Torsten Curdt’s weblog

When I came from vacation I had a lot of mails and news to work through. My MacBookPro was tucked away for a bit more than a week. No one touched it. Still for some reason the touchpad button was broken. It got stuck all the time. I couldn’t figure out why and just used a mouse. “Stupid Apple !$%@! Quality !@$#!“. Then after a sudden I realized – it’s the battery! It was “growing” and bending the case of the MacBookPro so the button got stuck. Quickly I’ve removed the battery and are now running the MBP without it. Athough God knows I treat my babies well – this one has just caused me grief. The dark spots (that now returned again), the uneven lit screen, a broken optical drive and now the battery spawning and breeding. Boy, quality has at some stage been a feature of Apple. This was a machine from work. But I so need to get Apple Care for my private one I hope to order next week.

Really annoying that the get away with charging extra for a proper customer care …while you already have to pay premium. I so don’t get this Mac fanboy-ism anymore.

Update: At the Apple shop they urged me to call Apple support. And although the MacBook Pro was already well out of warranty (20 months) and the battery was NOT covered by the battery return program, they just replaced the battery within 2 days. Nice!

On Wednesday I returned from the Seychelles. A few days earlier as planed. Unfortunately this trip wasn’t exactly born under a lucky star. Originally I wanted to go sailing for a week (with little diving) and then spend a week in a hotel/guesthouse doing even more diving. Unfortunately the sailing trip did not work out (Did I say I hate travel agencies?). But I thought either I will work something out when I am there or I will just be diving. Fair enough. This could have worked out just fine especially as I had some local contacts …if there hadn’t been the cyclone over Madagascar. Knowing that people died and many lost their houses I refuse to moan about the bad weather and diving conditions this caused for me. So turns out I was doing little diving, no sailing and a lot of reading during this vacation. Still it provided me with some experiences and insights that will help me (or you) when planing the next trip to these beautiful islands in the middle of the indian ocean.

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Next two weeks I will be off to the Seychelles. Diving and doing all sorts of non-computer related things. I will probably be offline for the whole time. So please be patient if you try to reach me via email.

Whenever you have you debug a http conversation there are a couple of tools available to help you to see the requests and responses that make up the full conversation. While for web development there is an excellent Firefox plugin called “live http headers“, it gets slightly more tricky when you are dealing with webservices from your own application. Either you have to go through a proxy or you try to record the incoming and outgoing tcp packets. To restore the conversation you either had to Read the rest of this entry »

Usually a simple command line can be used to extract the unique lines from a file.

cat data.txt | sort | uniq

Unfortunately the sort is required (as uniq requires a sorted input for its task) and the bigger the data set gets the more painful that sort operation becomes. I am surprised there is no option to ‘uniq’ to use hashing. But a short perl script also does the trick.

#!/usr/bin/perl

%seen = ();
while (<>) {
    print $_ unless $seen{$_}++;
}

Any better suggestions?