apparently it could have something to do with the theme, but this morning I noticed that the GrowlHelperApp was using about 200MB of wired down memory.
Restarting it seems to have restored it to a reasonable size, but I shall set up a dtrace script to keep an eye on it.
EA Download Manager – Failing Grade
Lets see; it’s a download manager and it launches by default ‘at start’. It is listening for external network connections (what, is it peer to peer over my 3g datamodem?). Apparently, this is to support ‘updates or patches’ to the software I’ve purchased.
And then, to emphasize how important it is (apparently it is vital for my life and the functioning of the world) it puts an icon on the desktop (low resolution, not befitting Vista) loudly declaring what it.
pricks. You are not that important. Really. Get over yourselves.
You now have 5 update tasks running…
Aargh! google chrome comes with it’s own ‘updater’ which runs in the background checking for updates to the browser (along with the updater for google gears, I presume).
Add in the Java updater (oh, lets check once a month for updates but run 24-7)
The apple software updater
Liveupdate (probably 3)
Each of them is probably doing the same thing.
- Wait until some time on the clock
- Check for a network connection
- Check if there’s new code to download
- Display an obnoxious dialog saying ‘Update available‘ with an Ok or possibly Maybe next time pair of buttons
- Download the update
- Install the update
- Require a reboot because it’s changing a file that’s in use
- repeat until you head explodes
Ok. Time fricking out here people! There has got to be a better way. If only there was a single update mechanism that all these tools could use… Unfortunately, it’s the built in update mechanism from Microsoft/Apple and it’s closed to outside developers
As it is, most applications on the Mac perform an automated check for updates when they’re launched. It’s relatively painless, and works most of the time. Mind you the notification dialogs leave a lot to be desired (version n+1 is available, download here!) as opposed to a list of version n+1 changes – especially security updates.
Hopefully, they’re secure and have built in mechanisms to make sure that they’re not taking in a corrupted/malicious application.
Your request could not be completed
Because, apparently it’s only available in the US. I’d love to buy the Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along blog videos. Unfortunately I’m not in the US so I am denied. In fact when in Ireland there are a lot of things that stop being available to me. Like any of the TV shows. Drive me to other sources!
Thankfully Warner seem to have been sensible with most of their Blu-Ray dvds – they don’t have zone locking so I can watch the ones I bought in the US in Ireland without violating anyone’s TOS.
Trust me…
It tells me to trust it. After all, it’s a certificate that’s signed by a CA that isn’t in the list of known certificate authorities.
I don’t trust certificates. There is a list of certificate authorities a mile long stored on my computer of groups who are to be trusted when a certificate is presented. I don’t know them from adam, and the certs from the Hong Kong post office are about as trusted as the ones from the Apple Root CA – get real people this is not security, this is just posturing. I trust them about as much as I trust the digital quicksand upon which they are based.
I’ve stopped caring anymore. The only thing that these certificates establish is a temporary private channel between me and the web server. The rest; it’s just smoke and mirrors.
This gnome tab-rip thing is just killing me
Aargh, it’s too bloody easy to rip off these tabs and there’s no way to re-attach them from what I can tell. Something about the sensitivity pop-up menus and the tab drag thing has been tuned up. It’s practically impossible to keep a pop-up menu open using a two-fingered click (touchpad).
Every time I rip-off a tab it makes me want to throw gnome out the window. the UI seems to have become more and more of a crayon interface without actually improving.
Tabs. A logical option for grouping works on different projects. Apparently, you’re supposed to use multiple windows in a desktop.
I reboot and get an ’emergency security update’ from Flash
Apparently, it needed to install a security update. I don’t believe I’m using any flash applications that would keep the player in use, so why the pathetic dialog on the left after I installed it? This is one of those cases where pushing through the update makes more sense. As it is this only tells me that I need to reboot my computer to be safe from ‘flash viruses‘.
Is it that the flash component is so embedded in the operating system that updating it requires a reboot? If that’s the case then why? it’s only a little thing for displaying animations; not the end of the fricking world.
Security, what the f**k do you mean by this
These bloody security measures drive me up the wall. I may, or may not have already stated where this special error message comes from, but probably didn’t. In this case it’s caused by the sysinternals process explorer running. It would also probably be triggered by the registry monitor as well, I’m just not certain. The issue is a two parter. Yes, I understand that you’re trying to protect your damned stupid copy protection mechanism, but would you please put a decent damned error message up so that the common user can have a chance of getting past the problem. But no, this is at the same level as ‘General Protection Fault‘ under windows 3.11. There’s no actual protection from this. A practiced hacker has already changed the pattern of the virtual drivers of procexp and regmon to be undetectable (generally using permissions on the registry).
I use No-cd patches for this reason. There’s no obvious no-cd patch for mass effect, simply because it needs a single activation before playing. Unfortunately the entire securom scheme is still in place, causing play degredation and generally making life difficult for people.
Slashes for filenames
I created a file with a series of slashes in the name under Mac OSX; Or at least they look like slashes. When I look at it under the cli they’re colons. Ok mac, which one is it [:/] ???
broken openid server :(
Plaxo doesn’t like my openid server. It seems to be timing out.
Investigations later, when I don’t have hardware to fix