It seems as though MacOSX 10.4 is a wee bit memory hungry… My Powerbook has a gig of RAM, and I’ve been stuck in VM thrash hell for several minutes on a couple of occasions (which hadn’t happened at all since I upgraded to 1GB from 256MB while running 10.3). I don’t recall exact memory usage on 10.3, but Safari alone is filling up almost 200MB of real memory, with almost half a gig of VM. 4 instances of the Weather dashboard widget suck up almost 90MB of real memory each, totalling a whopping 1GB of VM.
I’ve been using Safari as my RSS reader today, to see how it works, and am actually pretty surprised at how well it handles all of my feeds (after going through a roundabout process to get all 390 feeds imported from NetNewsWire Pro 2.0)
The combined display has grown on me - at first I absolutely hated it, with my body physically rejecting it in preference to manually cycling through posts by title in a list, and seeing the selected post individually displayed in a pane. Once I let go of that, it’s a much more magazine-like experience, and it’s not bad at all.
There are now 31 education-related podcasts listed. And it’s growing every week, it seems…
I do have to say that the iPodder.org category browsing interface is pretty sucktacular (although consistent with Radio/Manilla interfaces). Click targets are too small (why not make the title clickable, instead of just the meaningless icon?), and you can’t drill down easily - no expand/contract categories, you have to actually move up/down the hierarchy. Also, why is it a central collection of podcast links? Why not collect links from the wild, using tags? That would remove the current bottleneck for posting new links. coughsorryahem
I just installed the Dasher pref. pane, to pull up Dashboard after a couple of minutes of inactivity - instead of a screensaver.
Activity Monitor is running in the background, and while walking by, I noticed the CPU was pegged. I opened the detail view, and it listed 4 dashboard widgets as taking 10-15% CPU each. The widget was “World Clock” - 15% of a 1GHz CPU to render an analog clock? There’s gotta be something wrong there… I know it’s using the cool new WebKit draw dealie, but 15% seems a bit excessive. I could write Shockwave stuff that uses less…
I’m a pretty die-hard NetNewsWire Pro user now, but am dabbling with Safari’s built-in RSS aggregator on one machine. It lacks some of the things that i really like about NNW (marking posts as read and/or flagged). The all-posts-in-one-long-page thing is growing on me. I never got into the “Combo View” in NNW, but for some reason this is working for me (perhaps it’s the “article length” slider doowackie that lets me easily switch from titles-only to whole-enchilada mode).
Thanks to Paul Pival for sneaking in a recording device, and providing the .mp3 file containing the recorded audio from the Faculty Technology Days 2005 session on “Academic Publishing with Weblogs & Wikis”, the audio portion of the session is now available (download a copy here, or if you’re using a podcasting-capable RSS aggregator, the file is already on it’s way).
The levels are a bit low, because we weren’t miked at all. I wasn’t planning on recording this, and we didn’t prepare anything ahead of time. But, if you crank up the volume, you can hear me well enough (for better or worse), and can hear most of the questions.
I’m going to be riding a session on Academic Publishing with Weblogs and Wikis tomorrow morning as part of Faculty Technology Days 2005 here at the U of C. I’m going to be trying something a bit different, borrowing a page from Brian Lamb’s playbook - putting together a set of wiki resources, and then letting the flow take over and see where we all wind up. I normally start with a more conventional presentation, then shift gears to the more interactive stuff, but we’re going to have a lab with a computer for each of the 30+ participants, so I thought we could just jump right in with the weblogs and the wikis and the whatnot. Anyway, here’s the wiki page - it’s rather bare-bones, partially by design. I’ll try to add some more stuff tonight, but even if I don’t get to that, I can show how to add stuff to wikis Live and In Person! (or, perhaps, have the participants hammer away at it…) It should be an interesting session. I’m hoping to gather some feedback on what types of things the campus folks are interested in. Will weblogs.ucalgary.ca take off? How about wiki.ucalgary.ca? I can only make so many guesses without real feedback and input from actual humans :-) I just read through some of the text I wrote, and boy do I sound like a pinko commie! Power to the people! Members of the proletariat, blog! Hope I don’t have any troubles getting across the border after this… ;-)
I just finished testing an upgrade to MacOSX 10.4 on my desktop system. I’d been running a previous build, and all was working fine, but I hadn’t thought to install WebObjects - it always just breaks a bit with Big Updates, until they release a point-oh release for WO. I just finished installing 10.4, XCode 2, WO (5.2, 5.2.2, and 5.2.3), and Subversion. Checked out the APOLLO/Pachyderm source tree, and build and ran Pachyderm2.woa.
Either this is a new feature, or I totally overlooked it. Either way, this is very cool.
Flickr has a calendar view of your photostream - showing when photos were taken or posted. What an easy and powerful way to see what you’ve done (and where you’ve been) in a given 5-week period.
In this calendar view, I can see when I was in Vancouver for MW2005 (the blue sunset on the 13th), went hiking with Evan on the 17th. Got the new camera and tested it out on the 23rd, and went to San Francisco and Rohnert Park for the Pachyderm Pow-wow from the 25-27th. A month at a glance!
I’ve been running various developer builds of Tiger (from ADC) on my “secondary” machine - the desktop box that I use as “communication central”. It’s been so absolutely solid that I haven’t even had the chance to file any bugs on it!
Now that it’s been released, I’ll be installing the final build of Tiger on that box first thing on Monday, and will attempt the full XCode + WebObjects + Subversion install. If all is happy, I’ll be installing Tiger onto the laptop (my primary/development system) at first chance. That’s the only part of the install that has me concerned. If WO works, I’m laughing!
Emeril’s Restaurant Finder - so you always know where the overpriced restaurants are
podMeals - weekly menus to apparently help with grocery selection
ReciPods & ReciPods Too: 1000 recipes from Emeril’s archives. This one is actually pretty cool.
Downloading all but the Restaurant Finder now. The last time I was in Vegas, his restaurants were so ungodly expensive I couldn’t afford to read the menu in front of the joints. The time before that, I got to spend something like $25 so Janice and I could split a piece of pecan pie, and get her a quick tour of the kitchen.
It was a pretty busy multi-day session, but we’ve hammered out what we need to do to get Pachyderm 2 to the place it needs to be for the NMC conference in June, and for the Big Release in October. These face-to-face developer’s meetings are always good, and are always exhausting.
This was an especially bipolar trip. Ups included figuring out the project stuff, spending some time with the other developers, hitting some good restaurants, and being in the green lushness of California. Downs included the damned speeding ticket, Tim getting rejected at the border, and realizing just how little time we have to do what we need to do.
