svn: system(’vi svn-commit.tmp’) returned 256

July 17th, 2009

some-mac user$ svn ci some-file.M
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system(’vi svn-commit.tmp’) returned 256

I hate it, how I hate this. It just happened two times in a row, unbelievable! How the heck could Apple’s engineers think one can work with such kind of bugs in the system and/or tools?!?

Tip of the week: my brothers red-wine recommendations

July 17th, 2009

For a not too distant festivity we needed some selected wines, and I asked others about their favorites. I got a nice precise list from my brother - I thought its worth sharing here:

Origin:
+ France (except Bordeaux, especially: Burgund, Rhonetal, Elsass, Provence, Sud-Ouest), Spain (especialyl Rioja, La Mancha…), Chile
- Italy, Bordeaux, Germany

Grape variety;

+Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir!, Tempranillo, Syrah (Shiraz)
- Merlot, Dornfelder (Amselfelder)

(+ recommended, - not so recommended)

While I personally found a Zinfandel (Primitivo) out of California quite recommendable.

I heard Jacques’ Wein-Depot is supposedly a nice place to taste and purchase decently priced wine in many cities in Germany.

iTunes 8.2.1 verification of “Apple devices”

July 16th, 2009

So, iTunes 8.2.1 comes with:

iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices

such as not “accidently” syncing to a Palm’s Pre. Palm’s former Apple engineers might have implemented the Apple file “upload” protocol in all fine details (as can be derived from open source iPod access libraries anyway), but there is one simple show-stopper that Apple probably added in this update that Palm can not circumvent easily:

if (idVendor != 0×05ac) return false; // (Apple Inc.)

Palm can not just change their USB Vendor (and/or Product ID), …

Tip of the week: mail full-res iPhone photos

July 11th, 2009

For the Bodum glass article I was bitten by the iPhone’s photo application’s “email photo” functionally, which scales the photo by 50%, from 1600×1200 to 800×600. Of course far from ideal when you want to mail it to your server account for publishing.

Just in this minute I spotted a nice tip on the Daring Fireball, how to get the full-res version into your email: cut’n paste it! (Note: cut’n paste is a new feature of the iPhone OS, available since OS 3.0 and up, …) Now, that cut and paste is finally available on the iPhone, probably something one better get used to :-)

Paste (text) without format in Apple Mac OS X

July 11th, 2009

For some time it always confused, annoyed me that pasted text on Mac OS X always kept the format. For example when text from the web or email is pasted vise versa or elsewhere, e.g. a text editor or word processor. After having some non-matching mess on the screen I usually used “Format -> Make Plain Text” (in Apple Mail) to get rid of all the arbitrary formating mix.

To my surprise I just found out yesterday (on some other news site - I forgot which, now in retrospect it was listed on some this week), it’s actually possible to insert without format: “Edit -> Paste and Match Style” is the innocent menu item that does it! Combined with the really hard, next to impossible to press key binding: “Option + Shift + Apple + v”!!! A combination where even as trained Emacs user my fingers get rather twisted, …

I never gave this specific menu item much attention, because it’s only available in some programs dealing with formated, attributed text and probably because for me the textual description (Paste and Match Style) did nor really ring a bell to actually stand for Without Format or Style.

Anyway, good to know it’s there. No wonder why some news and blog sites explained this week how to make it the default “Paste”, namely via the “Preference -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts” settings.

Bodum double-wall thermo glass

July 4th, 2009

While we where looking for new interior yesterday, I accidentally spotted a new kind of glass from the company Bodum, which I had not seen yet: a kind of thermo glass with insulating double-walls. I’m not sure how much it will help to keep your coffee or tea warm, as I’m not sure if the double-wall is filled with air, or contains a vacuum and given it has no cover, and thus loosing quite some energy (heat) on the top. But nonetheless, it looks quite nice and might still help to keep your drink warm and protect your fingers.

They are said to be mouth-blown, and thus slightly differ in form and height (while I find the top border a little uneven on all of them I saw).

After 9 years jpeglib v7 is out

June 28th, 2009

So after 9 years (jpeglib v6b was released 27-Mar-1998) finally a new jpeglib release sees the light of day. v7 comes with the lossless crop patch merged, as well as artithmetic coding (which I thought was patented by IBM, though maybe that patent finally expired?) as well as more DCT scaling (N/8, 8/N) with all N in [1..16] (formerly since v5 from 24-Sep-94 only N in [1,4,8] where supported).

Rectangular text selection in Mac OS X

June 19th, 2009

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).

Exif tag based orientation, finally

June 14th, 2009

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, …)!

Via Nano stepping 3 for functional VT

June 8th, 2009

Interesting: So up to, and including Via Nano CPU stepping 2 the VT (VMX) was not finalized and does not really work (at least not in all details or unreliable, whatever). The Via Nano CPU must be at least stepping 3 for functional VT and should usually be disabled by the BIOS for earlier silicon, like stepping 2 and before (but sometimes isn’t like on Via’s own reference board VB8001 I had my hands on earlier this year).