“It’d be so cool to have a computer that knew everything…. ‘Computer! Get me the birth-weight of James Earl Jones! And how far I could throw him as a baby! Cross-reference with how much I would have trusted him!’”
–Eugene Mirman, “Driving and Thinking,” from _En Garde, Society!_
Safari 4 beta leaves data, privacy trail in its wake – MAC.BLORGE.
Yesterday I decided to give Safari 4 Beta another try. It’s supposed to be super fast and all, and I was thinking about those sites like Facebook and Chordie.com which seem to cause a ton of extra CPU usage when I leave them open… thinking maybe a more efficient Javascript engine would make them more pleasant to have around.
I tried it, and it was super fast, but if anything it achieved that speed by causing even worse CPU churn, so after a while oohing and aahing at its speed I toasted it, uninstalled and went back to Firefox 3.
Then I read this article, and the article it links to, and sure enough, in the short part of the evening I was using Safari 4 I had generated 170+ megs of data in a hidden, can’t-reach-without-command-line-fu location on my computer, not even in my personal user directory. (I don’t think it’s hidden for nefarious reasons; Apple doesn’t roll like that. I think it’s hidden because this cache is what the Apple engineers needed to achieve the effect they wanted, and they didn’t think you should have to worry your pretty little head about how they did it or how much of your disk space they used to do it.)
And darned if that hidden cache directory didn’t include full size image files of every site I’d visited during that time. Which stayed behind after I uninstalled the beta. How much data would there have been after a week of usage? A month?
Lame, Apple. Lame.
I’ve had a problem for a while on my macbook (running Leopard) that the Finder would just suck up CPU like crazy. Restarting it often didn’t change anything. I never found any useful information googling on it, until recently.
In this thread I hit on the idea of sampling the Finder process, and when I did so, I found that the biggest sucker of CPU was a function called “getdirentriesattr.” Googling *that* up, I found reports that this function is used iterating through really big directories calculating folder sizes, and that in fact:
It looks like it is iterating some directory to get its total size. This happens on my machine when I either File Menu->Get Info on a very large folder, or view the folder in List View with Calculate Folder Sizes enabled. Its trying to get the total size of that directory. Apparently there is a bug where the Finder doesn’t stop trying to get the size after you have stopped viewing that folder, or even turned off Calculate Folder Sizes in List View (until you quit/relaunch the Finder).
I opened up a Finder window, pulled down View – Show View Options, and deselected “calculate all sizes.” I made that the default, and then restarted Finder.
Suddenly my Finder’s at 0% CPU instead of a steady 20-80%. And my fan isn’t on all the time.
SWEET. Thank you Apple for having the tools that made it possible to dig down into the process and discover this, but nuts to you for that bug existing in the first place!
Ghostery is a Firefox add-on with a Zen simplicity: it tells you who’s watching you, via ad networks and “web bugs.” It doesn’t try to stop them from watching you, or do anything about it. It just lets you know. Which is somehow even creepier than doing something about it…. “Oh, Google Analytics knows you visited this page. Quantcast is watching you visit this page. Tacoda and WebTrends both know you visited this page.”
It’s an unassuming little box in the upper right hand corner of the web page. It disappears after a few seconds. No big deal. Easy to miss it.
On this page, on goesping.org, it tells you google adsense and doubleclick are both watching you. Since I put the ads on these pages. I don’t think I’ve ever made so much as a penny from them. Checking… nope, never a penny. Maybe it’s time to give up on that experiment. Turn down the creep factor a notch.
Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer. (The whole essay linked is well worth reading; this blog post only contains the barest summary of it.)
Ayn Rand was obsessed with a serial murderer named William Hickman, and based a hero in one of her early novels on him. She thought of him as a noble rebel against a pathetic and mediocre society. In praising her Hickman-inspired hero, she described what we now call “sociopathy” or “psychopathy” succinctly:
[He]is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.
Hickman kidnapped a banker’s child and held her for ransom, taunting the family with awful ransom notes; he managed to rig her mutilated corpse to appear to be sitting up and alive in the car next to him when he picked up the ransom, and he sped off and pushed the corpse out the passenger door when he was given the money by the father.
This was the sort of person who Ayn Rand admired.
American conservatives, particularly Alan Greenspan, the man who has been in charge of our economy for the last couple decades or so, admire Ayn Rand and what she stood for (with the exception, for many of them, of her contemptuous atheism).
Is it any wonder America’s economy is in a state of apocalypse? The ideology followed by the best and the brightest in the world of finance is that of an unrepentant Raskolnikov turned cult-leader.
But maybe I’m too kind in blaming it on Ayn Rand. This sort of thing went down in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well, without her help. Perhaps unrestrained capitalism has always been a playground for the sort of personalities who are admired and encouraged by the same people who admire and encourage those who abduct, murder, and dismember children.
(via a comment in Kung Fu Monkey, via Terminal Velocity)