Push Button Paradise

This transition is kind of a life reboot for me in a way.

Thanks to the excellent relocation package, plus the strong possibility of ending up in a significantly smaller housing situation, we're going through all our huge amounts of accumulated crap and sifting out the parts we really need and use. These pieces will get packed, shipped, stored, and shipped again by professionals. This is actually the first time ever I've had professional movers--previously it had always been a rental truck and lots of sweat. The rest goes out the door in a moving sale starting tomorrow. Anything left over after that will go on Yahoo! auctions. (Lots of "vintage" computer books, hint, hint.)

While I'm focusing on getting rid of stuff, Yahoo! keeps showering me with more stuff. One care package during my visit, and two more in the mail this week. Admittedly, some of the stuff is useful, like the Yahoo! duffel bag I'll probably be living out of for a few weeks in a hotel somewhere.

Looking at my process list now, Firefox is taking up 142 megs; Safari 149 megs. When either gets over around 250, I've come to expect freezes and crashes. So browsers and other software have the same problem with excess accumulation of stuff.

What's the solution? Tracking down memory leaks in C/C++ code is a hard slog. It takes lots of time, experience, patience, and often good fortune. But higher-level languages (mostly) solve the problem by having built-in garbage collection facilities.

So a reboot is a short-term fix. Life is not a high-level language. I don't know what the equivalent is of porting your life to Python, but if I could figure it out, it sounds interesting. :) -m

posted at: 23:21 | under: 2005-07 | 0 comment(s)