René Rebe

…but Sony indeed removed the OtherOS functionality with the v3.21 PS3 firmware update on April the 1st. So in order to use the primary function I purchased the 64bit PowerPC and Cell equipped small form factor workstation, I now have to carefully avoid to ever update the firmware again. Oh wait, there still is George Hotz to help out.

I’m crossing my fingers if that allows me to update to the more energy efficient PS3 Slim.

Certainly not the smartest move from Sony, to highly motivate some thousand, if not ten thousands, programmers -certainly some of the brightest minds, using it for super-computers in university labs- to regain access. Maybe even beyond the former restricted access, but now to the RSX, one more SPE, or Slim, as well.

Elsewhere I read others, like RedHat’s Fedora, SuSE’s OpenSUSE are dropping support for PowerPC – like Debian retired sparc32 in 2007.

I’d like to invite those, who are affected, to the T2 SDE Project, an unencumbered OpenSource project targeting all those architectures, without any plan to discarding support for any of those anytime soon.

We add, don’t take™.

I just read that Engadget now has an App for everything. Every crapgadget that is. From the iPhone over WebOS, to Blackberry and now Android.

I wonder why the heck one needs a custom App for a web-site, news-site that is? Do the mobile browser suck that much? Or is HTML no fun? However, they still got to maintain their plain, good, old HTML version (for now) anyway. With all that apps, that certainly is a maintenance nightmare^N.

Strange new world.

Just my own quick notes for SSL cert generation for use wit CAcert. Mostly just because too many instructions on the web run over many pages with thousands of words, … :-(

Generating the private key:

openssl genrsa -out key.key 2048

Generating the Certificate Signing Request, CSR:

openssl req -new -key key.key -subj /CN=example.com -out key.csr

The CSR is now provided to your signing authority, from which you get the resulting certificate, which you save to something like key.crt.

Some software require the key and the cert to resist in a single file, you can simple cat them together:

cat key.{key,crt} > key.pem

Just exported some RAW files (so regular Windows users can view them without the special Vendor’s RAW software):

for f in ../*CR2; do f2=”${f##*/}”; econvert -i “$f” -–gamma 1.1 -–contrast .25 -–colorspace rgb8 -–quality 93 -o “${f2/.CR2/.JPG}”; done

opensnoop didn’t really cut it, so here we go:

syscall::open*:entry
{
printf(”%s %s”, execname, copyinstr(arg0));
}
syscall::stat*:entry
{
printf(”%s %s”, execname, copyinstr(arg0));
}

The Apple Mac OS mouse cursor speed is one of those “love it, or hate it” domains. Personally I find the default speed already way too slow, always falling asleep on a fresh Mac install, or at the login window.

The max used to be barely endurable, so far, e.g. with the Mighty Mouse - until I got the Magic Mouse the other day. Directly compared the Magic Mouse moves way slower with at the same setting. No idea how Apple got this inconsistency in their own, few products. I also have no idea why mouse pointer movements can possibly be that slow. Not only the default, but also the maximal configuration value, …

Fortunately there is no limit behind the back, so you can tune it with:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -float 8

The 10.6.2 maximal UI value appears to be 3, …

Update: Some more review: The slowness aside, the Magic Mouse is pretty decent. The biggest improvement over the Mighty Mouse is the touch sensitive cover. The former microscopic scroll ball was prone to accumulate dirt inside and near to impossible to clean. (To really clean and remove dust and dirt from the ball axes one hat to cut(!!!) the glued mouse housing and disassemble it fully, …). So from this usability standpoint it’s a great improvement. The major downside is, that only a Bluetooth version is available. I personally find the weight of the two AA batteries too hefty - that was also already a problem with the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. For my excessive workdays I would prefer a lighter, cabled version to reduce the wrist stress, …

However, while the “magic” features do not appear to work (out of the box) under 10.5, the pointer tracking appears to be way faster – 10.6 might artificially slow the magic mouse tracking down, … ?!

Yep, I just downloaded the Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0 for Leopard and the Magic Mouse becomes as slow as under Snow Leopard, 10.6. Expands the Preferences, brings battery level indicator to the menu extra. Actually some 30MB download, unpacks to nearly 100MB. Just for a mouse driver! Well, the useless tutorial videos blow it up significantly, … Wished OS X would stay as lean and clean as it was in the beginning.

Update 2: Under normal, office-use conditions, the battery life with the shipped alkaline battery is just about a month. To safe the environment I always only use rechargeable batteries in any device after the first batch of shipped batteries died out. On an mid-quality (2400mHh NiMh Ansmann “Photo”) batteries I already had in the shelf it lasts way less, 1-2 weeks of busy office use :-( Guess I need to get a pair of higher capacity, quality, more expensive NiMH or even check out those new kinds of NiZN batteries. Hopefully those do not burn out the Magic Mouse :-)

Update 3: As the Ansmann 2400 mAh “Photo” NiMH batteries drained out so quickly, I got a pair of Ansmann 2850 mAh NiMH. However, I was surprised the Magic Mouse did not turn on at all!!! After a quick investigation it turned out that the surrounding plastic of the holder where the batterie +pole goes in is a little fat. The hole is simply too tiny for that pair of batteries!!! Who would have believed that, …

To: Apple Inc.: In the future please but a little more thinking into your basic, plastic structure. This is so unnecessary incompatible, most other equipment has just a rectangular area with a metal latch not posing exactly such problems, …

To compensate I placed a shim into the hole:

Attention: Due to the holes in the plastic foundation the shim can easily slip into the mouse, and you need to be pretty patient to shuffle it out again! My tip: By applying some magic -gravity-, holding the mouse up, into the air, with the bottom to the ground let’s the gravity magically support your shuffle game, …

To avoid exactly this in the future, I simply put adhesive foil (sticky tape) over the holes. In case you need a similar mod, maybe a good idea for you to do upfront to avoid slipping something into the mouse case in the first place.

Well, these days most news sites just publish the press releases of product announcements. Or re-tweet news from other sites. Personally I find really authentic, journalistic work such as the recent Tom’s Hardware video driver, 2D blitting vs. Windows 7 review particularly outstanding. Heck, they even wrote their own performance metric test utility for it!

With T2 r35579, I just added the required build system, configuration and glue to let the T2 SDE (System Development Environment) utilize clang and clang++ as the default C and C++ compiler. And I just successfully compiled the first packages on a x86-64/T2/Linux test build:

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3949 Feb 16 15:41 9-atop.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 21444 Feb 16 15:45 9-libelf.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 55854 Feb 16 15:45 9-fontconfig.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3827 Feb 16 15:45 9-renderproto.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 34883 Feb 16 15:46 9-libxext.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 12765 Feb 16 15:46 9-libice.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 22070 Feb 16 15:46 9-libsm.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 31354 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxt.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 15357 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxmu.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 15243 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxpm.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 12157 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxrender.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 13854 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxft.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 13782 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxkbfile.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 135931 Feb 16 16:00 9-openssh.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 344112 Feb 16 16:05 9-openssl.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 17024 Feb 16 16:06 9-screen.log

The resulting ssh and screen even worked as expected (so far, anyway).

(more…)

Your system keeps telling you a locale is not supported by your system’s C library? For example:

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

or:

firefox: (process:4376): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback ‘C’ locale.

or even while compiling software, such as:

setlocale(LC_CTYPE,”en_US.UTF-8″) failed!
make: *** [extra/locale/c8tables.h] Error 1

You can use “localedef” to add them to the cache from the verbose source definitions:

localedef -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

Update: Note to self:

iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 in.txt > out.txt