René Rebe

Some days ago the first game created by ExactCODE went online.

Numery is a logic puzzle, a brain game. At first colorful tiles with numbers are shown for some seconds, then hidden, and the player then ask to combine them to a mathematical target result. By memorizing the location and values of the numbers, the player needs not only to remember them but also to sum it up to match the target result. Once you choose a number cell from your memory, you can not give it up. You can either stop and match the result or choose the next number by opening another cell. With each new level the dimension and thus the complexity increases from an initial four to up to 36 numbers, and the higher target result makes it more complicated, too.

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The last years I posted some Apple App Store review times. As the review times now got significantly longer I wanted to drop a note where we stand now:

August 15, 2012 06:31 Upload Received
August 15, 2012 06:33 Waiting For Review
August 30, 2012 10:14 In Review
August 30, 2012 10:20 Apple Pending Developer Release

So welcome two full whole weeks review time for your precious App updates :-/

Looks like I (at least these days) have a little more time for the famous tip of the week series: It is long known (at least should be), that proper use of manual transmission (in cars) can greatly influence fuel economy and reduce the gasoline consume. This is archived by not driving out each gear, and instead upshift “quickly” into the next higher gear.

At least in Germany this is even standard teaching during driving school. Using drive-now car-sharing BMW Mini Cooper in Berlin for some time now I was wondering about the higher than expected gasoline consume of up to 10 liter per 100 km in central Berlin’s stop-and-go traffic. With some careful monitoring of the momentarily and average petrol consume in the digital display of the dashboard I figured out, that I upshifted too quickly for the Mini. Turned out that not up-shifting too early and rather going a little over the 2000 rpm mark brought down the consume from ~10 liter to something below 7 liter per 100km, …

In case you want to do something for the environment (and your wallet - or in reverse order) some conscious driving, monitoring and adaption can easily save some 30%, or more, …

Sorry, those of you with automatic (torque converter) transmissions are not in the fuel saving game anyway, …

Your milage may vary.

In recent times I had to do some more international calls, even including international calls to mobiles, than usual. Of course international calls are now the nearly only thing charged extra on bigger, e.g. office, plans. And they can be quite expensive, …

With some kind tip I was pointed to some Vodafone Germany Callya International pre-paid offer, that unexpectedly offers international calls, even including mobiles, into many countries as low in the single digit cent range per minute, …

So it really pays off to do some research, especially in esoteric situations, …

Being abroad over the May-day public holidays (in most of Europe), I had to compare some numerics without a spreadsheet at hand (traveling without my main MacBook, …). App Store hipsters would probably be lost, now, but knowing some good old Unix Kong Fu there was help around:

Cut’n paste the values (from an PDF, …) into raw txt files, and setup equations (with sed substitutions) to feed bc:

paste out in | sed ’s/\.//; s,[^0-9], / ,; s/^/100 * /’ | bc > res

And for the prettiness one can also paste together the table columns:

paste in out res

From the famous tip of the week series: The other day I was wondering what CLI tool I used years ago to mass convert / fixup encoding of text (e.g. program, source code) files and just could not find it, e.g. with googling, … As I just remembered, somehow, accidentally (maybe due to some T2 Linux maintenance work, …) I quickly wanted to share that note: recode. An older piece of software, apparently not updated since 2001, … (!?!?) Easy to use, just like this:

recode latin1..UTF-8 file.txt
recode UTF-16..UTF-8 …
recode cyrillic..utf-8 …

I guess you get the idea, …

In general I’m already not such a fan of those German public propaganda broadcast tax called GEZ. So every household and company has to pay this tax, and nowadays not only if you have a radio or TV (which some have not), but since some time also if you just have an “internet-ready” device. Like Sun SPARC station (a nice 25MHz, right?) or smartphone, … And as I happen to run a company I even have to effectively pay twice: once private, and once for the company. Don’t really know why, one should assume if one has an pay-per-view subscription one can only watch at one place, not simultaneously at home and work, …

Additionally, I’m also no fan of that massive money wasting, the public stations are practicing: from expensive sport event licenses, over expensive superstars at “Wetten Dass…?” & co, …

If it would be for me this would be called pay-tv anyway, and all paying subscribers would get a CI card and sorted out, everything is.

Whatever, I gave up to think about unlogical bureaucracy thinking a long time ago,

But when you already pay GEZ fees twice (!!!) you would assume you would be able to watch evening news on your “internet ready” device in the office when you (again) worked all Sunday (to pay all this taxes :-)?

Well, think again, … more than a third, if not nearly half of today’s Tagesschau I could enjoy this static images:

Did I mention I seriously want my double-payed GEZ money back? Opt-out of all this nonsense?? And certainly not pay even more, twice, after this upcoming GEZ fee reform???

Four SAMSUNG SpinPoint T166 series, HD501LJ and more than 4 years in a 8-core server, here are the raw error rates:

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0×000f 100 100 051 2
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 253 253 051 0
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0×000e 100 100 000 479105152
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 253 253 010 0
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032 253 253 000 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0×0032 253 253 000 0

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0×000f 100 100 051 6
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 253 253 051 0
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0×000e 100 100 000 633936205
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 253 253 010 0
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032 253 253 000 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0×0032 253 253 000 0

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0×000f 100 100 051 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 253 253 051 0
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0×000e 100 100 000 494533244
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 253 253 010 0
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032 253 253 000 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0×0032 253 253 000 0

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0×000f 097 097 051 54549
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 253 253 051 0
13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate 0×000e 100 100 000 844820954
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 098 098 010 20
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032 098 098 000 20
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0×0032 253 253 000 4194449

Fail?

Update: Running “dd if=/dev/zero, …” on the fourth actually bumped the reallocated sector count even further:

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0×0033 098 098 010 21
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0×0032 098 098 000 21

Selectively overwriting defect sectors?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 seek=Y

Where X is the storage device, and Y the LBA sector address, …

Update 2: Some manual sector write, to reallocate loops later:

# 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 30% 34103 663074301
# 2 Extended offline Completed: read failure 30% 34101 663073326
# 3 Extended offline Completed: read failure 30% 34084 664843895
# 4 Extended offline Completed: read failure 30% 34080 561288851
# 6 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 34007 409641893
# 7 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 32227 791207080
# 8 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 32227 791207080

I should just throw away this piece of s**t, right?

In late-2010 I already wrote in depth about Apple’s iTunes Connect App review times. As one of our latest Mac App updates kinda rushed a little faster thru the review, I wanted to give a brief update about the current state:

December 14, 2011 08:52 Prepare for Upload
December 14, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Upload
December 15, 2011 08:49 Upload Received
December 15, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Review
December 19, 2011 12:36 In Review
December 19, 2011 14:19 Pending Developer Release
December 20, 2011 00:16 Processing for App Store

While I do not know if that is just due lucky Christmas, at least it looks like the review times are now less than a week.

Update: And another such sprint:

December 18, 2011 06:15 Prepare for Upload
December 18, 2011 06:16 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 07:57 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:05 Invalid Binary
December 18, 2011 08:20 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 08:30 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:34 Waiting For Review
December 20, 2011 17:52 In Review
December 20, 2011 18:16 Pending Developer Release
December 21, 2011 01:04 Processing for App Store

Update 2: late-2012 report

Last saturday we went out to the thai / indonesian restaurant Goodtime in Berlin, Chauseestraße. While I have been there before -about a year ago- the last time was more of a short visit compared to the lengthier dinner this time.

My first impression was more positive than I remembered (I had some kind of canteen atmosphere in mind), the restaurant comes with some simple, white and stylish design chairs and painted walls. The menu includes the range of ingredients you would expect from an Asian restaurant: fish, chicken, duck, served with various vegetables, rice et al. And here comes the main point that pushed me to write this article: be warned that their kind of spicy is very spice. They really mean it. And this while I like and am really used to spice food. So unless you want to burn some flu away, and taste something beside hot, I suggest you order specifically without all the chillies.

All in all it was ok, however, for the price I would expect better, prompter service, as well as a more pleasant atmosphere: as the tables are placed fairly close to each other, the waitress’ often move them around to match group sizes, and when people come and go, including the waiters, they may often hit your chair, or table :-/

You can get similar quality food in Berlin Mitte, for nearly half the price at the Otito - only their tables and walls are not painted as nice, however the atmosphere is somewhat less hectic, …