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.

Is there anything I can do about this? Nope. My machine has 2 GB of RAM and that's all it can handle. Once Apple releases new MacBook Pros, I'll be ordering one immediately and loading it up with at least 4 GB of RAM (the new machines can handle 4 GB of RAM; hopefully newer ones can go higher). This also brings up something interesting; Apple's RAM prices are no longer completely outrageous. The current price for loading in 4 GB of RAM in a MacBook Pro is $200 whereas The Chip Merchant sells it for about $100. While it is double, it is significantly less than it was in the past.

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.

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.

Unified ToDo List

I've struggled with managing my todo lists and have bounced back and forth among many different applications and even paper notebooks! Recently I decided to give 37signals's Backpack as there are a few Mac clients and the web interface is excellent. I'm quite impressed with it and their free account seems to meet my needs at the moment. Browsing it on the iPhone works quite well and now I have my todo lists wherever I go (as long as I have data coverage). Others probably have the same issue organizing todo lists; I hope that this current solution will work for awhile.