I started with 1.9GB of plublic photo images, and the collection grew to 4.6 GB online in this blog, now. The Wordpress pixgallery plugin was rewritten by about 50% in the meantime, including many bug fixes, new features and utilizing our in-house ExactImage software library for the image DSP (digital signal processing) - mostly for improved speed and less server load :-)
One of the recently added photo collection, also known as streams, is the State of Play, Performance - Event, Berlin held by Susan’s sister: Sabine Klaus as well as Ridade Al Daghestani, Arnar Lindal Halldorsson and Alexandra Ross.
As the photos can not yet be commented (I guess I finally have to rewrite the other half of the PixGallery code, …), please feel free to leave comments about the event here in this post.
No joke - from the Gentoo weekly newsletter “16 April 2007″:
Gentoo Linux first distribution to run on Apple TV. … Our distribution was chosen due to the fact that it is one of the more portable Linux distributions and, as such, is often one of the first to be ported to new devices.
Now while it’s nice for all of us that the Mactel Linux folks got Linux booted on this “yet more closed and crippled” Apple device, I wonder what part of Gentoo should have played a role in that. After all those people just reverese-engineered and trial’n error enough to get a normal i386 linux kernel loaded. Nothing Gentoo would have helped in. So this statement boils down to:
Gentoo was “ported” to yet another i386 based device.
Congratulations.
And if you want to port - for example even cross compile - “with style”, a tip from my side: T2 SDE:
Running on i386 since its roots in 1998, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC since 200x whatever, the first to run on AVR32, and running on any other 32bit and above silicon (ARM, Blackfin, MIPS, HPPA, SuperH to name some more), and comming with strong cross compile support out of the box. And best of all (aside that it’s free under the GPL as well): Gaining more out-of-the-box (Board Support Package) embedded vendor support every day.
Now that was something one should write more news about :-)
I was just about to add a link to the Gentoo ebuild of my MacOSD when I had to notice they just removed it!!! :-(
MacOSD is a tiny background UI daemon that displays brightness, volume change events among some others on Apple computers running Linux in two ways: an older XShape based textual way using libosd which works on even the oldest X-Servers and video overlays, and a newer, Enlightenment 17 Evas canvas based, view that looks way more pretty, but only works correctly on top of video overlays with latest X-Servers with enabled composite extension and a running composition manager.
Now it appears the Gentoo folks decided that Enligthenment 17 is too rapidly changing and introducing too much unstability and API/ABI breakage for their unstable, ever changing Gentoo distribution. They thus removed Enlightenment 17 and all packages depending on an E17 library - include the little MacOSD :-(. Even though MacOSD only does build with Evas support optionally, they still could have left it in the tree building with libosd just fine.
So for all begging for a more compelte and stable source distribution you might want to give our T2 SDE a try - of course MacOSD is included :-).
Since I was quite unimpressed by the Apple MacBook version 1 I got rid of it on eBay rather sooner than later.
In former times I bought PowerPC based Macs just for the hardware quality and run them with Linux-only. But with the MacBook revision 1 the quality reached a point where I rather would have bought any non-Apple laptop if there would be any reasonable. Unfortunatly the ordenary PC market does not yield an amazing quality either and among the vast amount of Linux related Open Source project my companies is involved in, we now have two Mac OS X products leaving me no choice but bite into the sour apple …
As the look of the device did not change at all the pros are quickly counted:
even faster
finally a 64 bit CPU as it is suppost to be in this millenium
appears not as hot and noisy as the MacBook v1
However nearly the same cons are counted up quickly as well:
still the same bad TFT
still high-pitch whining under low load when the CPU cores take a nap
still touchpad with low pressure point
still strange case finish / material visualizing every touch with detailed fingerprints
still the sharp edge border of the top case that cut’s into your wrist (c’mon Apple, even my years old iBook has a round top-case border!!!)
All in all not the worst choice compared to the even more depressing PC market, but definetly not the kind of hardware quality Apple once stood for.
Note: Apple updated the Atheros WIFI chipset to a flavour no Linux driver is available for, yet.
Update: The MADWifi project has a “alpha” driver for this Atheros chipset, now. However only unencrypted networks work so far.
In the past I happily choose Apple Laptops such as the legendary, black G3 PowerBook’s or the pleasant G3 iBooks (those with the transparent inside-white plastic) even for use with Linux instead of Apples OS - but nowadays after the disappointing MacBook experience I wonder what Laptop^W err Notebook one can even purchase.
Right, Notebook as Apple itself officially stats that their recent Notebooks are not for peoples laps … (huh?) :-(
And the rest of the PC market? Well, I read a lot reviews over the last days and I found not a single laptop I would invest into. Every el-cheapo PC noebook does usually just look pure ugly, with plastic nobs and holes and un-stylish forms all over the place and or has other major drawbacks (such as few connectors, a 32bit CPU and the like) or is big and clumpy.
The only devices I barely would consider are the aging Sharp Actius MM20 or the IBM^W Lenovo Thinkpad X60. But they have the drawback of a 32bit CPU and the later requires an expensive add-on docking station (I even consider the lack of an optional drive a pro - I barely need it and connecting one in the rare case is quite ok - especially when it saves me from carrying the unused drive with me all the time - but an $$$ docking station just for the DVI output?).
Well - poor PC market; I guess I end up with a Core 2 Duo MacBook (I do not like the PowerBook / MacBook Pro speaker design and their keyboards …) although I already heart in a store that is has the sime high frequency noise when idling and the same sharp top border design bug that I really wonder how Apple could let slip into production. At least it should have less “Kinderkrankheiten” and at comes with a 64bit CPU - if just the silly DC-DC converter whining would have been fixed - sigh.
Also this is a major drawback of Apple’s Mac platform: When you do not exactly love the current hardware they have for sale you are out of luck. No IBM X60 to escape too - well - at least not legally …
Good that despite one Mac product I’m in the Linux business and can choose any CPU and plastic combination I want too … (just too bad the other PC manufacturers sleep that much).
I have the Sony MZ-RH 1 for some weeks now (see the blog entry about it) and the Sony Windows software named SonicStage gets on my nerves so badly it is worth another blog entry.
The Hi-MD and especially the MZ-RH 1 are really fantastic devices but the usability of the Windows music (mis-)management software Sonic Stage just sucks. Sorry Sony but that’s how it is and you can easily find out googling for it …
The Pro/Contra list boils down to this Cons:
Windows only (showstopper alone)
slow
looks ugly (heavily overthemed)
does not read all CD (e.g. some with copy protection that otherwise read out fine with other software and sometimes even not ordinary ones without any copy protection at all)
mutable locks all over the place, e.g. no name or meta info editing while importing a CD and the like
crashes more often than not
once corrupted the MiniDisc’s data integrity and as a result crashed even more often and forced me to reformat the disc loosing all my music on it!
You miss the Pros? Sorry that’s right - there are no Pros (despite if you like to count “after a lot of caffeine it sometimes transfers music files to the player - that is if it was able to read the CD and did not crash on the way).
Now not only does Sony force us to use Windows software where many people these days happily have no Windows anymore at all - this software is as annoying as I seldom have seen any other software in this millenium. Especially not in the content providing industry. Look at Apple’s iTunes or other HD Player that allow you to just drag’n drop your files on the USB storage device.
A pity this Software really prevents the Hi-MD from becoming a success, especially as Sony allows to drag’n drop mp3 onto and out of other models including cell phones (such as the k750i and m600i). On those cells you even can push the files too all the other people in school, a party or all the stranger in the subway just fine!
Historically the specification of tokens to be used in custom strings such as file names and report generation was just to use some special character such as ‘%’ or ‘@’ and pair it with some more ore less cryptic token to specify the kind of the replacement, e.g.: ‘%d.4′ or ‘%User’ and other variants such as ‘@day@’.
Of course this is not what today’s end users, especially on Apple Mac OS X want to see. I was already thinking how to make this more comfortable in one ouf our Mac products and with Adobe’s recent Lightroom demo I got an inspiration: Basically they use what Apple introduced with Apple Mail’s address field, rounded visual tokens you can inserted and drag around easily. So I set out to implement this using the NSTokenField, new in OS X 10.4, however I had to find out making it behave as wanted was not as easy as I hoped. One needs quite some Cocoa and ObjC experience to implement normal text intermixed with those rounded tokens and Google was quite sparse on on details and thus I decided to document the details here:
Note I’m not a Cocoa guru - feel free to comment suggestions and improvements!
Of course introducing it in your UI just means dropping it ouf of the Interface Builder’s toolbox into your project. The difficulties begin when you want to control the appearance of the tokens and display some as ordinary text.
For this you need to create your own class and add it to the NSArray that the NSTokenFieldCell uses to hold the tokens. Furthermore you need to define a delegate for the NSTokenField so that this delegate can respond to requests such as:
so you gain control about the formating of the individual tokens and the ordinary text parts can get the default NSPlainTextTokenStyle and you can return NSRoundedTokenStyle as well as the display text for your custom tokens.
When you want a context menu for your tokens you furthermore need to implement:
and to allow drag’n drop of your precious tokens your class need to adhere to the NSCoding protocol and implement:
- (void)encodeWithCoder:(NSCoder *)encoder
and
- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)decoder
and though deprecated you must use the old, non-keyed coding and decoding for this drag’n drop code:
In my example code this just was:
[encoder encodeObject:name];
respective:
name = [[decoder decodeObject] retain];
I hope this is a help for other people that want to use the NSTokenField and find the current Apple documentation slightly lacking detail. The full Xcode project is attached below:
A few days ago the Sun T1000 machine arrived that we ordered for a 60 day trial’n buy run. Historically we already worked with and supplied Sun UltraSPARC machines and even are one of the few that support this platform in our own Linux distribution (T2 SDE).
Of course, this massively parallel machines are just impressive. With its 6 or 8 cores, each with 4 threads of execution you get 24 or 32 processes or threads running in parallel on your machine. Though only when they do integer computations, since all those threads share the same and only FPU (Floating Point Unit). Though usually this is not too much of an issue in classic thruput computing such as Web, File or Database serving or custom scientific applications where you have the choise how to implement computations. The only thing that needs to make sure is to have enough processes or threads running to saturate the machine. Just one big binary without any thread will only give you 1/24 to 1/32 of the machines power, but saturated the machine performs like 24 to 32 GHz machine that you would need from competors to do the job!
And now the suprise for people that do not yet have read the T1 CPU (codenamed Niagara) SPECs: The CPU just consumes less than 80W and the whole machine is said to require less than 100W.
So it is nice to see that Sun is again ahead of companies like AMD or Intel that just ship 2 core CPUs today, plan for just 4 cores the next year and we have bare computational power to choose from.
My first contact with the Sony MiniDisc format was in the mid 90th. At that time I have been a bit more active palying guitar and bass and the Mini-Disc was a perfect medium to not only record some jam sessions or concerts but also carry the tiny player with other pre-recorded music around when others either had big, skipping CD-players or grinding and noisy analog tape walkmans. Despite a Yamaha MD HIFI deck I have the portable Sharp MD recorder. The later, now nearly 10 years old, is still in perfectly function after it was in use for 3 years when I was an trainee, for music yam sessions, I even borrowed it to a friend who studied composing and it made it to Ireland on a three week bicycle tour.
I never brought one of those MP3 player, whether iPod or other low-quality incarnations, because the ability to record is too handy and those mp3 player can not form the base for a music collection. At some time the hard-disc, or even sooner the flash, is filled up. MDs can be collected nicely among the CDs - and hundreds of them.
Now that Sony released a High density, Hi-MD format, including the possibly to store arbitrary data as well as inject MP3 tracks caught my attention. With the announcement of the MZ-RH 1 MD-Walkman it was the time to give that promising product a try:
The MZ-RH1 comes with quite a lot of paper work, the left side bunch are manuals in several languages, the cable remote, usb cable, and since the device has only a USB connector - not a dedicated power-supply plug, a power supply with a usb connector to charge the battery independent of a computer.
Overall the device looks very stylish and professional, especially the jog-wheel with play and record button and the OLED display. Compared with my former Sharp recorder it is much thiner and way lighter.
Usability wise it is as intuitive as usual, the jog wheel is used for navigation and fast forward / rewind in tracks, and as usual for MD recorders you can move, split, combine tracks on the fly, edit titles and so on.
The cable remote is a bit disappointing, it looks a bit cheap, plastic-wise, and lacks viewing angle. Also just because of this limitation I had to notice the device display does not allow to show the track names - maybe because the device has two separate displays and some Sony engineer decided the gab inbetween would be too big for scrolling text …
With a Hi-MD formatted disc the recorder appears as normal USB storage device and thus is accessible from any OS: Linux, Mac OS, Windows to name a few. However the old, classic MDs are only accessable from within the Sony SonicStage software - not even from the Mac software shipped with the package. Also SonicStage is not able to play the old MD tracks in real-time, instead the recorder will play the track out of the headphone / line-out if requested to play in the software, however it is still possible to copy those tracks back to the PC.
To upload audio tracks, be that MP3 or ATRAC files, the device should be able to play, meta data updates in special files of the Hi-MD medium are required, just drag’n dropping the files is not enough. SonicStage is required to register the files properly - not even the Hi-MD Transfer for Mac allows this, however it is just a matter of time until some open source developer will figure out how to update the meta data accordingly - as it was case for the Apple iPod as well …
All in all it is a awesome portable recorder that should be quite a pleasure to use for the next years, the music can be collected on a shelf while the 1GB media is still large enough to allow a current “personal best of” to be carried around as one would do with other MP3 players.
The quality of the headphone / line-out is exceptional perfect, and a menu option allows raising the level to the standard line level. I still wonder why in contrast the Sony walkman “cell phones” produce clicks and clacks between some mp3 files that make your ear wanna die with a far from linear output frequency spectrum.
The use as ordinary data storage is a much welcomed extra that might, or should suspend my 250MB Zip - random access CD / DVD media is still not widespread either. However the Sony DRM is really a drawback, especially with not even Mac software to transfer music onto the player. (I need to figure out the meta-data to up and download the tracks under Linux, however a first glimpse indicate that will not be that easy …)
Update:
The self discharge is quite high. When it is on stand-by for about a week the Li-Ion battery is about empty.
Update 2016:
Unfortunately the OLED display apparently die after some time. Since the “o” in OLED actually stands for organic, I personally call this “rotting away” displays. Sigh.
As far as I have found out the same part: 1-802-022-11, Indicator Module, Organic EL, is also used in at least the Sony NW-S202, S203, S205 and NW-E305, E307.
Update 2017
Now that I can upload mp3 from Linux I accidentally realize the MZ-RH1 refuses to play 48kHz files :-/ Apparently the decoder or DAC is limited to 44.1kHz.
Due development of Apple OS X software and phasing out of my former 800MHz iBook a new laptop had to be selected. Since I never quite liked the design of the PowerBooks and the negative stories one can find about the MacBook Pro on the net, I decided to wait for the iBook a-like Mactels. Recently they got released and I finally had the ability to aquire a black Apple lap^Wnotebook.
The last sentence already reflects that Apple tries to sell it not as a laptop but a notebook because it gets quite hot. Though unlike some other, normal PC laptops not on the top, the keyboard but more on the bottom. That said although I’m a bit disappointed about the performance / heat ratio after the switch to Intel I rather like a touchable keyboard.
At least the black flavour is quite stylish and unlike PC laptops the fan is nearly off when idle. However after some days I had to notice a subliminal whining when the machine is running, idling on battery.
The list of pro’s and con’s boils down to:
Pros:
stylish
light, thinner
outstanding keyboard
fast CPU
Mag-safe power connector
magnetic display holding, nothing to break apart
linear audio out without noise and spikes including optical in/out
brigther display than former iBooks
graphic chip with outstanding Open Source driver for Linux and friends
Cons:
hot like vulcano underneath
glossy, very viewing angle dependant, overdriven display with worst white to black switch time I ever saw (thin black or gray text even disappears while scrolling!!!)
end of life x86 CPU without 64 bit extension
sharp border of the top-case where the former iBook was rounded. I guess a shortcumming of cut down production costs …
touchy DVD drive, does not read many CD-RWs and skips when moved slightly
still not perfectly processed, some unevenly placed plastic parts (as usual)
whining while idleing on battery, most probably some DC-DC converter
What I wonder is why unlike the former iBooks the power-on fanfare is not mixed to the headphone when one is plugged in, there appears to be no way to silence the beast when you power up your machine in an audience … :-(
Also, personally I have no use for the IR remote and the built-in iSight which I btw. find a bit noisy. The later is also easily touched while opening the conver.
All in all the design is the logical continuation of the former product lines, however some more detail work such as choosing a display that is not as laggy when the display content changes, a rounded top-cover border and better heat dissipation would have been very much welcome and would have made it an outstanding machine.
As it is it is just about average: Good design but too many pitfalls that could have easily been avoided.
Update:
Later on I noticed due to whatever reason the hostname was amusingly set to blackrider :-)
