René Rebe

So disappointing that the vendors want to press in activation and always on into their next gen consoles like the Xbox one. Fast forward a decade and you can certainly not play your then old games anymore when the DRM servers are gone away. I personally find this less than acceptable. All the investment in games go to the next landfill then, … While you still can play your most favorite legacy NES, Sega, Playstation and even Amiga et al. games with your kids and such, …

Guess I can start a “Brave New World” category here for things like that :-/

Tumblr. A micro blogging site. Like Posterous (sold for $5m to $10m? to Twitter), Wordpress, and many others.

How should that business work in the future? We should Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and what not? Should there be any time left for private, real life? Not to mention actually getting work done?

And these “companies” are profitable how? Ah right. The only viable business model currently appears to be advertising. Very innovative. So we will all be living from selling advertising to each other then? Oh right, Twitter sells our tweets in blocks per million to analytics, … Thanks.

Somehow this does not look like an adorable brave new world to live in, … Does it?

And –by the way– this is not what the web was intended to be. The world wide web was meant to be exactly that: a world wide web. Not a point to point infrastructure for a few big content providers to push content down the pipe ala cable tv. In the earlier days people run their own website, their own weblog. Fault tolerant. Independent of big cooperations controlling your data.

Now we have massive single point of failures. When Facebook is down many people’s photos and communications are down. If a service closed (for bankruptcy, purchase, etc.) like Posterous, Google Reader, Google Video, Photovine, GeoCities, … often all your data is in jeopardy.

Back to the future.

At this day of age you have to wonder what those multi million dollar CEO’s like Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer are thinking. After the purchase of highly over-rated web services at an even higher, over the top price, Instragram for a whooping billion (1.000.000.000, or 10^9 just to make sure you get a “feeling” for the number of zeros) by Facebook; and now Tumblr for an even higher 1.1 billion US dollars (in cash nonetheless!1!) one has to wonder where that leads to. Unfortunately I have to side those seeing a second .com bubble waiting to burst.

One billion dollar … think about how long it takes to get that investment back, … from a photo sharing App and a micro blogging site, … We do not talk about a HIV or cancer cure, nor an solution for hunger or world energy, nor an artificial intelligence company, …

Keeping my fingers cross, …

I historically never really used much of Google’s web cloud services. Mostly only some tertiary @google email address for all the non-VIP account registrations, you know, forums and tradeshow registrations and such, …

But I try to avoid them more and more, I like to be customer, not advertising target, … :-/

Since the MacBook Air more and more Macs, Ultrabooks, and regular, old fashioned laptops (not to mention smartphones, …) come without user serviceable battery, storage, memory, etc. Most people argue: “It is not that bad, when do you ever change the battery? And changing memory and storage? Thats for geeks only anyway, …”

More real life examples why this really sucks:

Of course the biggest reason is the battery. If you gonna use your laptop a serious amount of time (2-3 years++) you definitely need to have the battery replaced at least once. Unless –of course– you just keep your laptop on a desk, always connected to a power source. Likewise, previously I always had another battery for my cellphone when traveling abroad. Now with the iPhone I often find myself in a situation where it emergency powers down approaching the end of longer travels. Yes, one could carry those external charging battery packs. But first of all they are usually bigger, can not instantly be exchanged into the phone, and last but not least: in that case I could carry the matching battery to swap in the first place.

But today came an even bigger point in case: I got one of those faulty Retina MacBooks that have this image retaining LG panels, ieek! After some months with this annoyance I finally wanted Apple to replace it. Turns out they will repair it instead of just swapping the machine, and this may take up to 2 weeks++ (here in Germany, at least, …). Now I have of course many personal files, source, images, documents, on it, … With those nice black polycarbonate MacBooks I could just remove the hard disk without opening the case at all. And leave all my source code and documents here at home while the machine is in service.

Now? I have to make sure I have a perfect, recent backup. Then zero out the flash storage, just to replay the backup when I finally get the machine back.

What a really major waste of time (and flash write cycles).

And it is of course a scandal that Apple sold such faulty display on such a high-end machine in the first place :-/ !1!

Brave new world :-/

These days we just released the first major update -2.0- of our OCRKit.

The version 2.0 greatly improved performance on latest Mac’s with many CPU cores (4, 8, …) When we started to work on OCRKit initially, dual-core CPUs where the state-of-the-art for desktop and portable laptops. Times changed, now 4 or even 8 (with Hyper Threading) cores are standard in Mac’s and so we refactored and tuned our OCRKit to make good use of all those cores. All this leads to improve recognition performances of x4, x8, or eve more times depending on the available core count, and input material (e.g. processing may be limited by the combination of decompression, re-compression in certain scenarios).

As promised we also further improved PDF compression, and thus now added a dedicated file format for Highly Compressed PDF. Making OCRKit an even more useful PDF re-compressor, too.

And best of all: To thank all the early bird customers of v1 the new OCRKit v2 is a free updates for all. Enjoy and spread the word!

OCRKit - Recognition revisited.

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 :-/

You have an archive of PDF files, e.g. scanned with the scanner driver standard software, that takes a lot of storage space?

Chances are OCRKit can reduce the file size quite a bit due it’s built-in color detection and advanced compression. Simply drag and drop the files on the OCRKit icon and it will do it’s work. If the files had no text from OCR before you even get searchable PDF along the way, … And usually the resulting files should be quite a bit smaller¹. Of course the same works with plain bitmap files, such as JPEG and TIFF.

The possibilities are endless.

¹) The size may increase for PDF files already stored as highly compressed PDF. We are working to further improve compression for future updates.

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, …

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???