Intel X.org driver crashed and froze the whole machine. Funnily at that time no GMA500 driver was supplied either, so that Sony Vaio P run even in the slowest software blitting mode I ever saw!

That where golden times when we developers had to target Windows, Linux and Mac. Nowadays it’s one app store per device and vendor :-(

For the last three years I enjoyed an 20″ Apple Cinema Display. Unfortunately, however, TUIfly (or better, maybe, some airport staff) lost it on the way back from the last trade-show.

Spending some good hour in the nearby Cyberport store I quickly found out: TN panels (such as in the LED backlit Lenovo Thinkvision L2440X) are definitely no joy. On top of the “just 6 bit” color range, with time or area dithering comes the extreme angle dependent color dependency.

Looks like I’ll definitely have to invest in a IPS or PVA display. Devices from NEC and, surprisingly, HP looked quite good.

Update: You may track lost baggage at this site: worldtracer.aero.

Update 2: Looks like my lost display was indeed found, crossing fingers it’s still intact and in the box :-)

Update 3: It did arrive! Looks like it travelled over Tel Aviv!!!

Update 4: From my time as student I still have two ViewSonic VP912s display, too. I invested one into my company, while the other still lives on my home desk. However, I mostly use a notebook on the living room / kitchen table when at home. It happen that I just got to sit on said ViewSonic TN display at home, once again, and I must say it ain’t too bad! For example way better than the approximately 5 years newer Lenovo ThinkVision L2440X display I checked out in the store, as mentioned above. For example simple text (editor, web page) scrolling was tearing badly on the Lenovo display, while it is pretty ok on the old ViewSonic model.

Amazing how much the individual panel technologies varies, especially how much worser it can be even after five years (of R&D one should think).

and AT&T apparently thinks so, too – uses 1st generation iPhone in 3GS MMS press announcement, … If just the Aluminum would not hinder reception that much.

Cost’ them nothing, just shuffled a few more units. Well, given some super-computers build out of massive amounts of PS3’s probably quite some units. Though maybe the unit shuffling was the problem: sold below the manufacturing costs to people not buying games to subsidize it, …

Maybe they just wanted to boost the sales numbers initially to look better against the Xbox 360 and Wii, which where sold ahead of the PS3 lunch. Or it was a special deal with IBM to promote the Cell SPUs by getting them into the hands of developers cheaply?

For some time I’m now looking for a usable N.tB..k (ok, Intel brought the former trademark from Psion, I could probably start using the word unmangled …). Some kind of ultra-portable notebook I can take with me, everywhere. My expectations are not really high (e.g. I do not need excessive Phenom (Core 2 Duo, or i7) power on the road. An Via Nano certainly has enough processing power for some minimal Linux to do some text editing and photo upload. However, there are some basic thing I need for the device to be functional:

• Intel VT, AMD SVM, to start some virtual machine when a customer calls
• x86-64 (AMD64, Intel EM64T), gives a little extra performance due to more registers for the register constraint x86 legacy, most of my “Pro” software certainly depends on it, today, …
• digital video out (HDMI, Display Port, whatever) to connect a display when I’m at some desk to do some more work abroad (customer on-site, presentation, meeting, speech, etc.)
• some integrated 3G (UMTS) modem would also be nice to save to carry some additional plastic tube
• ok, it should not look like the cheapest “crap-ware”

To bad most of the “all too similar” standard NetBooks already fail to just meet the first 3 points above, no VT extension, no 64bit and a digital video out mostly missing anyway.

Anyway, I looked at some of the latest arrivals in the sore and collected some data: Toshiba NB200, Samsung N310, Packard Bell DOTM and Asus EeePC 1003HAG.

I find it most irritating that most cheap PC manufactures do not have any unique selling point whatsoever or add higher end features, and merrily compete with exactly same SPECs in a price race to the bottom.

Manufactures: Please, may you please adapt some more decent silicon like the AMD Neo or Via Nano (64bit and VT/SVM aware!) in some products? And manufacture products that suck-less(tm)? Some less thick plastic bezel around the screen (less wasted screen real estate and space in the bag) would also be a welcome design goal. And while we’re at it: less than 600 vertical pixel really don’t cut it anymore. Not in this millennium, ever. Thanks.

PS: Maybe I should just get an “some years old” 12″ Apple PowerBook from eBay … :-(

With a car rented recently (Mercedes B) for some tour thru Germany we wondered why we run out of gasoline so quickly. It was just then (after some 600 km (some good 372 miles) that we spotted the automatic transmission was set to “Sport” mode (read as: waste some extra gasoline) instead of the “little more saving” “Comfort” mode.

So the tiny reminder and tip of the week: Better double check some basic settings of your rented car – especially the Comfort mode can save you some extra bucks on a longer trip given recent gasoline prices, …

some-mac user$ svn ci some-file.M
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system(’vi svn-commit.tmp’) returned 256

I hate it, how I hate this. It just happened two times in a row, unbelievable! How the heck could Apple’s engineers think one can work with such kind of bugs in the system and/or tools?!?

For a not too distant festivity we needed some selected wines, and I asked others about their favorites. I got a nice precise list from my brother - I thought its worth sharing here:

Origin:
+ France (except Bordeaux, especially: Burgund, Rhonetal, Elsass, Provence, Sud-Ouest), Spain (especialyl Rioja, La Mancha…), Chile
- Italy, Bordeaux, Germany

Grape variety;

+Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir!, Tempranillo, Syrah (Shiraz)
- Merlot, Dornfelder (Amselfelder)

(+ recommended, - not so recommended)

While I personally found a Zinfandel (Primitivo) out of California quite recommendable.

I heard Jacques’ Wein-Depot is supposedly a nice place to taste and purchase decently priced wine in many cities in Germany.

So, iTunes 8.2.1 comes with:

iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices

such as not “accidently” syncing to a Palm’s Pre. Palm’s former Apple engineers might have implemented the Apple file “upload” protocol in all fine details (as can be derived from open source iPod access libraries anyway), but there is one simple show-stopper that Apple probably added in this update that Palm can not circumvent easily:

if (idVendor != 0×05ac) return false; // (Apple Inc.)

Palm can not just change their USB Vendor (and/or Product ID), …

For the Bodum glass article I was bitten by the iPhone’s photo application’s “email photo” functionally, which scales the photo by 50%, from 1600×1200 to 800×600. Of course far from ideal when you want to mail it to your server account for publishing.

Just in this minute I spotted a nice tip on the Daring Fireball, how to get the full-res version into your email: cut’n paste it! (Note: cut’n paste is a new feature of the iPhone OS, available since OS 3.0 and up, …) Now, that cut and paste is finally available on the iPhone, probably something one better get used to :-)