René Rebe

On days like this, I wonder what the heck the authors think - changing their software again and again in incompatible ways. Case in point this time: u/dev (or just udev, as you like).

If it would just be some random tool, tiny utility or whatever, I could not care less, but with tightly coupled pieces, wired into the system boot, low-level device management and the Linux kernel in many ways, I really have my problems with breaking existing installations due incompatible changes.
In the past, already, they renamed the system init programs, such as udevstart to udevtrigger as well as the format and keywords of the configuration files (rules) changed multiple times.

And now, with hundreds of thousand deployed Linux systems in the wild, someone decides “well, we do not like this multiple single tools anymore” and refactored the code to some combined “udevadm” in udev-121.

And we (the people using Linux, the “Linux” vendors, system integrators, and other individual users) can go update the init and system start-up scripts just for the fun of it.

Oh my.

Sure, one can argue the vendor should care and just get it right. But still: Multiple vendors now have to adapt multiple distributions (and embedded systems) and probably many many users will run into problems during updates of single packages to a new major release of their distribution of choice.

A +1 vote from me for less incompatible, random changes. Would saves coders and system admins a great deal of time.

Though I’m using Qemu for some time, now - I recently installed an old T2 flavour from 2 CD’s and thus had to exchange Qemu’s cdrom image at run-time. It came to my suprise that some random googling brought up mostly stuff that did not work anymore - maybe because I have to use a Qemu SVN version due a newer GCC (4.x).

change cdrom
device not found

With “info block” in the Qemu monitor (Ctrl-Alt-2) one cane get a list of currently attached block devices:

info block
ide0-cd1: type=cdrom removeable=1 locked=1 file=/home/rene/…
ide0-hd0: type=hd removable=0 file=/home/rene/…

…

So for exchange the attached cdrom at run-time the commands are:

eject ide0-cd1
change ide0-cd1 /home/rene/some-other-file…

And finally the switch back from the monitor to the VGA output screen with Ctrl-Alt-0.

Up until recently no sophisticated barcode recognition was available as open source. There where some attempts to handle barcodes among an otherwise character recognizing project, as well as a “just code39″ recognition tool. ExactCODE now made a whole family of barcode recognizers for all common 1D codes (UPC, EAN, CODE25, CODE39, CODE128 to name a few) available within the modern, C++ imaging framework ExactImage under the terms of the GPL.

For commercial licensing options, for distributions in classic binary-only applications as well as more advanced features and 2D recognition, just contact us.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

The first non x86 machine of mine was a 270MHz Ultra SPARC 5, that over the early years was tuned up a little with a 360MHz UltraSparc IIi, some additional RAM (to 256MB) and an Adapted SCSI controller with a U160 IBM disk. As the Adaptect controller has no OpenFirmware ROM I had to keep an IDE drive for booting, and thus just pluged a spare 2.5″ laptop disk over the floppy which just holds the /boot partition. Recently, however I noticed SILO look extraordinarily long to load while the IDE drive made very disgusting clicking sounds. I figured I’d better replace that drive soon before I have a non-booting SPARC and got a 512MB IDE flash module (after all I just need it to hold SILO, the kernel and the initrd. However, to my suprise, freshly formated with a Sun disklabel generated by fdisk the OpenFirmware would just hang during boot, not loading anything of SILO at all. After some back and forth with my T2 sparc64 recovery CD, the old fashioned regular disk and Google not spitting out anything useful for troubleshooting this problem, I just manually edited the disklabel to another CHS geometry than auto-detected and it just worked again. Puh!

For the records, the (Model=TRANSCEND) flash drive fakes to have CHS=993/16/63 and cfdisk happily fills this values into the partition label, however my former disklabel had 255 heads encoded and thus I manually tweaked the flash disks label to 255 heads, likewise: CHS=62/255/63.

Hope that helps others with ancient hardware.

For our 8-way Xeon with some >TB RAID array I had to find out what filesystems I would want to use on the logical volumes for some different use cases, and as a quick internet search did only brought up years old benchmarks I quickly done one for the T2 SDE magazine on a 2-way (dual-core) 64-bit PowerPC64 (G5) running Linux 2.6.24 - too bad Reiser4 did at least not like the 64-bit, big-endian machine too much and oopsed too much to yield timing data :-(

Once in a year I need to look into a DEB or RPM package, either to just take a look how other package software, or to extract a tiny tool otherwise hard to get built. Right now it was gptsync to synchronize the MBR and GPT partition types on a server supposed to just run Linux (e.g. without OS X consuming disk space).

rpm2cpio some.rpm | cpio -idv
dpkg-deb -x some.deb target-dir

Or without the dedicated packagers for DEBs:

ar xv some.deb
tar xvf data.tar.gz

For quite some time ExactCODE was shipping a Mac OS X TWAIN driver for Avision document scanners. However, with ExactScan version 2 the device support was now extended to cover many Kodak and most Visioneer and Xerox document scanners as well!

This includes, but not limited to the devices: Avision: AV121, AV122, AV210 C2, AV220 C2, AV610 C2, AV3200 SU, AV3750 SU, AV3850SU, AV8050U, AV8350, FB2080E, FB6080E - Kodak: i30, i40, i55, i65 - Visioneer: Patriot 430, Patriot 470, 9450 USB, 9650, 9750 PDF, Patriot 680, Patriot 780 - Xerox: DocuMate 152, DocuMate 250, DocuMate 252, DocuMate 262, DocuMate 272, DocuMate 510, DocuMate 520, DocuMate 632, DocuMate 752.

However, ExactScan 2 is not just about more devices: Under the hood it was completely redesigned and rewritten from scratch to allow monitoring the current scanner’s hardware buttons and profile selection and perform scans to be invoken by a fingertip on the scanner.

Also new are a bunch of ExactCODE’s image enhancement algorithms for automatic and intelligent binarization of images for massive long term archiving, very accurate and fully automatic auto-crop and de-skew as well as faster sharpening, de-screening and more.

This way ExactScan matured from a classic TWAIN data source it was in version 1, to a full blown image processing suite that also runs persistently in the background to monitor scanner actions, interface with existing TWAIN applications non-the-less and comes with sophisticated, state-of-the-art image processing.

Designed for Apple’s Mac OS X.
Made by ExactCODE in Germany.

Now, after all the year++ of waiting for a smaller MacBook, like the size of the former 12″ PowerBook “sub-notebook”, Apple wants to sell us the MacBook Air? Nice try but they should have tried a little harder - at least my expectations are not really satisfied:

• Form: A wedge shaped - something one expects from Sony and Dell? It’s not as simple and stylish as the last designs.
• Keyboard: Black keyboard in an Alu case? Not without reasons the external Alu keyboard has white keys - this really does not match into the line … Imagine the external Alu keyboard connected to the “Air”, …
• Ports: Too few ports! At least 2 USB ports are a must, and where is Firewire? - Especially with the need of an external drive (which, however, is good ™ I was waiting for this space reduction for quite some time already) a little more connectivity would be welcome.
• Ethernet: Or, the lack of it. Much fun opening professional image, audio and video files from a network server, think Photoshop or Video editing or just copying those huge Xcode project folders around
• The moving ports door: To break apart sooner than later. At least it is not a rubber clutter as Sony is using.
• Battery: Built-in battery? So no second battery for longer traveling abroad and bring-in plus service fee every year when the battery is worn out
• Speaker: Mono? What? Still living in the 70′th of the last century? As if back side, display reflecting stereo speakers of the lower price MacBook would have added much to the size …
• Screen frame: Why the heck does this “world’s thinest” laptop come with such a big frame around the display that already looks so ugly on the MacBook? As small as on the Pro’s the frame should have been.
• Air: Built-in 3G (UMTS) would have made the thing even more wireless in the Air abroad.
• Name: Air? Why not MacBook nano or mini? Such a name would have fitted so much more into Apple’s current cooperate naming scheme.

In my opinion the 3D models and photoshop’ed images floating the net for some time where better designed. Maybe Apple should google for Mac mockups for inspiration more often …

So still waiting for the perfect sub-notebook to fill the gap still left open.

Update: Finally available!

As I usually use the PNM format as a very minimal container for image data to dump for debugging in low-level places (e.g. even drivers as it only requires a few lines of code) I missed the ability in Apple’s Mac OS X to display PNM files (apparently even the Photoshop CS2 does not support it!).

As I spend rather much time on some OS X code these days, I stuffed together a Quick Look generator plugin for any UTI (file type) supported by our ExactImage.

If you are looking for such a plugin let me know - I’ll also probably publish it later when I find some more time.

The was a time, some years ago, when osnews.com was a lovely site, reporting about alternative operating-system news. Of course you could find news about the major releases of Microsoft Windows, or Apple Mac OS on the site as well, however the audience was mostly people interested in more solid solutions and looking into OS/2, BeOS, Linux, etc, pp.

Long these days appear gone. These days the site appears to be run by a handful of people just popagating their own personal taste and feeling. Where the biggest fraction of the news are just Mac OS X developers seeds - nearly each of those - dynamic window managers and their weekly pointless ranting about what annoyed them most the last 7 days and come up with their own teaching series.

Seldome did I see a site degrading that much - guess it is time to watch out for a new operating systems news site, …