René Rebe

In late-2010 I already wrote in depth about Apple’s iTunes Connect App review times. As one of our latest Mac App updates kinda rushed a little faster thru the review, I wanted to give a brief update about the current state:

December 14, 2011 08:52 Prepare for Upload
December 14, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Upload
December 15, 2011 08:49 Upload Received
December 15, 2011 08:52 Waiting For Review
December 19, 2011 12:36 In Review
December 19, 2011 14:19 Pending Developer Release
December 20, 2011 00:16 Processing for App Store

While I do not know if that is just due lucky Christmas, at least it looks like the review times are now less than a week.

Update: And another such sprint:

December 18, 2011 06:15 Prepare for Upload
December 18, 2011 06:16 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 07:57 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:05 Invalid Binary
December 18, 2011 08:20 Waiting For Upload
December 18, 2011 08:30 Upload Received
December 18, 2011 08:34 Waiting For Review
December 20, 2011 17:52 In Review
December 20, 2011 18:16 Pending Developer Release
December 21, 2011 01:04 Processing for App Store

Last saturday we went out to the thai / indonesian restaurant Goodtime in Berlin, Chauseestraße. While I have been there before -about a year ago- the last time was more of a short visit compared to the lengthier dinner this time.

My first impression was more positive than I remembered (I had some kind of canteen atmosphere in mind), the restaurant comes with some simple, white and stylish design chairs and painted walls. The menu includes the range of ingredients you would expect from an Asian restaurant: fish, chicken, duck, served with various vegetables, rice et al. And here comes the main point that pushed me to write this article: be warned that their kind of spicy is very spice. They really mean it. And this while I like and am really used to spice food. So unless you want to burn some flu away, and taste something beside hot, I suggest you order specifically without all the chillies.

All in all it was ok, however, for the price I would expect better, prompter service, as well as a more pleasant atmosphere: as the tables are placed fairly close to each other, the waitress’ often move them around to match group sizes, and when people come and go, including the waiters, they may often hit your chair, or table :-/

You can get similar quality food in Berlin Mitte, for nearly half the price at the Otito - only their tables and walls are not painted as nice, however the atmosphere is somewhat less hectic, …

The Chaos Computer Club apparently got their hands on the German’s federal trojan, 0zapftis! According to the preliminary analysis a piece of junk, full of security holes, …

For years the increasing trend for public monitoring, including CCTV, becomes questionable: beside common sense, many studies find no security improvement at all. Rather the contrary: due intended (but often not archived) cost savings, CCTV usually comes with reduced human resources for real people to be present, guard and inform citizens. Until someone notices a riot on a monitor the victim is usually nearly dead, already. In case the CCTV was not plain defect to start with, or the tapes (or discs) lost or already deleted, the images are usually too blurry to identify and search the wrongdoer.

It looks like the politicians have not learned the lessons from the former DDR, which is still known for their systematic monitoring of all their citizens. The western world will soon be on par with measures taken by the Stasi back in those days. An this despite all the memorial installations all over Berlin.

Oh, cool: one can hack, and restore old SDK (and GCC) support in Xcode 4!

And also install Xcode 3 on Mac OS X 10.7, Lion.

I have not yet checked how well that works, though.

Updated: hack-installed Xcode 3.2.6 appears to (mostly) work on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), e.g. Xcode itself and the Interface Builder do work, Dashcode, however, fails to lunch due to some missing Framework symbol (_dispatch_get_concurrent_queue expected in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib).

Since the beginning of this year I use the “Flinkster” car sharing of the German Railway company (Deutsche Bahn, DB Rent). So far this worked out pretty well, and the pilot run of all-electric vehicles in the region Berlin / Potsdam is a welcome bonus. If one happens to have to fuel, the cars come with a DKV petrol card, so one does not have to directly pay the gas, which is already accounted for by a per kilometer (think mile) charge.

So far this was not a problem, until yesterday. I did not even had to gas up. But as there was a gas station on the way, I thought it is nice for the next customer not to need to detour just to find a station in the middle of Berlin. Although it was a “big” Aral station I better asked if they take the DKV card, and was surprised to find they do not. Puzzled and thinking whether I ever refilled a Flinkster car at Aral, I continued my way, and there was a Shell station just on the next corner anyway. As I knew Shell worked earlier this year I just filled up the car, and was likewise surprised to find that this Shell station did not take DKV cards either, … Ieeek!

The employee told me every leaseholder of each individual station can decide whether they take those DKV cards, or not! And usually only the very big ones do, … While I find this pretty irritating, and annoying, the lesson learned is that one really has to check on each and every gas station if a DKV sign is in sight, and if in doubt: better ask. Thinking that the market dominating oligopolies accept the DKV or other petrol cards is unfortunately not enough, …

As I already fueled I had to pay myself, and and sent in the receipt to the car sharer. Hopefully paying back works out as smooth as they promise, …

We finally got another App for iOS. Actually I had this speedometer around with me for two years or so already for my own use. However, ad-hoc provisioned App certificates expire faster than you can watch after them, so often when I wanted to run it for my own use the provisioning profile was already expired. So I finally polished it for global distribution for all of you, and here are some free promo codes, enjoy:

LH3EKYM7JPXW
YLY7AW3PPJNE
HRAARNM7PMRX
WTNH3FF77E3N
YJLRA9JHLK7P
L49JW3NFHRX4
4JN3MWJMYE4E
7Y34J349PFLE
YMKYM9REKMR9
YKYT49RXKX9L
LM9YP4WEX6FR
NXL7MXNF7PPK
WHRJJXWTRXXK
93E63TFKPYF3
RE7H4APMLXH9
XTALKFX6PMN3

Just gave it a quick spin at a local store. quite nice so far, know and worked with QNX since the mid 1990s. But how the heck to you get out of an App, e.g. back to the home screen? Tried all kind of gestures, touched everywhere - nothing intuitiv worked

Update: Aha - touch sensitive bezel: swipe on the border, …

BREAKING, WARNING:

This year the Filmpark Babelsberg hosted a Star Trek exhibition, that was advertised to run until the 31st of October. Since my last and only visit to the Babelsberg studios was in 1995 we decided to use the sunny yesterday to finally visit the exhibition. Unfortunately, and to our biggest disappointment we had to find the exhibition cancelled way before the official end.

And this despite we even looked up the opening hours on their website in the morning. I can absolute not understand how a major organization can fail to publish breaking developments such as canceling the show on their website, or local news(paper). Yet, they can even print a plate as shown above!

I can imagine they like to still get the some extra visitors that arrive just for the Star Trek exhibition to find the event cancelled and yet visit the park nonetheless, though, …

Left disappointed at the entrance, we decided to rather leave for an ice cream in the sun at the nearby lake Griebnitz.

So for some time now I’m searching for the perfect ultraportable (laptop). Tables do not really cut it, even got an iPad to test things, but productivity wise they are not too great to get things done. As I need to get things done, I require some kind of grown up notebook. All the latest Apple machines are not too pleasing either, either cold (on power-up) and too hot during use hard edged aluminum case, and glossy window glass mirror displays, … not to mention the ridiculously huge and space wasting MacBook Air screen bezel, …

The Lenovo X220 is not all that perfect either, same lagging Intel graphics (among others no OpenCL, …) and additionally I just noticed a setback in their display configuration:

The former X200/X201 spotted a 12.1″ 1280×800 display, and it’s ultra-portable cousin X200s/X201s even featured a: 12.1″ 1440×900 (PDF) - now with the “all new” X220 even the Premium HD display only features a mere: 12.5″ 1366×768 pixels, … (PDF)!

This is not only a lower dpi resolution (pixels per inch), it also cuts away enough vertical pixels to make it seriously less useful for professionals with remote screen sessions, and virtual machines. More than the last millennium’s 786 vertical pixels (remember when 1024×768 became standard?) really are a blessing when you want to have your operating-system’s menu bar, and window deco around your windows and generally avoid scrolling in your VNC, RTP, X11 session or virtual machines.

Doing some research on this topic I also spotted that the X220 IPS screen appear to have some ghosting issues, …

Dear manufactures: I do not need a professional computer (display) optimized for consuming cheap Hollywood (or Bollywood) movies. If the mankind is supposed to live on some more centuries, we certainly also have to get some work done, not just hang on to consume other’s stupid videos all days. And even for consuming a decent movie every now and then, I’d get myself a decent TV for that. And with 16:9 LCD TV’s I noticed most high quality movies, on BluRay and such, are not even 16:9, but more like 21:9, …

So, can we please get professional grade, matte, 16:10 display, with at least 800 vertical pixels back to get some serious work done?

So you got an “older” (pre 2011) MacBook Air with read-only USB recovery thumb-drive (stick)? Well, turns out it is only read-only by some firmware lock bit. Just run:

sm32Xtest.exe

On your favorite Windows (virtual-) machine to toggle the read-only bit. You now can use it for your personal data, or writing the Lion installer disk image to it to gain a Lion Recovery USB key, just as you like.