René Rebe

The Chaos Computer Club apparently got their hands on the German’s federal trojan, 0zapftis! According to the preliminary analysis a piece of junk, full of security holes, …

For years the increasing trend for public monitoring, including CCTV, becomes questionable: beside common sense, many studies find no security improvement at all. Rather the contrary: due intended (but often not archived) cost savings, CCTV usually comes with reduced human resources for real people to be present, guard and inform citizens. Until someone notices a riot on a monitor the victim is usually nearly dead, already. In case the CCTV was not plain defect to start with, or the tapes (or discs) lost or already deleted, the images are usually too blurry to identify and search the wrongdoer.

It looks like the politicians have not learned the lessons from the former DDR, which is still known for their systematic monitoring of all their citizens. The western world will soon be on par with measures taken by the Stasi back in those days. An this despite all the memorial installations all over Berlin.

Oh, cool: one can hack, and restore old SDK (and GCC) support in Xcode 4!

And also install Xcode 3 on Mac OS X 10.7, Lion.

I have not yet checked how well that works, though.

Updated: hack-installed Xcode 3.2.6 appears to (mostly) work on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), e.g. Xcode itself and the Interface Builder do work, Dashcode, however, fails to lunch due to some missing Framework symbol (_dispatch_get_concurrent_queue expected in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib).

Update 2: As the link went dark, here is an archived full quote:

In looking through the isDevToolsCompatible function again, I noticed that it would return true if the COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL environment variable was set no matter what version Mac OS X you are running.

It’s now possible to greatly simplify the installation process:

• Mount the Xcode 3.2.6 DMG
• Open Terminal
• Enter the commands:

  export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1 open "/Volumes/Xcode and iOS SDK/Xcode and iOS SDK.mpkg"

The open command will launch the installer app and allow you to install Xcode

Since the beginning of this year I use the “Flinkster” car sharing of the German Railway company (Deutsche Bahn, DB Rent). So far this worked out pretty well, and the pilot run of all-electric vehicles in the region Berlin / Potsdam is a welcome bonus. If one happens to have to fuel, the cars come with a DKV petrol card, so one does not have to directly pay the gas, which is already accounted for by a per kilometer (think mile) charge.

So far this was not a problem, until yesterday. I did not even had to gas up. But as there was a gas station on the way, I thought it is nice for the next customer not to need to detour just to find a station in the middle of Berlin. Although it was a “big” Aral station I better asked if they take the DKV card, and was surprised to find they do not. Puzzled and thinking whether I ever refilled a Flinkster car at Aral, I continued my way, and there was a Shell station just on the next corner anyway. As I knew Shell worked earlier this year I just filled up the car, and was likewise surprised to find that this Shell station did not take DKV cards either, … Ieeek!

The employee told me every leaseholder of each individual station can decide whether they take those DKV cards, or not! And usually only the very big ones do, … While I find this pretty irritating, and annoying, the lesson learned is that one really has to check on each and every gas station if a DKV sign is in sight, and if in doubt: better ask. Thinking that the market dominating oligopolies accept the DKV or other petrol cards is unfortunately not enough, …

As I already fueled I had to pay myself, and and sent in the receipt to the car sharer. Hopefully paying back works out as smooth as they promise, …

We finally got another App for iOS. Actually I had this speedometer around with me for two years or so already for my own use. However, ad-hoc provisioned App certificates expire faster than you can watch after them, so often when I wanted to run it for my own use the provisioning profile was already expired. So I finally polished it for global distribution for all of you, and here are some free promo codes, enjoy:

LH3EKYM7JPXW
YLY7AW3PPJNE
HRAARNM7PMRX
WTNH3FF77E3N
YJLRA9JHLK7P
L49JW3NFHRX4
4JN3MWJMYE4E
7Y34J349PFLE
YMKYM9REKMR9
YKYT49RXKX9L
LM9YP4WEX6FR
NXL7MXNF7PPK
WHRJJXWTRXXK
93E63TFKPYF3
RE7H4APMLXH9
XTALKFX6PMN3

Just gave it a quick spin at a local store. quite nice so far, know and worked with QNX since the mid 1990s. But how the heck to you get out of an App, e.g. back to the home screen? Tried all kind of gestures, touched everywhere - nothing intuitiv worked :-(

Update: Aha - touch sensitive bezel: swipe on the border, …

BREAKING, WARNING:

This year the Filmpark Babelsberg hosted a Star Trek exhibition, that was advertised to run until the 31st of October. Since my last and only visit to the Babelsberg studios was in 1995 we decided to use the sunny yesterday to finally visit the exhibition. Unfortunately, and to our biggest disappointment we had to find the exhibition cancelled way before the official end.

And this despite we even looked up the opening hours on their website in the morning. I can absolute not understand how a major organization can fail to publish breaking developments such as canceling the show on their website, or local news(paper). Yet, they can even print a plate as shown above!

I can imagine they like to still get the some extra visitors that arrive just for the Star Trek exhibition to find the event cancelled and yet visit the park nonetheless, though, …

Left disappointed at the entrance, we decided to rather leave for an ice cream in the sun at the nearby lake Griebnitz.

So for some time now I’m searching for the perfect ultraportable (laptop). Tables do not really cut it, even got an iPad to test things, but productivity wise they are not too great to get things done. As I need to get things done, I require some kind of grown up notebook. All the latest Apple machines are not too pleasing either, either cold (on power-up) and too hot during use hard edged aluminum case, and glossy window glass mirror displays, … not to mention the ridiculously huge and space wasting MacBook Air screen bezel, …

The Lenovo X220 is not all that perfect either, same lagging Intel graphics (among others no OpenCL, …) and additionally I just noticed a setback in their display configuration:

The former X200/X201 spotted a 12.1″ 1280×800 display, and it’s ultra-portable cousin X200s/X201s even featured a: 12.1″ 1440×900 (PDF) - now with the “all new” X220 even the Premium HD display only features a mere: 12.5″ 1366×768 pixels, … (PDF)!

This is not only a lower dpi resolution (pixels per inch), it also cuts away enough vertical pixels to make it seriously less useful for professionals with remote screen sessions, and virtual machines. More than the last millennium’s 786 vertical pixels (remember when 1024×768 became standard?) really are a blessing when you want to have your operating-system’s menu bar, and window deco around your windows and generally avoid scrolling in your VNC, RTP, X11 session or virtual machines.

Doing some research on this topic I also spotted that the X220 IPS screen appear to have some ghosting issues, …

Dear manufactures: I do not need a professional computer (display) optimized for consuming cheap Hollywood (or Bollywood) movies. If the mankind is supposed to live on some more centuries, we certainly also have to get some work done, not just hang on to consume other’s stupid videos all days. And even for consuming a decent movie every now and then, I’d get myself a decent TV for that. And with 16:9 LCD TV’s I noticed most high quality movies, on BluRay and such, are not even 16:9, but more like 21:9, …

So, can we please get professional grade, matte, 16:10 display, with at least 800 vertical pixels back to get some serious work done?

So you got an “older” (pre 2011) MacBook Air with read-only USB recovery thumb-drive (stick)? Well, turns out it is only read-only by some firmware lock bit. Just run:

sm32Xtest.exe

On your favorite Windows (virtual-) machine to toggle the read-only bit. You now can use it for your personal data, or writing the Lion installer disk image to it to gain a Lion Recovery USB key, just as you like.

Yesterday, my father and I have been to the vintage car gathering (Oldtimer-Treffen) at the HefeHof, Hameln (Germany). Starting with nice sunshine I got some great shoots to share:

… more in the whole gallery

Some years ago Apple introduced a feature called “safe sleep”, which dumps the content of the system RAM into an on-disk file. If battery power falls below the threshold that can sustain the content in the system RAM while the Mac is asleep, OSX will use this fallback virtual memory state during the next power-up.

Dumping some GB (2, 4, 8, …?) to disk takes some time, though. If you do not move around your MacBook too often, you can choose to disable this feature for more instant sleep:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0

You can also remove the perviously used file to regain some GB of storage:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage