You're thinking of Agilent.

HP spun off all the cool engineering stuff into a separate company because it was like "too hard to compete with IBM and Dell when the CEO has to spend precious time on 'worthless stuff'" like cesium clocks, heart defibrillators (though maybe sold off by now), inkjet-printed DNA Micro-array scanning chips*, satellite testing equipment, optical "bubble" network switches, and way, way, more, all of which went to make Agilent in 1999. I've always been a little disappointed that the calculator division stayed with HP.

HP may have kept the name, but little else of value.

* The DNA micro-arrays probably didn't exist then, but they are at Agilent now.

In the example, it was simply non-printable characters. In other cases, repairing client's data files has required more.. creativity. Like handling non-escaped commas in a comma-delimited file.

I use Perl for one-time jobs... Repairing badly-formatted 80GB data files. Splitting flat files into multiple output files. Testing uniqueness of various fields. Finding the line(s) in a 250GB file that is crashing the sqlload program, and fixing it, because you have two hours or we'll lose the project. (nevermind it's the client's data). Editing several files to purge or excise fields or characters before doing serious work with them. Most of these I do via the command line. I'll write actual Perl scripts to crawl throughout our network and gather statistics on files and projects, to test patch status, to download files, process them, and email the results.

Quick! The boss is standing over you demanding that you convert a flat file into csv, add a header, prepend a unique id, and spit any lines with weird characters into a separate file. Here's the printout of the layout. You have ten minutes. There's a million lines in the file and they've got to build a marketing model before the client meeting in one hour.

MLK assassination wasn't that long ago, just 40 years. Rosa Parks.. 53 years ago. MLK could still be alive to watch this if he weren't killed for his message. Whether or not you think race should be a factor, you have to acknowledge the progress made in so short a time.

Bush was on vacation clearing brush 1/2 of his presidency until 9/11, and as we found out later, he'd been gunning for invading Iraq since he became President. Plus, Bush flatly ignored the report that Bin Laden was going to attack the US.

There's no fucking way that Al Gore would have sent our military to invade Iraq, pushed for torture, greatly expanded the secret prisons. That war drained our military, drained our economy, and filled our hospitals with vetrans who will be on healthcare for the rest of their lives.

Al Gore's big thing was fighting climate change, which would have resulted in a new technology and research boom in America, NO NEW WARS, and he would not have pissed away the goodwill of the foreign nations, if he'd been unable to prevent 9/11. Plus, fighting climate change has the side-effect of reducing our foreign energy dependence. I have no doubt that Al Gore would have had a better pick for FEMA head, and a better response for Katrina. He wouldn't have been the second coming of Christ, but at least he wouldn't have been indifferent and snarky and intentionally destroying government effectiveness.

Bush and his team were fucking awful for the US.

Obama's pretty fucking decent. He can actually write his own speeches, and he reads the newspapers, and he can effectively lead and organize. That'll be a shit-load better than Bush. If people are treating Obama like the second-coming, it's only because we've survived eight-years of Bush.

ARGH! Deux ex machina! After reading the thoughtful foreword in Hunters of Dune (describing the lost manuscript found in the bank vault) I looked forward to a wonderful and considerate continuation of one of my favorite series...

At the end I felt like I'd watched Santa Claus get raped by R. Daneel Olivaw, and then Tinkerbell waved her fairy dust and suddenly everyone was all right and laughing together even while the smell of roasted reindeer giblets filled the air.

Similar here.. I only found out his personal values after greatly enjoying several of his books. Interestingly, OSC's Postwatch was one of the books that pushed me over the edge from Agnosticism into outright Atheism... I have an autographed copy now.