René Rebe

Уважаемые Клиенты German Medical Care,

1. НОВОСТИ GerMedCare
Время идет, осень совсем скоро сменит зима. В преддверии холодов, смены года и предстоящих праздников хочется
не только начать подводить первые итоги работы, но и напомнить, что так как конец года обычно является активным
временем, когда многие из Вас пользуются возможностью долгих праздников, чтобы не только хорошо отдохнуть,
но и потратить часть пред и после новогоднего отпуска на себя и на заботу о своем здоровье, все это нужно планировать заранее.
Начиная с 10 декабря консульства будут перегружены, срок оформления визы может быть увеличен до нескольких недель.
С 23 декабря консульства будут закрыты на Рождество, а вот с 3 января 2014 года в Германии работа уже продолжится в обычном режиме.

Что касается первых итогов, положительной тенденцией является тот факт, что около половины наших новых клиентов
приходят к нам по рекомендации, что накладывает еще больше ответственности на нашу работу и говорит о Вашем доверии.
Радует, что большинство наших клиентов - это пациенты, которые успешно прошли лечение и регулярно подтверждают,
что здоровы или пациенты, которые проходят регулярный годовой осмотр в превентивных целях, а также пациенты,
которым необходимо то или иное высококвалифицированное лечение.

Мы так же прислушались к Вашим пожеланиям и чаще предлагаем Вам на выбор лечение в исключительно частных
клиниках Германии, помимо государственных. Преимущество исключительно частной клиники - это в первую очередь
время,которое доктор тратит на пациента. В частной клинике у доктора больше времени для детального разговора,
осмотра и ведения лечения, а также возможность привлечь по интересующему Вас вопросу специалиста как
широкого профиля, так и специалиста узкоспециализирующегося именно по Вашему вопросу.

Мы всегда работаем с выбранными докторами с хорошей репутацией и с клиниками, которые предоставляют
самый высокий уровень профессиональных медицинских услуг. Что касается ценовой политики - диагностика в среднем
стоит одинаково везде, стоимость операции может меняться в зависимости от уровня доктора, чем более
узкоспециализируется доктор, тем его услуги дороже, и от уровня комфорта в клинике.
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For me it is no surprise that most vendors stopped adopting the “RT” flavor of Windows. The main reason people want the old, and buggy pile of junk that is the decade old legacy Windows code are exactly that: legacy Windows apps. Be that office, industrial, games, what not, …

With Windows “RT” you do not get anything of that. Worse: Developers can not even re-compile their existing apps for the “RT” desktop. I guess there would be plenty of smaller, and also bigger Windows companies who would do so with pleasure. But no: Microsoft just would not allow for that. What a pity. And a fail trying to copy Apple even up to the software lock in. For Apple it certainly only works because they had awesome looking and a pleasure to use software on (r)evolutionary hardware. And after a head-start they had enough customers locked into their eco system. But people do not love Microsoft like that. Au contraire: after decades of crashing DOS and Windows, and hindering competitors due their monopoly powers people do not want to be locked into a Microsoft product or eco system yet again. So for Microsoft to gain traction it would have made much more sense to allow side-installs like on classic Windows boxes just as well.

Oh, and then there is the SecureBoot (or what it is called for Windows on ARM). So developers, researchers, students and enthusiast can not even buy the hardware from the overfilled and non-selling Surface RT stock to put Linux or any other of their own OS flavor on it, … :-/

Usually I’m not in this “unboxing” and “hands-on” business. But as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 arrived early, this morning, here go some public service unboxing shoots:

In generally a quite good first impression, especially as I’m getting so tired of the scratchy and hard edged aluminum cases in Apple’s PowerBooks MacBooks, iPhones and iPads, …

Some first notes: Given the two kickstand positions, I wonder how the 1st, old snap-in position ever could be useful, … For me the 1st position is not even a good match on an office desk, … And why (the heck) is the BIOS/EFI (hold volume [rocker] up button while powering up to get into the EFI BIOS) startup background so ugly red when SecureBoot is disabled (to install Linux and such)?!?!

Update: If the original Surface Pro battery life was short, the v2 definitely is well an improvement for that. 7h battery life for normal office, developer tasks are quite possible. Your milage may vary. However as non-Windows users I’m a bit irritated that still some old fashioned dialogs are not resolution aware, and thus scaled-up blurry. For example System Control ones, like detailed network settings, e.g. static IP config and such, … One should think a huge company like Microsoft gets all such system-wide details covered over the years, …

Update 2: The machine feels pretty solid, in ways quite outstanding engineering, … I just can not get so warm with the Touch and Type covers. The Touch Cover does not really register every key touch, leading to re-typing some words again, and the Type cover too does not feel too solid, with the fabric edges looking like they may peel off as known from the first try already, …

Update 3: Looks like the Surface Pros will only boot thru EFI, that is no legacy BIOS compatibility “layer” in the EFI firmware (BIOS). So you need a “bleeding-edge” Linux distributions and can not boot older versions, nor Windows XP or such, …

I tweeted it already the other week:

now I admit something “embarrassing”: I might get myself an #Surface Pro 2, …

— René Rebe (@renebln) September 25, 2013

The number one reason for that is plain simple: Productivity for content creation. While I had most iPhones and iPads (like every other generation) I use my iPhone most of the time, but the iPad is mostly just sitting on my desk or bag waiting for the next software test. For occasional reading in public transport it feels too big and heavy, I use the iPhone for that. And for real office productivity the iPad just does not work for more than basic email response. Of course my situation as computer scientist is a bit special. I simply can not do (any serious) programming directly on the iPad. So during the commute, airplane taxi, or on a passenger seat I can not do much with the iPad except consuming something (like news, or a book) answering an email or so. I can not work on an algorithm, fix some bug, or things like that.

Of course with the Surface RT it is even worse: you get the system restrictions with even less apps. The only improvement over that is the Surface Pro. I think it is the biggest mistake from Microsoft to limit the RT’s classic, desktop apps like that. Without that arbitrary restriction (again copying Apple) even Windows RT could be more popular, e.g. for classic, legacy business workflows. Basically the classic Windows customers, maybe the only marked Microsoft Windows is still strong.

While I already considered the first Surface Pro I mostly did not get it due the abysmal battery life. Two to three hours of “normal, real use” (in contrast to the just on, dimmed display, not touched setup used for this longer, official rating) is just not good these days. Of course I knew the Intel “Haswell” CPU Core generation was just around the corner, so I was awaiting this update.

Now the Surface Pro 2 is announced and it delivers just that: A 75% improvement in battery life they promise (and [graphic] performance) due Intel Haswell generation CPUs. Along with some minor improvements left and right (display, touch cover backlit keyboard, dock and such, …). Remaining drawbacks? 40% more weight (900g vs. 652g) and thickness, and probably about half the iPad’s battery life, …

Of course the biggest hurdle still is the Windows OS. As engineer, and spending more than a decade in the open source, Linux side of the world I do not have the highest words for the mess that is Win32 API, kernel and UI design with decade old DOS and 16 bit legacy cruft built-in. Of course the latest NSA scandal does not contribute to the faith in their security and possible crypto or real backdoors to the system.

However, it should be possible (at least there are reports it works with the 1st gen Surface Pro) to also run Linux on it (after disabling SecureBoot that is). This is also something not (easily) possible with the iPad (or the Surface RT). And it should (theoretically) be possible to even run Mac OS X on it, …

So the new, Surface Pro 2 should theoretically vastly boost my productivity while on-the-go: More than answering emails or plain “media” consumption: Aside from real emails, with different attachments, spread sheets, PDF invoices, spec sheets, etc. to real work: code, design. And this likewise applies to others, too. Think photographers, graphic designers working with some Gimp-like program (Photoshop et al.), real office spreadsheets and documents, presentations, etc. Also a plus, and a must: An usable USB port - where I can plug in some USB device to work with, such as a document scanner. And when you come to work you can plug in your desktop class display, keyboard and mouse and work on.

Yes, there are apps for many things on iOS. But let’s face it: aside some awesome games, and social apps most things are toys. Next to no real (that is more than basic features) word, spread, photo or graphic editing. And given the extreme iOS (and Windows RT) restrictions next to no computer science programming. Aside graphical calculators, BASIC, and a Lua shell, or two.

I know, I do not like Windows, the Win32 Api is disgusting, it is full of security issues, the old apps are not touch optimized, … But at the end of the day being able to write some code and send out some more complex email (with more than one kind of attachment) and with a real keyboard, is what counts to get work done.

There could be a point, even in the near future, where productivity on iOS gets better: If Apple continues to push it’s own 64-bit ARM CPUs to the MacBook Air (as they already announced is as “desktop class” performance), there could be an quad-core A8 MacBook Air in one or two years. If iOS and Mac OS X further merge there could be similar, full-blown graphical, office, and science apps for that.

However, to be really useful for the growing class of programmers: Some of the restrictions need to be lifted: be able to generate and run code (for programming, think Xcode), allow to fork of new processes (for anything, from helper programs in scientific apps, to scripting, Xcode, compiler, converter, anything beyond simple apps. And of course the USB port should be fully usable for custom drivers and apps, …

Some of the iOS restrictions are really silly, and what starts to drive some people away from it :-/

I updated my ExactImage-based QuickLook plugin to also support camera RAW images.

Just some week ago I got myself a Sony Nex 5 camera, and used to shooting RAW images for the superior post-production quality with my former, aging Canon EOS 350 I had to notice Mac OS X (10.7) does not support the Sony Nex RAW images by default. There is a camera raw update, but it apparently only installs with iPhoto or Aperture installed, which I do not plan to purchase.

So I finally updated the dcraw support in ExactImage and rebuild the QuickLook plugin with the new support for RAW files, enjoy: 1.8 update w/ camera raw support

If you have another image format you like to preview on the Mac just let me know! Especially if you have camera RAW images that you would like to preview, I likely have to add the file UTI for other files to load, too.

For some excessive amount of time -as I do not find the last half decade MacBooks perfect- I am looking for a PC laptop. The Samsung Series 9 came pretty close, just that the max 4GB RAM of the 13″ is a little little for a software engineer, …

Yesterday Sammy announced the Haswell based, latest Intel Core generation refresh, and I unfortunately have to say: What the heck?

They managed to ruin the machine for the most part: Gorilla glass touch panel!?!?! Thanks, but no thanks! Most of all I do not want to look in a mirror the whole day. This just hurts the eyes, seriously. Not to mention office lights or sunlight. Thank you very much. Of course the touch panel can mostly be ignored. I mean: Who would want to raise the arm the whole day, and even smearing the screen with natural skin oil??? Definitely not me. I could ignore the touch panel - if there would not be this glossy gorilla glass cover, ieek. And then the screen resolution. Yeah, Retina sounds awesome in product advertisements. But fact is, only Mac OS X scales the UI reliably. Such a display is no fun on Windows, nor Linux. All non-top notch Windows Apps will have scaling issues. Sometimes even the top notch ones, … :-/ And obviously all the added mega pixels just burn vital battery life away, …

So then let’s come to the ATIV Book 9 Lite (why continue to use an established, simple brand name like Series 9, when you can ruin it with something like ATIV -what the heck?- Book, yeah, well, ok …). Finally a nice and light AMD Ultrathin. Awesome! We need more of that!! I would get it immediately, if not, … 1366×768 resolution seriously? Come on, after 3200×1800 at the premium, you want to sell us last millennium 1366×768? How crazy is that? One excessive high-res, the other below the bare minimum. And of course only 4GB of RAM, … when you cripple it, make sure you cripple it for real, … The brave new world of soldered on the board, no user swaps SO-DIMM, …

What are those product managers thinking? Really??

PS: And btw. classic: Other companies (like Apple) would have pretty product pages available on their website at launch time, … Samsung? Nada. Not listed yet (on the US, or German) website; at the time of writing. Yeah, why list the just announced flagship product so people can take a look, and order, …?

These days you really wonder, …

For some time now we had some simple email registration for the free trial of some of our software products. We are aware that some users do not like it, however, we are a small company and also need to think about some trial follow up reminder, questionnaire, etc.

Of course most annoying for us are invalid email addresses, causing bouncing error messages, blocking our email server, support accounts or a combination of those, … So after some week of too many delivery errors we ended up adding some basic input validation. However due to the complex nature of HTML, Javascript, and XML-RPC based AJAX or variants thereof we only, quickly did so in the JavaScript. Just some simply straight forward checking. You certainly get the idea. For normal customers that worked great.

Guess what happened next? Java spam bots eventually found the form and started feeding the usual v1a6ra, and other related medical, drug and other spam thru the form. Of course they where usually sending some random email address for their spam, resulting in the same, and in the end even higher amount of email delivery errors than we wanted to prevent initially.

After too long time the pain became too big. Yesterday we finally moved the input validation into our server backend as it should be. Never trust the client, always validate 100% on your final server side. Of course one shoudl do so from the beginning. Just that Web 2.0, with HTML, Javascript and all the surrounding “technologies” are such a complex, error prone, and not so easy to debug mess, that this is unfortunately a rather complex affair, …

Let’s see what annoying trickery comes next to that simple form, … ;-)

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.