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I couldn’t help but notice the heightened memory usage just after logging in to Windows Vista (on both of my computers) - this can be seen using the Task Manager’s Performance tab:
As you can see, the memory usage drops dramatically after a few moments, and returns to normal levels. A cursory glance at the memory usage on the Processes tab doesn’t reveal any particular culprits. Does anyone have any ideas on what’s going on?
Tags: memory, task manager, vista
As I trawl the depths of the Interweb, I’ve been jotting down ideas for what to blog on my digital post-it notes in the Vista Sidebar. (Notionally, it’s because I only want to inundate my blog but maybe I’m procrastinating on doing my procrastinating activities - not a good sign). Sadly, I somehow mistook the delete button for the add button, and I deleted everything but here’s a few I remembered.
Sad kitty: my cats would hate this - this surely counts as animal cruelty! Only in Japan…
Are the days of the SMS numbered? As the only person using mobile Internet regularly that I know of, I’ll just say something quickly. No, I don’t think email (in its current form) can supplant SMS. Putting aside the reputation of email as being for more “serious stuff”, email is fundamentally a pull medium, not a push medium that SMS is. The usually widely different uses of the two mediums doesn’t really make a strong argument for the convergence of the two - one’s for short quick messages that you’d prefer to be received instantly, while the other’s for longer messages that can be digested at the recipient’s leisure. I guess you could do something like what Google has done by meshing email and chat together in Gmail, the logic being that both are about conversations, and they’re just different manifestations of the same thing… but I just don’t see SMS and email together as offering any additional benefits to what we have currently. In terms of cost, yes, one SMS nominally costs a lot more than one email, but my cap plan at least allows me to treat SMS as an all you can eat thing - I can’t possibly use it all up unless I text day in day out.
Zachary, G. Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft.
If you’re into computing history, this is well worth a read. By the end, you get a really good sense of the personal sacrifices made to create the first version of Windows NT; it’s hard to criticise the flaws in Vista (which is for those unfamiliar with Windows versioning, NT 6.0) when you realise the price that many in the team paid: the loss of friends, and the shattering of relationships. At first, I found the digressions into personal history distracting, but I felt it added the necessary dimension to an otherwise technical topic.
I also finished reading Gittinomics by the one and only Ross Gittins, and Joel Spolsky’s ramblings on just about everything (not the actual title), even though I’ve read his web articles already. I admire Spolsky’s ability to make management and business accessible to a technical audience.
… and as usual I borrowed out a bunch of Cantonese books from Fisher, and this time, a book on expressive Japanese joined the mix. I’m now up to Dawkins #2, but this one seems much harder going than The Selfish Gene. On the left is a very dense book on convex mathematics from my supervisor. It’s dense.
Not so dense:
Tags: cantonese, doraemon, japanese, joel spolsky, microsoft, richard dawkins, ross gittins, software development, vista, windows
Just a miscellany of things that I’ve been doing…
I’ve discovered Terra Politicus, an online game where you play a role in a fictional Australian federal parliament. It’s part run by Daniel, and the attraction is, I guess, that you can do stuff you can’t do in real life. In TP, I’m an annoying journalist - it’s less commitment than being an MP and I can pop in and out and pontificate.
I spent an entire day listening to little kids recite Chinese poetry, courtesy of Tommy, at the National Chinese Eisteddfods… and I never want to hear another line again 
The non-native Mandarin sessions were far more bearable, because at least I didn’t try to make sense of what they were saying. Funny thing - I ran into Josiah from IT, who happened to be a judge there…
I’ve also been going to people’s graduations… funny seeing everyone wear those funny hats. More seriously, it’s good to be there to congratulate them on completing a major milestone.
Other than that, nothing much apart from the usual slog of uni work. Oh, and I upgraded my cousin’s laptop to Vista (the OS stuffed up and they didn’t have an XP CD). I evidently didn’t do my research beforehand, because a number of their devices just didn’t work after the upgrade - driver problems (but that’s because their hardware is a little on the old side). There were howls of protest from my uncle (who’s overseas) because apparently “Vista’s crap” (paraphrasing) but how would you know if you haven’t tried it? I think I made the right decision, because Vista helps with protecting them from a problem they’ve always had: malicious software.
Tags: chinese, graduation, poetry, politics, vista
This is one of the styles in Vista’s built-in clock sidebar gadget. It just begs the question… why?
Speaking of the sidebar, I’ve tried installing some custom gadgets (some are pretty useful) but a number of them just fail to install (and I’m browsing the gadget site using IE not Firefox). You click on the install button and it downloads, but nothing happens. If it’s because those ones are designed for the beta versions of Vista and it’s failing to install to protect my computer, then that’s fine - but an error message would be nice.
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