Torsten Curdt’s weblog

This morning I woke up and “Inbox zero” was already reality. No mail? That’s odd! But then my IMAP account failed and I knew something must be going on. Mail.app told me it can’t log in. Strange - I didn’t change a thing! Checking the web interface revealed a an inbox far from being empty. So I dug a little deeper:

openssl s_client -connect pop.gmail.com:995
+OK Gpop ready for requests from 84.58.54.4 5pf404508eyh.0
USER tcurdt
+OK Backend is offline.  Showing you an empty mailbox.  Sorry. 5pf404508eyh.0

Wow! The Google backend offline?? I tried from a different machine (on a different network). Works! So obviously I was hitting a bad node and Google is doing some sharding based on the IP. Thanks to my 3G modem I got all my mail now …but where to you report stuff like that to? The Gmail help groups don’t really feel appropriate for such an incident.

And again more than 10+ people showed up on the Monday night. (And this is during vacation season!) So I am quite happy. A couple faces from last time but also quite a few new folks rocked up. Glad that again someone from the BigNerdRanch was able to make it.

Stephan’s introduction to the WiiRemote was really interesting. (Thanks!) So much cool stuff you can do with the accelormeter and especially the IR tracking. The WiiRemote immediately made it into my Amazon shopping basket and I am looking forward to play with this myself.

In order to better communicate we agreed on going with mixxt as a platform. So now we have a wiki, a forum and event calendar. (I will still also submit it to upcoming though)

Unfortunately Club Voltaire is no longer available during weekdays. But some of the attendees stepped up and will provide the room for the next meeting. The topics of the sessions are still TBA. But mark your calendars. It’s the first Monday each month. So the next CocoaHeads Frankfurt will be September 1st.

If you feel like it: Here is a list of possible topics. You don’t have to be a Pro to present. Don’t be shy!

Just a reminder. Monday we will have the second CocoaHeads Frankfurt at Club Voltaire. We are starting a little later at 8pm as requested. I am really excited about the one confirmed presentation. Stephan will be talking on how to use the Wii Remote from Cocoa. Just check out the videos on youtube.

• Head Tracking
• Multi-Touch Whiteboard

We would still have slot for a second presentation. So if you have come across a cool framework lately or could give a quick intro to some of the Cocoa technologies. Please speak up. I think it would be great to have two short presentations per event.

CocoaHeads Frankfurt,
Monday, 04.08.2008 20:00 at Club Voltaire

To keep up-to-date with future meetings please join the group on upcoming and subscribe to the group feeds via iCal or RSS. Please be so kind and register if you are planing on attending.

Unfortunately dealing with links and permissions is not really easily possible in java. At least with the following code you can figure out whether you dealing with a link or not. A similar piece code has recently been contributed to the commons-io project. Found that really useful and worth sharing.

public static boolean isLink( final File file ) throws IOException {
	if (file == null || !file.exists()) {
		return false;
	}

	return !file.getCanonicalFile().equals(file.getAbsoluteFile());
}

An easy way of finding out about the health of your MacBook/MacBookPro battery is to use this little command line.

$ ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity
"CurrentCapacity" = 5259
"LegacyBatteryInfo" = {"Capacity"=5279,"Voltage"=12596,"Flags"=7,"Current"=5259,"Amperage"=267,"Cycle Count"=48}
"DesignCapacity" = 5500
"MaxCapacity" = 5279

MaxCapacity is the current capacity your battery can still hold on a full charge. DesignCapacity was the original capacity. So if the difference gets too big your battery is probably end of life and ready to be replaced. Most likely the related Cycle Count is high then as well.

It would actually be a neat little project to collect this information over time with RRDTool. If you are OK to shell out a few bucks there already is a software called ibat that seems to do this.

Update: There is also a freeware tool called coconutbattery that shows this information in a nice UI.