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Value of a lifetime warranty?
Several months ago, a friend told me that a little known fact is that most residential faucets come with a lifetime warranty (OK, maybe not little known, but until I started ReceiptWallet, I could never find manuals/warranties). I put in our kitchen faucet when we moved in about 4 years ago. I noticed that it was chipping and it annoyed me. So I took pictures (my friend said that Delta faucet would accept digital pictures instead of sending the whole thing back) and Delta sent me replacement parts. Yeah! I probably would have eventually bought a new faucet as I would have expected them to want it back, so I saved myself a bunch of money.
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Hamstrung by lack of RAM
Lately I've noticed that my machine is quite slow and appears to lock up for seconds at a time causing me to pound the keyboard. It is a 2 year old first generation MacBook Pro so that could explain a lot. However, I installed iStat Menus and turned on the CPU and memory items. It turns out that my processor isn't maxed out all that often (usually only during compiles). When memory usage tops 50%, things start to slow down. As long as I keep memory usage below this, I seem to be OK. This indicates to me that once the OS starts paging to disk, all hell breaks loose. Of course, this is obvious as hard drives are much slower in RAM, but I always like to have lots of stuff open and never paid much attention to RAM usage; with virtual memory, it is easy to loose sight of RAM.
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Memory leaks, oh my!
Even though I've been using Xcode for something like 5 years, I learn something new about it and its related tools all the time. This week I started playing with Instruments and the Leaks tool in particular. I was horrified at the number of memory leaks I found in ReceiptWallet. While they weren't large, I'm ashamed that I had any (there were maybe a dozen or so). It also showed me that some of the system libraries I'm using (in particular TWAIN and Image Capture) also seem to have memory leaks. I feel much better that I squashed the leaks. They probably won't affect users, but having memory leaks is just bad.
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Barenaked Ladies Live!
I like listening to music as silence is sometimes unnerving; I listen to music in the car and most of the time when I work. However, I'm not a music connoisseur and haven't been to many concerts in my life. The few concerts I have been to, I really haven't enjoyed because the music is usually too loud and distorted and the artists are just not as polished as when in the studio. Last night, Apple surprised us by having the Barenaked Ladies at the WWDC bash. I have one of their CDs and we recently bought their kid's CD. I must say that the concert was excellent; I was able to understand the words, the music was good, and they were pretty funny when telling some jokes. It was a very welcome surprise. All I had with my was an iPhone, so my pictures aren't very good, but here is one anyway.
