Still catching up with getting old photos online the next installment brings photos from the Raptor Project sponsored by Nikon.  We were lucky enough to have our own little show around lunch time a few weeks ago.  I got a few good photos of some birds that I'll probably never get this close to again so that was quite fun.

 

View the Raptor Show album. 

 

I've been trying to get around to uploading some more pictures and I just went through the photos I took during Fleet Week/Memorial Day weekend.  There aren't too many, but there are a few good shots of an aircraft carrier that was visiting New York.

 

View the Fleet Week album.

 

OK, to start this off I must admit that I'm a Screen Rat - the digital version of a Pack Rat.  I keep tons of applications open at once with literally dozens and dozens of windows open (I just counted and I have 26 applications and almost a hundred windows open right now, and that's after I just quit Safari).  But with 5.5 GB of RAM I can afford to have everything open at once.  Safari though, like no other application, just seems to gobble up RAM like a goat in a petting zoo (watch out for those fingers kids).

The first rule of being a Screen Rat is to never quit an application, NEVER!  You should only quit an application when you need to shutdown your computer, there's no other excuse.  Well, that is unless that application is Safari.  For some reason if you keep Safari running for a few days its memory footprint will just keep increasing.  Sure, it'll start off using a nice cool 20-30 MB, but after a few days of browsing and countless windows open it will balloon to 1.3 GB.  1.3 GB of RAM!  For a web browser!  That's actual RAM in use, not the virtual address space, the virtual address space is well over 2 GB. 

Normally what you do when an application starts hogging RAM is release some of its resources.  In this case, you start closing those dozens of windows that you've opened over the last few days.  That would be enough for most apps, but not Safari.  No, just now I closed all but one window in Safari and the RAM usage went from 1.3 GB to 1.2 GB - 100 MB.  Sure 100 MB is a good chunk of RAM, but it's only about 8% of what Safari was using.  How could the last remaining window be using 1.2 GB of RAM?

Anyway, at that point I was fed up, I'd need to quit Safari to reclaim my RAM.  I repeat this cycle every few days and the only solution I've found is to quit Safari.  I've tried emptying the cache, closing all the windows, clearing the history and using the Debug menu to empty all of the caches (WebFoundation, WebCore, JavaScript, etc.).  Nothing works.  Once Safari has ballooned into a memory gobbling behemoth there's no way to reclaim the memory short of quitting the application.  This is utterly depressing for us Screen Rats. Maybe I'll have to try using Camino or Firefox instead to see how well they behave.  I do use them both often, but not nearly as much and as long as I use Safari.  They seem fairly well behaved right now, but I wonder how well they hold up after a week of continuous use and dozens of windows opened.  Can any fellow Screen Rats comment?

 

Some friends and I are walking home on Saturday night and thinking "What do you do in Midtown Manhattan at 10:00 PM on a Saturday night?"  Well, you go to the Apple Store of course.  And while at the Apple Store what better thing to do than play with Photo Booth on one of the many MacBooks?

 

So we spent a little too much time making faces and playing with the many effects in Photo Booth.

 

View the Fun with Photo Booth album. 

 

I was reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and saw a headline describing a time management application called Procrastinatr.  I went to the web page to take a look but the web site consisted of only two pages - 1) the front page and 2) a download page that asked for your name and email address.  There were no screenshots, no information describing what it does, nothing.  This should be the first warning sign to anyone - if they want your name and email address and there's no other information available about the application then you want to stay as far away as possible from that application.  Needless to say, I didn't want to have anything to do with the app and didn't download it.  Unfortunately a number of other people weren't so lucky.  

 

Apparently the application was just meant as a joke, and if you read the ReadMe then you'd have known that, but how many people actually read ReadMes?  Well, not many I guess.  What Procrastinatr does is open iCal and add a week to the deadlines of all your events and To Do lists.  Ha ha ha, what a great joke.  Well, this also effectively destroys all of your calendars.  There's supposedly a fix now available, but I don't know how well it does or doesn't work.  
 
Shame on you TUAW for recommending such a malicious app, apparently they don't do their homework over there before recommending applications to their users.  And to the moron that thought an app like this was a good practical joke, well I'm thinking of a place where you should go.
 
The bottom line is that you should beware of what you download, even if it is recommended by a clueless friend.

Well, today is June 6th, 2006 or 6/6/06, the end of the world!  Anyway, the other day I was thinking back to this time last year.  In fact, one year ago today Steve Jobs announced the Intel transition to the world.  Now, if that isn't a sign of the apocalypse then I don't know what is.