René Rebe

You asked for it, we deliver it. A streamlined and native, Intel Cocoa application for Mac OS X to convert your non-searchable PDFs or other images to searchable PDFs with the recognized text.

Simply dag’n drop your files on the OCRKit application icon, for example in the system dock – or open the file form within the application’s menu: File -> Open File.

Of course multiple OCR and UI languages are supported.

When it was announced, released, back in the other year, the Via Nano (x86) CPU had so much potential:

• 64bit (x86-64, AMD64, Intel EM64T, …)
• VT (Virtualization Technology) extension (ok, unfinished in the early silicon, said to be in the 3rd stepping)
• quite power efficient, yet reasonable performance

Too bad they somehow did not manage to get into the market. Very strange given that the Taiwan company (Via) is located exactly where most of the devices are actually manufactured (Taiwan, China). On the other hand even the way bigger AMD struggles to gain in the ultra-portable, mobile market.

I guess Intel is just too established, pressuring, buying the manufactures.

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-01/msg00260.html

So the Lenovo X100e is announced, compact, kind of ThinkPad design inheritance. And best of all: with a more powerful AMD silicon inside (AMD Neo and related ATi graphics) and matte 11″ HD screen! Too bad it misses an digital video out (HDMI or so instead of the so last millennium analog VGA). Looking forward to the dual-core AMD Neo (X2?) option mentioned by an Lenovo spokesperson in some hands-on video, …

Update: Of course the absence of digital video out (HDMI et al.) is a show-stopper. It also looks a little cheapish in real-life, battery life is also said to be disappointingly low (3-4h on a charge). I’d definitely wait at least for an AMD X2 variant to appear. Of course fixing the other imperfections would be welcome, too.

Daily one encounters strange stuff on the web, or email. People try to get quick money by scamming you with pharmacy or other replicas (think Rolex) – from what I heard they often would not even deliver anything at all.

The other day I encountered a (Germany) site that wanted to verify the identify and age via an external service available at sofortident.de. I was cautious. A second look made me wonder even more: The first step requires to fill a form with name, address, age and the bank institute. I wondered what the heck they need the bank institute for. But the second form quickly enlightened me: Depending on the institute they then ask for your bank online account information, to (AS FAR AS I COULD FIND OUT) LOG INTO YOUR ONLINE BANK ACCOUNT and certainly parse out your birth date (or more) for verification.

To me this sounds like the worst thing to do on the internet: Telling some third party site your bank account information. Certainly they do not get the TAN (or other means of per-transaction authentication information). However, giving third parties any of my account data and let them mess with the system does not sound like the most sane idea to me either. And in the worst case some sloppy web coder accidentally left the input data in some log, or temporary file (or in some database intentionally). You’ll never know until it’s to late, the next scandal in your evening news broadcast.

Take care!

Fortunately I only get in touch with SQL (yeah, this not so Structured Query Language) every other week. Unfortunately until then the pesky syntax details always bite and force me to look them up on the internet, or a nearby old-fashined bookshelf. So here goes the most basic 1×1:

CREATE TABLE table_name (”column1″ “data_type1″, “column2″ “data_type2″, …);

INSERT INTO table_name (”column1″, “column2″, …) VALUES (”value1″, “value2″, …);

UPDATE table_name SET column1=value, column2=value2, … WHERE some_column=some_value …;

SELECT column_name(s or e.g. *) FROM table_name WHERE some_column=some_value …;

DELETE FROM table_name WHERE some_column=some_value;

Update:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table_name WHERE some_column = some_value;

Update 2:

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD COLUMN some_column …;

Now on one Mac I have a strange issue I never had before: Sporadically, e.g. after a fresh boot, name resolution does not work. While nearly every kind of application is effected, Safari, Mail, etc. even ping. To my surprise, though, dig(1) does reliable work in this kind of stuck system state. After some review it turned out that Mac OS X provides different DNS resolution services of the classic Unix / Posix services - that apparently can get out-of-sync from what the classic resolution configuration would use. To flush them:

10.4: lookupd -flushcache
10.5: dscacheutil -flushchache
10.6: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

For me, under Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6), killing the mDNSResponder did actually indeed help! I’ll have to keep an eye on the situation, if it’s getting too annoying I’ll have to try a clean re-install. Sigh!

The first Pine Trail Atoms, N450 and the like, are trickeling leaking out. And guess what, the performance meter did not move a bit: Just some randomly picked Geekbench results:

score 916
ASUSTeK Computer INC. 901 6 days ago
Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 994
Hewlett-Packard HP Mini 311-1000 5 days ago
Intel Atom N280 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

score 934
Acer AO532h 7 days ago
Intel Atom N450 @ 1.67 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

I wished Moore’s law would still be in effect as the Atom performance is barely endurable. At least the new Atoms finally come with the AMD64 (x86_64, EM64T) enabled, and might be slightly more performant in 64bit mode due to more general purpose registers being around, potentially shuffling more data per instruction, clock cycle (e.g. rendering your browser content, text, graphics et al.).

To my greatest amusement this is about exactly the performance of the Transmeta Efficieon, announced in 2003, and started to ship in 2004:

score 956
Linux PC (Transmeta Efficeon(tm) Processor TM8000) 20 months ago
Transmeta Efficeon TM8000 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, threads)
Geekbench 2.0.15 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

I wished more companies would switch to more competitive solutions, such as the AMD Neo and Neo X2 series that comes with a way higher performance envelope for some time, now, …

score 1687
Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv2 Notebook PC 4 months ago
AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor, 2 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.3 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Update:

While at it, the Via Nano does not appear to be that much of a screamer in this regard, likewise:

score 1064
LENOVO 20021,2959 7 days ago
VIA Nano U2250 (1.6GHz Capable) @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Windows x86 (32-bit)

Oh, and you are looking for decent reference score?

score 18996
Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8384 5 months ago
Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8384 @ 2.69 GHz (8 processors, 32 cores, threads)
Geekbench 2.1.2 for Linux x86 (32-bit)

score 9777
iMac11,1 4 hours ago
Apple Inc. Mac-F2268DAE
Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.80 GHz (1 processor, 4 cores, 8 threads)
Geekbench 2.1.4 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)

score 1872
Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)
PowerMac11,2
PowerPC G5 (970MP) @ 2.00 GHz (2 processors)
Geekbench 2.1.6 for Mac OS X PPC (32-bit)

Limited time, post Black Friday sales of ExactScan, enjoy!

If you are even just a bit interested in document scanning on the Mac it’s a chance to get a huge discount on the most professional capture application specifically made for Mac. An update to the Pro version with OCR, barcode recognition and batch file processing is just 29€.

At a time, a decade ago, at the advent of Mac OS 8 and 9 there were some pretty popular mobile strobe scanners from Visioneer, named PaperPort Strobe, Pro and Co.

However, Mac driver and support were abandon with Apple’s migration to the all-new, Unix-based Mac OS X. Since then Mac users where left with few choices when it came to mobile (abroad), desk-space-efficient and business card scanners.

Now, the new version 2.8 of ExactScan set of to change everything: among the now over 200 built-in scanner drivers, is support for the popular and convenient Visioneer RoadWarrior, as well as the Xerox Travel Scanner 100! On top of this, the version of ExactScan already supports the just-released Visioneer Strobe 500. A novel feature of the Strobe 500 is the detachable ADF dock: For use abroad, the ADF unit remain on the desk, leaving just the slimmer, mobile scanning unit to travel with you.

Read more: ExactScan homepage