WiredAtom

I am taking my first (ever) class in economics in this quarter at UCSC Extensions. And for the first time, the world makes perfect sense to me through the eyes of economics and math. And this is the only time where math has ever made any sense to me outside of the realms of daily application.

The best way to describe my experience is Jonathan Goldstein’s description of Eve’s experience with her first “nibble” of the Fruit of Wisdom… “It’s like trying on a pair of new glasses for the first time…” An experience that is both dizzying and exonerating.

Sweet. Maybe I will take the next class in macroeconomics!

After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:

For Safari, in the command prompt, run
cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks Safari
Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines or error codes)

For Firefox, run
cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks firefox-bin
Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines of error codes)

When leaks Safari was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.

After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:

The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):

2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.

Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.

Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?

Argh… memory leaks are annoying…

I was in my microeconomics class ALL day last Saturday. But during break, I caught an interesting reanimation of Adam and Eve narrated by Jonathan Goldstein at the end of “This American Life“. The Real Audio file can be downloaded here. The segment starts at about 42:30.

This is probably THE Biblical story told over and over again and is probably one of the most recognizable icons of Christianity. But the way Goldstein narrated the tale was so fresh, dark and humorous that I couldn’t help but to track it down and listen to it again. As always, “This American Life” produces one of the most interesting and original radio shows on NPR.

I went to the ATM today to deposit some checks. As soon as I approached the teller machine, I was like, “WTF! What is that huge 7-11 sticker doing on the floor?” It turns out that 7-11 has a marketing deal going with Citibank. Not only is the tiny area in front of the teller plastered with a 7-11 smoothie, the touch screen of the machine is also polluted with 7-11 ads and catch phrase. Just before I thought this experience couldn’t be worse, my printed receipt from the ATM was also littered with stuff from 7-11…

Introducing the ATMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
7-ELEVEN now has Citibank ATMs.
Go to Citibank.com to find the location nearest you.

O~kay… I guess that’s good to know.

Now I can’t even get my own my money in a peace and quiet manner. As if Citibank isn’t doing me enough favor by squeezing every possible dollar out of my bank account, they want to also make money by selling me ads….

It feels like ads are all over the place now. They are between half-time breaks of professional sports games (“This half time break brought to you by Budwiser” ), half-time scores announcements (“This half time score brought to you by “AT&T” ), shopping carts…. everywhere. And now they are even on the ATM machines and printed receipts. What next? Toll booths and gasoline receipts (well, they ARE all over the back of Safeway’s receipts)? Or, ahem, blogs?

This kind of stuff makes me appreciate Apple and Macs even more. Allow me explain why.

When I had to buy a Dell years ago (stupid 3D modeling), I had to sign up an account with them. It’s been almost 5 years, I am STILL getting emails from Dell about their special deals despite of my opting out (can I sign up somewhere to sue them?). When I got the computer, there were endorsed trial services and softwares all over the computer! AOL, Earthlink, this or that financial services, this or that trial software… The computer was literally littered with stuff I didn’t want and didn’t ask for. So the first thing I did was reformat the hard drive and install only stuff I wanted. But when I had to support 10-15 Dell computers, it was a nightmare.

Fast forward to the day I got my PowerBook from Apple. I powered up the computer; I made an account; it asked if I had an ISP, if not, whether I wanted to sign one up with Earthlink. DONE. No more ads, trial software, advertising garbage. Nothing.

It’s been almost four years since I got the PowerBook, I have yet to receive a single piece of junk mail from Apple. I will take a company that does not compromise the integrity of its customers’ information v.s. another that treats it as another dollar sign any day, even if it means I have to pay a slight premium over the former’s products and services (all this is beside the point that Apple simply makes superior products).

We knew that Bryan knew how to imitate some simple stuff a few weeks ago. But to see him being able to imitate more complicated stuff was just a blast!

Today Bryan was smacking the desk with his palm as usual. So I played a game with him using that: I first gently patted the desk twice and then on the back of his hand, also on the desk with the palm facing down, twice. And then I took his hand to pat the table twice and THEN on MY hand twice. I repeated this cycle two times. Then on the third time, I stopped at taking his hand to pat on mine. But Bryan made the connection of what that pattern was supposed to be and patted the back of my hand twice!

WOW! That’s pretty damn cool!

At first I thought that was a coincidence. So I asked Grace to come by to witness it and showed Bryan what to do again. And he did it again, twice, without me showing him what to do the second time. Grace and I were both ecstatic! Too awesome…

Babies are fun…

Another observation we made of Bryan is that he’s getting pretty damn good at balancing himself in our arms. Just a couple of weeks ago, if we held him in our arms facing us without support on his back, he’d have flapped backwards like a broken bamboo. Today I observed that he’s now fully capable of balancing and counter-balancing to adjust the degree of angle to which I hold him with his head, legs and torso. It’s a very unique opportunity to be able to observe those developments so closely as Bryan grows.

Bryan has also just learned how to turn over… But it’s only a one-way street so far — he can turn from facing up to facing down, but not always the other way around. This can only mean one thing — crawling is not too far behind… Time to childproof the damn apartment…

I finally have had it with Firefox and its crawling speed on page loads, long page scrolls and other user interface issues. So I made the switch back to Safari again. Having used a crowded UI like Firefox’s, using Safari again is like taking a vacation from all the “interface noise”. Safari’s interface is clean and snappy. I do miss a couple of Firefox’s features though, namely “search as you type” and “AdBlocker”. Safari has a very cruel “search as you type” feature (even that, I think was from a plugin I installed).

Speaking of Safari, Carl sent me a site that compares Camino to Firefox and their differences. It’s an interesting read. Maybe I will give Camino a shot again when I am tired of Safari in a few months… But what I am really looking forward to is Apple’s next new OS and all the possibilities it holds (Safari 3.0, Mail 3.0 and other cool stuff).
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Chee-hoi and I were emailing back and forth on how he thinks Apple/Mac OSX are just pieces of crap. I was surprised that at this day and age, there are still people out to trash talk Apple even when the most critical of Apple/Mac geeks are making the switch to Mac OSX. Sure, us Mac users do seem a bit cocky at times, but it’s just so hard to grasp how some people can be so stubborn about trying new things when Windows is just so behind on almost every feature it has to offer! Worst yet, most people who trash talk Apple/Mac OSX haven’t even used a Mac for any meaningful period of time!

I think I am qualified to trash talk Windows and non-Apple hardware in general because I had been a hardcore user of “the other side” for so long (I have owned PCs before! Shame on me). I was even a systems administrator for them for years (to a point where I knew more than Dell’s tech support… well, not that they know anything anyway)!

But I took the flame bait myself. I only have myself to blame…

At least Nixon had some integrity when he was caught with the Water Gate incident. Now that Bush and Cheney are caught with their pants down, what will they do (again)?

US President George W Bush authorised the leak of secret intelligence to a newspaper to help defend the Iraq war, a former White House aide has said.
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… in the past the president has said he does not approve of such leaks and would sack anyone involved.

How many lies does an administration have to tell for its members to be impeached?

Excerpt direct from Slashdot:

“Facts and science collide with tribal loyalties, the Washington Post reports: ‘Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.’”

WTF?

I stumbled upon Blog Stock Market the other day which uses a set of metrics to vaulate websites/blogs as if they were corporations with real market shares… WiredAtom fared “ok” considering it has about 0.00001 % of the market share (yoohoo!). And apparently, my “blogshare” is available for trading.

Care to buy some blogshares of WiredAtom?

Another pretty crazy site (thanks, Carl) of the week was Alexaholic. It (somehow) compares traffic of any 2 given (or 5) sites by showing you a series of graphics and charts. It turns out that my humble little dinky site fares pretty well to my former employer’s corporate site! Dang…

Apple never seizes to amaze the high tech industry with its top secrecy of projects and strategies. While most of us hardcore Apple and Steve Jobs fan weren’t surprised, Apple sent another shock wave into the PC galaxy with its introduction of Boot Camp.

The Mac-friendly cluster of the media thinks this is an ingenius idea on Apple’s part to have a trojan horse in the PC world to give the Mac-shy PC buyers no more reason to buy another box from Dell, HP or the like. And by doing so, since Mac OSX is already pre-installed, there’s no reason NOT to try an use it. Hence the great victory of the trojan. The same media cluster also thinks that since Apple is still a hardware company at heart, this strategy will help drive Apple’s hardware sales off the roof (somebody lend me $3000 for some AAPL shares!).

And of course there are also some doomsday predications. Some people think this will spend the end of Mac OSX as we know it. Why would developers want to invest the resources in developing anything for Mac OSX when Windows can also run on Macintosh hardware? This would also erode Apple’s own software business!

I told Murdza that maybe this is the final duel — Steve Jobs is now openly challenging the world to come and see what Mac and Mac OSX are made of. They are confident in saying that, “Look, we think our sh*t is so good that we will even HELP YOU run our competitor’s software on our hardware. And you know what? You will swtich.”

I foresee a lot of dual boots in the coming months. But perhaps the true ingenious of this strategy is still not revealed to the public. Once Boot Camp becomes part of Apple’s next release of operating system (should be due out first quarter of 2007), many of us think that maybe Apple will make it so that Windows will run side by side with Mac OSX without any kind of rebooting, having Windows run at near-native speed, like Mac Classic did under OSX for a couple of years (Darwine comes to mind). Now, THAT would kick ass!

While Singapore is often praised for being an economic and technology miracle in Southeast Asia, some of the decisions made by its political leaders are really dumb. I guess Singapore never pretends to be a “democratic” country anyway.

Slashdot was making fun of Cute Overload on April Fools which basically just made Cute Overload exploded with traffic (a.k.a. The Slashdot Effect). I am glad Slashdot covered the site though. There are tons of cute pictures of animals for you animal lovers… Even if you don’t like animals, I am sure your kids/spouse will appreciate the fun.

via [Slashdot]