René Rebe

For some time it always confused, annoyed me that pasted text on Mac OS X always kept the format. For example when text from the web or email is pasted vise versa or elsewhere, e.g. a text editor or word processor. After having some non-matching mess on the screen I usually used “Format -> Make Plain Text” (in Apple Mail) to get rid of all the arbitrary formating mix.

To my surprise I just found out yesterday (on some other news site - I forgot which, now in retrospect it was listed on some this week), it’s actually possible to insert without format: “Edit -> Paste and Match Style” is the innocent menu item that does it! Combined with the really hard, next to impossible to press key binding: “Option + Shift + Apple + v”!!! A combination where even as trained Emacs user my fingers get rather twisted, …

I never gave this specific menu item much attention, because it’s only available in some programs dealing with formated, attributed text and probably because for me the textual description (Paste and Match Style) did nor really ring a bell to actually stand for Without Format or Style.

Anyway, good to know it’s there. No wonder why some news and blog sites explained this week how to make it the default “Paste”, namely via the “Preference -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts” settings.

While we where looking for new interior yesterday, I accidentally spotted a new kind of glass from the company Bodum, which I had not seen yet: a kind of thermo glass with insulating double-walls. I’m not sure how much it will help to keep your coffee or tea warm, as I’m not sure if the double-wall is filled with air, or contains a vacuum and given it has no cover, and thus loosing quite some energy (heat) on the top. But nonetheless, it looks quite nice and might still help to keep your drink warm and protect your fingers.

They are said to be mouth-blown, and thus slightly differ in form and height (while I find the top border a little uneven on all of them I saw).

So finally I squeezed the time of adding Exif-based rotation into my free Sunday schedule and thus to our ExactImage library. In other words: The 13 GB of digital images in mypublic photo gallery are now usually more pleasant to look at.

Some images are still not quite right, though, simply because some cameras had no acceleration sensor, or images are out of sync due to previous manual rotation, … The biggest suprise was to find out that even the quite decent Sony T10 camera does not feature a gravity sensor (the next thing to go away thru eBay, …)!

Too many NetBooks, NAS solutions and the usual mass-ware: logic (main) boards, cases, power-supplies, keyboard, keyboard mouse, KVM, cables … pictures frames and bags.

Everyone got NetBooks, now. From Gigabyte to J&W, extending their “Minix” branding to a NetBook line:

The Asus Keyboard PC also was shown in action (on the CeBIT they only presented a case mockup behind glass).

You could also see how DMP intends to manually assembles their Education Book:

The German c’t (et al.) publisher Heise also had a booth. However, I strongly doubt the success of it, given that they only displayed the German flavor of their c’t magazine, and the two Taiwanese pupils could speak neither English nor German, nor where they able to comment what the booth is about (notice the “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON” cap of one of them!), …

The German IFA fair had a somewhat more useful stand: The personal was able to communicate in English, and on top of that they even know what they where presenting. Thumbs up:

Summary:

It was an exhausting week: Time-shift and jet-lag ^2, plus the additional workload from the intension to blog about the Computex and impression in near real-time for the first time. Which is an tremendous extra load of work, which I underestimated (maybe with some one touch iPhone app it would be more fun, if just the roaming for the data rate would allow for that).

The Computex felt less crowded. No matter what official numbers are being circulated, it’s should definitely been less visitors than the last year. The recession and H1N2 probably contributed most to this trend. Maybe additional the shared time-frame with the US E3 show made it worse. (Something I also did not quite understood when the German CeBIT and Embedded Expo where scheduled for the same week in this year [2009], … At least I had to decide which of the two German fairs to attend and went to the CeBIT, and many other probably had to pick one mutually exclusive [due time or budget], likewise.)

All in all pretty many interesting impressions and contacts. Although it was the third visit to the Computex in a row, this year we had our first trip to the countryside of Taiwan:

… more in the whole gallery.

Taking some pictures and making some notes definitely is challenging when you actually also have some other stuff on the agenda. So for day 1 I actually took less pictures than I hoped to do.

It appears we’ll finally see a family of Via Nano based devices on the market quite soon, as there where multiple shown in the Via/S3 showroom. Even an Lenovo Ideapad:

There also appears to be a storm of cheap e-ink e-book readers on the horizon. However, I wonder about the acceptance given the 0 media partnership and the Amazon-like partnership that brings the daily newspaper to their Kindle:

And in the Via showroom I also found a hot candidate for the “ugliest” (or at least outdated) case design award (actually the picture makes it look better than in real, where the simple steal case does not really shine - and is pretty heavy too [metallic prototype?]):

Oh, last but not least (I nearly forgot): Art Studios has a booth showcasting EFIX in action.

… more in the gallery.

PS: I know, I urgently need to fix my blog gallery plugin to auto-rotate based on the EXIF tags, … I guess some prominent frontpage posts are a god reason to finally do so :-)

The first pre-Computex is about to end, … a good time to spend the evening with some good old friends.

So we landed in Taipei, Taiwan for the Computex 2009 to begin tomorrow. I’ll try hard to post some live updates this time. Stay tuned.

… to gallery.

Today on a Germany news portal a news scrolled by that apparently 90% of the German Eclipse users are satisfied.

Maybe they have pretty low expectations, got used to it’s quirks, or otherwise not know any other IDE, as personally I find Eclipse the most annoying IDE ever. Even Vim and (X)Emacs manage to top it by far - that is not get in the way as Eclipse does all the time. Out of the blue my most annoying issues of Eclipse (for C++) are:

• builds all files by default, requires to explicitly remove files (e.g. intended for another platform, or tests or old reference files etc, …), this also can result in formerly perfectly fine projects to no longer build when other platforms got new files, …
• many popup dialogs asking insane questions (do you really want to quit, do you really want to xyz?) which all of the require some “do not show again, remember my choice” checkbox to be checked for a less annoying workflow
• at least for me in the C++ version it was not possible to change the build output directory (not even by manually tweaking the XML file), thus clobbering debug build files into my project’s debug sub-directory with actually source code utility files in there, …
• copying a project from one computer to another (VM) made me wonder how on earth to open it, turned out that deeply hidden at: Import (!!!) -> General -> Existing Project into Workspace
• in one case the generated include paths where also out of of sync from what was shown in the UI, I found no solution for that problem and reverting my project files in the end to fix this, …
• the latest stable version (Ganymede SR2) does not even start here (obscure Java errors, whatever), only the original (non service) release (Ganymede / 3.4.0) actually worked

All in all Eclipse is by far the worst IDE on my personal scale. Working with it feels like a fight against windmills. Even Microsoft’s Visual C++ Studio is more fun and less annoying to use. Of course currently Xcode tops all of them, …

We where recently flushing some stuff that was lingering in our storage on ebay. One of this was a Mukka Express Cappuccino / Espresso maker. As we wanted to make sure it is really clean when we send it out, we placed it into the dishwasher, which was a major mistake. It came out with the surface corroded, gray and matt, which was due to the maker being made out of aluminum, …

Aluminum with a thin anodized coat usually is not dishwasher safe and can also be permanently damaged! The degree of discoloration depends on the exact aluminum alloy, anodization as well as the alkaline cleaner and the length of the length of contact.

Some materials may be refreshed by additional cleaning with steel wool or an acid cleaner.

Your milage may vary.

As a note to myself and a hint for others: While the main site of Cyberport in Germany does not list in-store availability of the goods, their not so well known alternative web presence does, …