René Rebe

Today I catched some neat exception / assertion trace of an [NSString drawAtPoint: withAttributes:] while drawing with an invalid context. So this is is the calling sequence how Mac OS X 10.5(.6) draws an NSString internally:

CGContextSetFillColorWithColor
CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor
CGContextSetTextMatrix
CGContextSetFont
CGContextSetFontSize
CGContextGetShouldSmoothFonts
CGContextSetFontRenderingStyle
CGContextSetTextPosition
CGContextShowGlyphsWithAdvances
CGContextSetTextPosition
CGContextShowGlyphsWithAdvances

Well, yesterday night I finally updated my 3G iPhone to the 2.2.1 firmware - mostly because I have bug reports pending over at Apple, where some are said to be fixed in the latest 2.2.1 FW update.

So after the usually too lengthy backup, update and restore cycle (why can’t they just send delta updates over-the-air as they do for regular, real Macs?) I was left with my iPhone not wanting to lock on a provider in Germany, and no - I’m not running it unlocked or jail-broken but with the regular T-Mobile contract here in Germany (sigh!).

Anyway, as the “reset network preferences” and googling was not of help I decided to restore without replaying the backup, and voila: it worked, locked to the all expensive T-Mobile cellular network again. Though this left me with all of my preferences and particularly my not yet downloaded photos missing. Thanks god others already created some nifty iPhone backup decoder!

Even years before the recent NetB..k ^W sub-sub-notebook storm - kind of initiated by unfortunate Asus EeePC - I already used and enjoyed one. No, not the initial, real Psion NetBook (although I had a Psion Revo at that time, …), but the MSI MegaBook S270.

It was about the size of the 10″ modern flavors and compared to the most ugly Asus EeePC even had a slick and slim design, including a quite thin metallic display cover.

It’s just now - comparing all the many variants today for family and friends asking for suggestions - for me to notice what I was already enjoying back in the days.

I’m waiting for many years now for Apple to release a sub-notebook replacement for the formerly quite handy 12″ PowerBook that is EOL from Apple’s side.

However, for some reason Apple is just not getting one pushed out. The only thing they want to sell to us is this awful MacBook Air that is just thin, but not sub-sized and due it’s outside dimensions not too useful in a plane or otherwise abroad (at least for my use cases, anyway).

Thanks to some PC vendors sub-notebooks finally start to reach a decent quality to fill this gap:

Booth the Sony Vaio VGN-P and the HP Mini 2140 are reasonably sized (or tiny), with still a decently sized keyboard to type and of good build quality. Booth also worth a second look.

While the Sony Vaio achives an amazingly tiny outer dimension it even comes with an ultra low voltage Aton Z5xx that additionally features the VT extension and results in a quite reasonable battery life for this pocket PC (nearly 4h on the standard, and up to about 8h with an optional higher capacity battery pack). Despite it’s super tiny size it even brings a WWAN - 3G - chip and GPS! The only downsides are the exorbitant price (in Germany anyway) and Intel’s Pulsbo chipset with PowerVR graphic for which there exists no open source accelerated graphic driver, yet.

The HP Mini 2140 on the other hand is a less expensive choice, but less compact. The regular Atom used, however, features neither 64bit nor VT. While it comes without 3G and GPS, it is of pretty reasonable built quality and design. Over its preceedor (the HP Mini 2133) it also increases the display size to a reasonable level (up from 8 inch to 10) and replaced the aging and hot VIA C7 CPU with the Intel Atom that has slightly more power and runs cooler. While keeping the superb keyboard and compact touchpad (with buttons on the side).

Though I got hands on some pre-sales models of booth I will still have to wait for regular sales to kick in in Germany, as well as the HD screen option for the HP Mini 2140 (1366×768, instead of the SD 1024×600 model) to become available at all.

Well - and while I continue to wait for those to become available, who knows what else is happening on the market till then: VIA Nano anyone? Endurable case design from another vendor, too?

Just the other day on Susan’s birthday we had the pleasure to follow Obama’s inaugural speech live (via CNN) in a Irish Harp pub here in Berlin, Germany:

Enjoy!

I was keeping an eye on those cheap PC sub-notebooks (often called Net…, however a trademark of another UK-based company), but just recently noticed that the cheap Intel Atom variants used in those computers have neither 64 bit (x86-64, AMD64, Intel E64T, x64, or however you want to abbreviate it) nor the hardware assisted Virtualization Technology (VT). 64 bit support is handy for running the same, modern software as you run on a workstation and also offers a performance advantage due more CPU registers and potentially moving twice the data per clock cycle. VT on the other hand brings the popular open-source virtualizer Qemu up to speed via the help of KVM making use of said hardware assistance.

Hower the N (low-voltage) versions used in those tiny and cheap PC notebooks comes with booth disabled. Only the more expensive Z (ultra-low-voltage) flavors - most often used in higher end UMPCs - comes with at least the VT extension available. Only the “regular” Atoms (without N or Z) do have 64bit mode, however no VT extension.

Summary:
Intel Atom 200: E64T; no VT
Intel Atom N27x: no E64T, no VT
Intel Atom Z5xx: no E64T, but VT (except Z500 and Z510 which do not feature VT)

I wonder how they came to this silicon feature inheritance - what a mess.

Too bad the VIA Nano is coming so late to market: it is advertised to feature both - 64 bit and VT.

Last year the news of the Festival of Lights (2007) did not really came thru to us, although we where even guiding a friend thru Berlin:

This year, however, I got a tripod for the digital SLR for my birthday and we thus we took a quite extra excessive two night tour thru Berlin and took quite some photos on the way. So enjoy Berlin at night:

Don’t wonder about the many re-occuring images, they are -/+ 2EV exposed images to eventually generate HDR images from. Also approximately the second half are RAW images that you browser will probably not show full screen (unless you are on Apple’s Safari anyway). I specifically further hacked up the gallery code to generate JPEG thumbnails on the fly for the .CR2 RAW images :-)

Update: Now with PCX support!

As three people already left comments in my earlier note that I was working on some ExactImage based Quick Look plug-in for Mac OS X, Leopard, I finally took the time to clean it up and get it out. And as I had some initial testers for the 1.0 version I already got an 1.1 update with some PNM compatibility fixed.

To install it, just move the QuickLookEI.qlgenerator bundle into either /Library/QuickLook/ or into your users’s home folder: /Users/…/Library/QuickLook/ - just as you prefer.

Oh, and before I forget: 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!

ExactImage had digital still camera RAW loading (aka decoding) support for over 2 years now, already.

While “RAW” images differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, from model to model and sometimes are even obfuscated by the vendor to prevent loading and creating solutions by third parties, ExactImage supported a wide range of RAW formats thanks to the embedded dcraw copy. Copy, because the orignal project is only available as a command line program and not in form of a library - and ExactImage needs to have some more control about how the image data is passed around, e.g. coming in from a database, network or are just keapt in memory and not to be processed fragilily thru sub-processes and pipes. We wrapped the plain ANSI dcraw C code with some macros to transform the ordinary C FILE* access to C++ std::iostreams and get rid of it’s main() function and call into the code from our library flow of execution. So we also had to update our support glue in order to update the aging dcraw copy.

But aside vastly increasing the number of supported models, we also added support code to allow extracting thumbnails via the ExactImage library and thus allow creating an overview / gallery of a bunch of RAW images in just the time you need to snip your fingers:

econvert –decompress thumb -i dcraw:img_0123.cr2 …

If batch image processing is something you where looking for or already performing maybe just give it a try, some distributions are alreaady including it and apparently it’s also on the way into Debian.

Of course the functinoality is not only available thru the command line frontend “econvert”, but also thru the external library interface, also wrapped by SWIG to Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, etc.

ExactImage 0.6 now comes with an revamped PDF writer and hocr2pdf front-end. Together with a patch to cuneiform to annotate each recognized glyph with a hOCR-like bounding box, it allows the creation of pretty exactly positioned, searchable PDF files with open source software!
Basically hocr2pdf accepts the input from STDIN (we could also add a -h/–html option to read it from a file) and the image from the filename passed with -i/–input. The resulting PDF filename is specified with -o/–output.

Additionally -s/–sloppy-text allows grouping of words on a line for sometimes improved search and cut’n paste results with older PDF viewers. The -n/–no-image option allows to skip the image - normally shadowing the text - to either save storage space or take a look how exactly the glyphs are positioned. Basically the short introductionary usage boils down to:

cuneiform -f hocr -o test.hocrl ocr-test.tif
hocr2pdf -i ocr-test.tif -o test.pdf < test.hoc

And the searchable PDF is there. The cuneiform hocr patch is now in the Launchpad’s cuneiform Bazaar HEAD/TIP.

It’s also already in use on the Archivista Box - a complete and open source long term archiving solution.