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Friday, February 07, 2003 |
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Fixing Radio After Compacting Data Files. Hoping to recover some memory I tried compacting the Radio root and its data files this morning. You can compact Radio's data files using the Radio/Utilities/Compact Data Files... menu. This can have remarkable results. My copy of aggregatorData.root went from 13M to less than 2M. That can be a significant help. However, when I first ran the utility it broke, claiming that it could not delete a thread named “Radio”. That led to a severe breakdown of Radio
I found the browser stopped working because somehow the port Radio listens on got changed from 5335 to 8083. I never did figure out why the port got changed. The other problems cleared up when I read through the script that compacts data files. It shuts down all threads (except for the agent thread) and does not restart them if the script halts execution. I simply reran it a second time, which worked just fine, and all of my threads (and seemingly everything else) were restored. Whew!
The upshot? My roots are smaller, but I'm still leaking memory at a fast rate! 2:18:50 PM 
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Radio Leaking Like a Sieve. My copy of Radio has been leaking memory like a sieve lately. It will go beyond 80M (according to Windows Task Manager) a couple of times a day. I usually like to shut it down and restart it before it hits that point. Lately I have had to go through this exit/restart process two or three times each day. I will say that the leak seems to increase proportionally with my use of the Radio IDE. I sure wish I had some knowledge of how to track or profile Radio memory allocations. I would be more than willing to spend the time trying to pinpoint the problem (which may well be my own). Anybody know something about memory allocation in Frontier or Radio and how to track it? 11:59:12 AM
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In Whom Shall I Trust? It (the use of media to drastically alter our thinking) is still happening today. Whom shall we trust? Against what plumb line shall we measure claims of truth? How can we guard ourselves from being sucked, unwittingly, into deception? How shall we recognize right from wrong? When should we value vision, courage, and responsibility as opposed to tolerance and conformance? These are important questions as our nation edges ever closer to the brink of war. 10:44:11 AM
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Art Affects Our Deepest Sense of Being. A Spanish art historian uncovers the use of modern art used to toture prisoners during the Spanish Civil War. Spain's leading newspaper, El Pais, insisted that the creators of such "revolutionary and liberating [artistic] languages" as surrealism "could never have imagined that they would be so intrinsically linked to repression." [From Breakpoint's Art as Torture]
Our thinking, our well-being, our self-esteem, our sense of right and wrong are very much the result of the media we digest. We all know this at some level, if we are honest with ourselves. Well-written books sway our thinking, weblogs provide insights we had never thought of before, songs and movies play with our emotions. This is not to say we are completely at the mercy of the authors of these works (although Beethoven is said to have claimed he could alter a man's thinking through his music). Yet we are influenced by them. Couple this with the fact that when we hear the same message repeated over and over again, we begin to accept it as truth and you can begin to see the importance of carefully filtering (or processing) the messages you listen to. Somebody in Spain understood this very well and used it, with evil intent, to their advantage. 10:40:14 AM
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Mini-Review of The Rose Tatoo. I saw the Goodman Theatre's production of Tennessee Williams' play The Rose Tattoo last night. It's a good story and there are some brilliant performances (notably Alyssa Bresnahan as Serafina Delle Rose and Jon Ortiz as Alvaro Mangiacavallo). On the other hand, I sure wish they would have done some things differently. In one scene Rosa, Serafina's daughter, is slowly walking off stage, mourning the death of her father. Other mourners walking past her begin picking off pieces of Rosa's clothing. Just before she steps off stage she tears off the last of her clothing. What am I supposed to make of a naked 15 year-old mourning her father's death? Was this shock really necessary? I felt the same way when, in a subsequent scene, a clearly nude (and distracting) Rosa is taking a bath above the set on which Serafina is trying to convey the depth of her feeling of loss. The play was often funny and poignant, but too often filled with over-the-top sensual distractions. I noticed that CurtainUp had a similar "over-the-top" impression about other elements of the production. 10:17:51 AM
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I Remember TelMe. Evan Williams asks "Remember Tellme?" [via Scripting News] I remember TellMe, but only because of an encounter I had with them last year. They were trying to sell us call center voice recognition technology. Well, it was a little more than that. They had a voice activation technology that could navigate the same XML-based web services powering our public website. The idea being that a customer could call in and use voice technology to find out about the status of their insurance claim. As it turns out we never came up with more than a handful of applications where a customer really wanted to use such a facility. Many of our customer inquiries are complex and require more information transfer (and interaction) than an automated voice system can reasonably handle. There is nothing like talking the good old fashioned way - to a fellow human. 8:42:05 AM
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