René Rebe

Those who know me, or other fellow readers, may have noticed: I am a little in this low-level computer science stuff, like OS kernel, assembly, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, and such, …

So my latest pet project, for the weekend education was resurrecting the T2 MIPS port. And as such I had some fun porting dietlibc to MIPS64.

And what a fun ride that was, looking forward to see how MIPS develops on the smart-things side of life!

Sony is suing computer scientist and programmer George Hotz for getting Linux to work on his personal PS3, again - performing an in-depth security analysis of the system on the way and uncovering a bunch of beginner programmer mistakes while at it.

If anyone should have sued anyone in this case, then it should have been the general public in a class action suit against Sony for taking away an formerly advertised “Other OS” feature, a function that allowed the use a real OS, such as Linux, on the “computer system” that is the PS3. A feature taken away by Sony on April the 1st 2010.

If anything, Sony should have silently taken the in-depth security analysis by Hotz and the fail0verflow group and hardened their next gen console, such as an PS4 or PSP2, with the lessons learned form all their sloppy mistakes, such as not using random data for the crypto, … [or for delivering rootkits with their Windows software, …]

I would be all for upgrading my fat PS3 that I intentionally did not update since May 2010 to still be able to boot to my Linux, and thereby save some Euro on my electricity bill due to the more efficient PS3 slim. However, Sony’s customer limiting feature removal does prevent my living room setup from going green, …

Due to Sony’s latest actions, I call to boycott Sony, until they stop suing their customers!

Instead there are plenty of other companies delivering aesthetic, feature rich, and often more affordable consumer electronic products for home entertainment and business computer equipment. Until Sony stops their latest actions against free speech, fair use and the internet I recommend supporting more customer oriented companies. Companies that do not sue their customers for doing whatever they want with the expensive equipment investment.

Udev did it again. Wasting my time during emergency maintenance at a remote datacenter server. The box was flunky and we eventually decided to exchange the hardware to cure sporadic reboots (may have been a faulty cooling fan, …). The question was:

Would the remote machine come back to remote managed life, or would it not?

In the past we usually had no problem with this, even tested it to be prepared for such disaster. But you probably already guessed so from the headline, … udev was again in between us and the network packet flow :-(!

Remote management kept black, and scheduling a reboot into the maintenance PXE & NFS recovery system revealed udev used it’s default persistent name glue to rename the new boards’s NIC with (obviously) different MAC from eth0 to eth1. Hallelujah!

A:

rm -f etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

and some very unnecessary down-time later an the system was back online running on the new server blade.

And this is even the second time this year the persistent naming got in my way - guess I’ll remove this persistent name gibberish from the default build.

Update: Turned out every new version of udev started to use another just new Linux system-call - as T2 uses dietlibc for the initramfs early-userspace we had to add support for a dozen new system-calls to dietlibc, just to update udev, again, sigh!

As I twittered the other day we are working like night and day and are making awesome progress on all fronts (yeah, there are quite some, more than you probably see right now). One of those bits just made an awesome sprint thru Apple’s iTunes App Store review process:

November 19, 2010 12:35 Pending Developer Release
November 19, 2010 06:33 In Review
November 13, 2010 09:34 Waiting For Review

Which is the fastest round trip time we got so far, yay!

If only the sales numbers would report more consistently, one day they are available at 1pm (CET) and the other days “iTunes” is apologizing for “reports being late” and we just get to see them after 8pm. Strange thing for such a huge server farm. Whatever. Maybe id’s Rage HD just sells too well, … :-)

Just today, 50% off sale of OCRKit at MacZot, enjoy!

OCRKit is the most accurate affordable OCR for Mac and converts any PDF or graphic file into searchable PDF, RTF, HTML and TXT.

For more information visit the product site - and it is a also available for iPhone and iPad.

So Google’s Andy Rubin said to PCMAG: …, the world doesn’t need another platform. Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons.

Hear hear. The world said exactly the same when Android came along, and we had plain Linux, Windows whatever, RIM, Symbian, Apple’s then still named iPhone OS, QNX, and even yet more.

And then your initial versions where just so badly mangled, and visually lacking Linux flavors that few wanted it. Took you quite some years to polish and JIT it to visibility and speed that is Android 2.2, …

(And Andy, you [at Google] are even working on this other, alternative Google Chrome OS platform yourselves!!!)

If we would have followed such “political” advices in the last century, we would still travel in cars pulled by horses - would still search the index in the library, not need Google at all.

So, let the innovation continue …

Hey, LLVM 2.8 is out, and of course T2 already got it!.

Enjoy!

Apple’s free (up to 50 per version) iTunes Connect App promotional codes unfortunately are currently for the US store, only. At first I thought this is no big deal, just switch to the US store (at the very bottom of every iTunes page: “Change Country”). However, it is not that easy, as iTunes requires to sign in with an US store count, as soon as you sign in with your non-US (read international) account it would not let you redeem the code.

Some web guides (mostly even from 2009) explain to simply setup an US account, however, iTunes wants an valid US credit card, or PayPal account. The “None” choose for payment method usually does not appear too easily (anymore).

However, the trick is: you have to be in the “App” store part of the US iTunes store, and best click to load a Free App. Only then the new account creation will show to you the “None” payment option.

Apple even has a knowledge base article about this :-) – I just found it by accident after I already had given up on this!

I for myself find this hilarious, why could they not just let anyone redeem their code in their country’s store? Especially as this way they get zillions of ghost US account, just used to redeem free iOS Apps for review, …. Maybe some database access problem with sloppy code, unless they want to artificially increase their US market share numbers – until they have more US accounts than citizens :-)

I already teased it the other day, but given Apple’s careful review I had no idea how long it would take to get accepted into iTunes.

While we are waiting for the extern review of the one more big thing, we continued to work on our remaining schedules and are proud to announce the release of a new version of OCRKit for Mac.

Again we addressed the #1 request from our users: saving to other, directly editable text files. We even added all the top 3 most wanted file formats: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Rich Text Format (RTF), as well as UTF-8 encoded plain text files.

Along the way we also made various improvements all over the application, including improved recognition, improved stability, updated user-interface translations, and miscellaneous other changes.

Just try out the no-stirng-attached 14-days trial of OCRKit. If you find anything we could do better just let us know! We listen to our user.