René Rebe

Just yesterday I accidently “discovered” that some Mac OS X applications allow to select text in a rectangular area, as opposed within the regular text flow, with whole lines between the start and end. Simply holding down the Option-key (fork with alt) before selecting trigges it. This appears to work in at least Xcode, Terminal, Console, Textedit and Preview (but not e.g. Safari, nor Mail). Actually it works in most selectable NSTextField instances.

Update: Looks like a new feature of Leopard, 10.5. Poking around some more it’s even possible to extend text selection while holding down the Apple-key, which then adds the inverse selection of the area. That is: unselected parts are selected, and those already selected previous and inside the new area become unselected.

Interesting that they implemented such an “complex” selection theme (that is quite some lines of code to get right).

So finally I squeezed the time of adding Exif-based rotation into my free Sunday schedule and thus to our ExactImage library. In other words: The 13 GB of digital images in mypublic photo gallery are now usually more pleasant to look at.

Some images are still not quite right, though, simply because some cameras had no acceleration sensor, or images are out of sync due to previous manual rotation, … The biggest suprise was to find out that even the quite decent Sony T10 camera does not feature a gravity sensor (the next thing to go away thru eBay, …)!

Today on a Germany news portal a news scrolled by that apparently 90% of the German Eclipse users are satisfied.

Maybe they have pretty low expectations, got used to it’s quirks, or otherwise not know any other IDE, as personally I find Eclipse the most annoying IDE ever. Even Vim and (X)Emacs manage to top it by far - that is not get in the way as Eclipse does all the time. Out of the blue my most annoying issues of Eclipse (for C++) are:

• builds all files by default, requires to explicitly remove files (e.g. intended for another platform, or tests or old reference files etc, …), this also can result in formerly perfectly fine projects to no longer build when other platforms got new files, …
• many popup dialogs asking insane questions (do you really want to quit, do you really want to xyz?) which all of the require some “do not show again, remember my choice” checkbox to be checked for a less annoying workflow
• at least for me in the C++ version it was not possible to change the build output directory (not even by manually tweaking the XML file), thus clobbering debug build files into my project’s debug sub-directory with actually source code utility files in there, …
• copying a project from one computer to another (VM) made me wonder how on earth to open it, turned out that deeply hidden at: Import (!!!) -> General -> Existing Project into Workspace
• in one case the generated include paths where also out of of sync from what was shown in the UI, I found no solution for that problem and reverting my project files in the end to fix this, …
• the latest stable version (Ganymede SR2) does not even start here (obscure Java errors, whatever), only the original (non service) release (Ganymede / 3.4.0) actually worked

All in all Eclipse is by far the worst IDE on my personal scale. Working with it feels like a fight against windmills. Even Microsoft’s Visual C++ Studio is more fun and less annoying to use. Of course currently Xcode tops all of them, …

Recently I started to notice some traffic storms from strange folks that run wget against our sites and on-the-way grabbing whole Subversion repositories, including tags and branches on the way. Needless to say that is a pure waste of our bandwidth and server CPU cycles. And as it even motivates me to drop a note in my blog, this is not a single occurrence and makes me wonder what the heck the people want to do with the randomly grabbed data and why they can not use proper clients (e.g. the svn client) to checkout open source bits, … If this trend continues I guess I really have to think adding some smarter traffic shaping and quality of service then just dropping offending IP addresses:

iptables -I firewall –src x.x.x.x -j DROP

Flashrom 0.9 is out, and already in T2. Flashrom is a universal, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. - you name it - BIOS flash utility. Now that might have saved me most of the other weekend where I had to update the BIOS of a Sony Vaio laptop, …

A First Look at the Larrabee and C++ Larrabee Prototype Library just arrived via the Intel software dispatch in my INBOX. Enjoy!

Update: Now with improved PCX support!

I updated my ExactImage-based QuickLook plugin to also support non-standard, Apple iPhone optimized PNGs (with “CgBI” chunks). A great help for iPhone developers who want to get a better overview of their bundle content, enjoy: 1.5 update with PNG support. As usual: If you have another image format you like to preview on the Mac just let me know!

So I wasted most of my weekend messing with old PC hardware. Initially I just wanted to check some KVM/VT detail and needed a test system. I was under the impression some lingering Sony VGN-SZ laptop would fulfill the need. However, it turned out, that Sony disabled VT in the BIOS, at that time, locking the MSR bits. While some NVRAM tweaking should enable it, this procedure required some newer BIOS to be flashed for a determinstic, known offset to tweak.

First of all the Sony BIOS flash thing required Windows, which obviously was not installed on the machine. So I grabbed the XP copy shipped with the device and some hours later I had to find out that the Sony BIOS flash tool requires a bunch of Sony “support-DLLs” (to determine the machine model). So some more disc jockey-ing later, I finally had to find out that the latest Sony BIOS updates even require Vista!

All my time spent on just getting XP on the machine where thus wasted - and obviously I had no Vista around. I grabed the latest Windows 7 public beta and thanks god some hours later the Sony BIOS flasher was not so picky to complain about Windows 7 vs. Vista, but that the BIOS update would not be suitable for this machine!

It was only some more hours later that I accidentally found on Google, that the US version of the BIOS (PHBSYS-01041232-US.EXE) would not flash on this particular VGN-SZ2M, but the Japense (or Asia or whatever) version (PHBSYS-01041232-UN.EXE) would! I really wonder what the PC manufacturers think creating such a madness. Specifically with 40++ model variants you can go hunt the matching BISO for (not to mention the initial insane move to disable a hardware feature, such as Intel VT).

But now with the BIOS update finally done the biggest suprise is still to come: The T2300 CPU does not even feature VT!!! And this, while I even checked on the Intel website that it should. Turned out the cpuid identifier T2300 is no real T2300 but a T2300E. Yes, and extra E, indicating no VT. And I really wonder how such a huge, market leading company, as Intel can afford shipping CPUs not correctly identifying uniquely thru the cpuid, …

Update: Now with iPhone-optimized PNG support!

I updated my ExactImage-based QuickLook plugin to also support PCX image, enjoy: 1.2 update with PCX support.

As usual: If you have another image format you like to preview on the Mac just let me know and I’ll see how quickly I can add support for it!

So I had to test some tiny detail of Intel VT-d variation and needed a normal PC. The only non-Apple hardware to spare in the office was some aging Sony Vaio VGN-SZ laptop which unfortunately comes with VT disabled in the BIOS. In the attempt to re-enable the VT support by some NVRAM poking I had the need to have some form of DOS for the BIOS utility and obviously I had none at hand.

So I grabbed the 1.0 release of FreeDOS and just used Qemu to install it onto a USB stick passed to the VM as hard disk:

qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fdbasecd.iso -boot d

After some minutes and a couple of Enters I had a bootable USB stick with FreeDOS for this arcane flashbacks of dancing with the high techology that is the PC BIOS.