René Rebe

For some time I was wondering how suspend time on my iPhone 5 can be so low. Having owned the very first gen iPhone, the 3G, the 4 and now the 5 the current suspend and talk time did not really feel like progress. Au contraire: It felt short :-/

Historically I never had much Apps. After all the initial iPhone was about doing mobile web right, it even did not allow third party Apps. Even when third party Apps where allowed, and appear I did not have many of them. After all I wanted mobile Web, email, and such, …

However over time some Apps accumulated, and of course nowadays people continuously ask to like some Facebook upload and the like. So I had this infamous Facebook.app opened every other day. What I did not realize was, how much hiccup it is doing in the background! After quitting it completely, via the taskbar the battery life actually went up from barely 24h standby and a little use over the day to nearly 48h standby with occasional regular office day use.

If that is not an improvement! Of course it is still fare away from regular, old fashioned mobile’s - but those also did less, had less fancy, smaller screens, etc. Most of all it shows how bad some mobile Apps are written!

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, …

Hahaha, that we are not lying on the floor laughing (lol)! Now that the KHTML fork known as WebKit is so successful and the developer world has finally broken into the former Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer monopoly Google has nothing better to do than fork it? What stupid nonsense waste of human time, developer resources and so on, … in this day of age where most economies in most countries struggle with bigger challenges than reimplementing competing HTML engines and features over and over again, … They want to make it so much better? Why does it feel so much smother and snappier on iOS than it does on Android (pinch zooming, page rendering, scrolling while loading, …)?

Here is an amazing translation to plain English.

I always was skeptical to data collecting and mostly only ad selling Google, but from now on I will be even more, and avoid all of them like the plague.

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.

Well, not that I was too interested about it, nor thinking about it, just accidentally stumbled over the MINI Connected system update: UPD01005.bin, a nice, plain tar archive:

SWIP_00000B97_003_005_005.xml
SWUP_00000B98_002_006_005.bin
SWUP_00000B98_003_005_005.bin
SWUP_00000B99_001_012_000.bin
SWUP_00000B99_003_005_004.bin

Which in turn are similar nice tar archives as well:

beschreibungstabelle.sgbm
Phone-2.6.5.tar
beschreibungstabelle.sgbm
Phone-3.5.5.tar
beschreibungstabelle.sgbm
MME-1.12.0.tar
post_deinst.scr
post_inst.scr
beschreibungstabelle.sgbm
MME-3.5.4.tar

Which -you can guess by now from the file extension- are nice tar archives again:

MME-1.12.0/
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/db/
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/db/mme_combined.sql
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/qnx/
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/qnx/etc/
MME-1.12.0/HBMedia/qnx/etc/post_starting_qdb.sh
MME-1.12.0/MANIFEST
MME-3.5.4/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/bin/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/bin/io-media-generic
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/cipher-aes.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-hbextdrive.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-i2c-ipod.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-ipod.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-msdrm10.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-pfs.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-ser-ipod.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/iofs-usb-ipod.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mme-imgprc-gf.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/aac_parser.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/audio_streamer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/audio_writer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/fildes_streamer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/media_streamer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/mp4_parser.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/mpega_parser.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/queue_filter.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/ren_raac_decoder.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/stream_reader.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/tmpfile_streamer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/wav_parser.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/wma9_decoder.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/wma9_parser.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/wms_control.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/wms_streamer.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/dll/mmedia/xing_mpega_decoder.so
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/libaoi.so.1
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/libmmedia.so.1
MME-3.5.4/HBMedia/qnx/lib/libmmfilter.so.1
MME-3.5.4/MANIFEST
Phone-2.6.5/
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libbssservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libdmlservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libdsiservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libmediaservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libphoneservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/HBPhone/exe/libpimservice.so
Phone-2.6.5/MANIFEST
Phone-3.5.5/
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libbssservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libdataservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libdmlservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libmediaservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libpdiparser.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libphoneservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libpimservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/HBPhone/exe/libsimservice.so
Phone-3.5.5/MANIFEST

Oh! Nice shared-obejct’s and Shell-scripts, for QNX, how handy! ;-)

Usually Mac OS X is a joy to use as things use to just work ™. However, sometimes -well- they just do not :-/ Recently I had a very mysterious issue in Moscow, Russia. Often WiFi would just work ™, however, sometimes that specific access point station would simply not show up at all in the network list. I kept resettings that AP point a couple of times and even started to reboot Mac OS X in misbelieve - what else should one do when that WiFi would not show up nor auto-connect again? More mysteriously that AP I kept resettings worked just fine with with plenty of iPhone’s and iPad’s and the like around. I started to really wonder what was wrong with my Mac when I noticed holding the option key to the boot chooser, that the recovery netbook WiFi selector would show that AP’s SSID network! Hah! I thought it must be some caching issue / plist corruption whatever that irritates the full Mac OS X network stack, but even a few more reboots and wiping of the network settings still made no difference. It was then when I noticed something strange was going on with the Wifi Country Code and thus allowed frequency channels (yeah, I got some inside knowledge, working on drivers and such).

Mar 18 19:53:25 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘TW’.
Mar 18 22:56:20 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘X3′.
Mar 18 22:56:21 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘TW’.
Mar 18 22:56:38 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘X3′.
Mar 18 22:56:40 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘TW’.
Mar 18 22:57:26 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘TW’.
Mar 18 22:59:11 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘TW’.
Mar 18 23:00:58 retina kernel[0]: en0: 802.11d country code set to ‘X3′.

TW? Taiwan? And what is X3? Rest of world or what??? Either does not sound particularly Russian, so where does it come from? Turns out in Mac OS X Lions 10.7 / 10.8 there is a command line WiFi scanner hidden in the Apple80211.framework:

$ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -s
SSID BSSID RSSI CHANNEL HT CC SECURITY (auth/unicast/group)
Xyz 01:23:45:67:89:a0 -83 13 Y TW WPA(PSK/TKIP/TKIP) WPA2(PSK/AES,TKIP/TKIP)
…

It reveled the three or so access points around all were broadcasting with a TW Country Code, obscure bits, nobody cares about, set in the Linux-based firmware once in Taiwan, probably a hardcoded C struct, and forgotten they are. And then all those forgotten bits and pieces lead to this user annoying behavior in the field. Thank you very much! :-/ Mac OS X picks up the mostly TW Country Code bits in the air, … and then concludes channel 13 is not valid, and, … your precious network never makes it into the higher levels of the network stack, nor the UI to choose from.

Given that we can not (too easily and legally) hack into those offending access points and alter the Country Code, how can we fix that? Turns out the access point had a nice sticker with username and password on the bottom side, which allowed me to login and notice it’s channel was set to “Auto”. This explains why sometimes the network worked for me, when the AP choose another channel than 13, … which allowed my MacBook to connect in the “TW” region.

A simply change from “Auto” to a channels with in the range that was not used around by other routers, and I had a WiFi connection happily ever after, …

I hope this helps, and educates not to broadcast random, and wrong settings thru the air!

What sets ExactScan apart from competition? Well, for one it certainly are the now about 400 built-in drivers for various professional document scanners, that due the lack of a vendor’s driver for Mac OS X would otherwise not function on an Apple Macintosh at all.

On the other hand it is also our high internal standards for code quality that translates to higher quality images and general scanner behavior over other scan applications, including Apple’s ImageCapture or the vendor’s own Windows software.

Case in point are our new drivers for Canon DR-series scanners. From our past experience with other scanners and drivers we knew some areas where we could improve quality and scan speed; and we continued to collaborate directly with Canon as well as carefully analyzing the bits and bytes of the Windows driver’s USB I/O. The result of this sheer endless work? The next update will drive Canon DR-series scanners slightly faster; and the auto-crop and de-skew as well as image quality will be even better as well!

Made in Berlin; Germany.

Some days ago the first game created by ExactCODE went online.

Numery is a logic puzzle, a brain game. At first colorful tiles with numbers are shown for some seconds, then hidden, and the player then ask to combine them to a mathematical target result. By memorizing the location and values of the numbers, the player needs not only to remember them but also to sum it up to match the target result. Once you choose a number cell from your memory, you can not give it up. You can either stop and match the result or choose the next number by opening another cell. With each new level the dimension and thus the complexity increases from an initial four to up to 36 numbers, and the higher target result makes it more complicated, too.

(more…)