RAM is a crapshoot

I've been having some problems with my 2.5 week old MacBook Pro where it spontaneously restarts. It happened again today while I was doing a backup and after some research on the web, I found that others were blaming RAM. So, I called The Chip Merchant and they said to bring my machine in and they'd look at it. I brought the machine in and while they couldn't determine that RAM was the problem, they said that others have had problems with that brand of RAM and would replace it. Hopefully this replacement solves my problems. What I'd like to know is why is RAM such a crapshoot? I've bought RAM from The Chip Merchant for the last 10 years (through at least one change of ownership) and only had problems with the RAM I bought for my server last year and potentially now. I don't blame them as other people have problems with RAM from other vendors. RAM is supposed to be a standard, but I guess manufacturing tolerances on the modules as well as the computers vary so widely, that there is no way to guarantee that a RAM module will work in any given machine. I would have expected that over the years things would have gotten better, but RAM seems to be the leading cause of computer wackiness.

Maybe in my next life I won't have to deal with computers and the randomness associated with issues.

Why is the church afraid?

With the release of Da Vinci Code movie today, there has been some press about the church being afraid of the movie and wanting to steer people away from seeing it. This just seems plain stupid to me; the movie is a story that I hope will be entertaining. I've been listening to the audiobook of it (I listen to the unabridged versions of the books as I like to hear all the details; one book I listened to was abridged and I could easily tell where pieces were missing) and am enjoying it...as a story. Do I believe it? I haven't even thought about believing it; to me it is entertainment. (I'm enjoying the book so much that I just purchased Dan Brown's Angels and Demons so I can listen to it next.)

As pointed out in the book, the church seems to be afraid of anything that is contrary to its own teachings and doesn't allow its followers to think on their own. I'm not one that lets others dictate what I believe. I take in everything I can and make my own judgments and decisions based on the knowledge at hand. I personally view religion as a guide instead of an absolute way to lead my life. Blindly following reminds me of George Orwell's 1984 (at least the Apple commercial based around his work) where people can't/don't make their own decisions.

Is it so bad that people do their own thinking? I thought that thinking set us apart from other species. Of course this is just my opinion, so please don't send me hate mail.

Is the MacBook Pro all it is cracked up to be?

I've had my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and I have mixed feelings about it. I upgraded from a 15" PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz to a 15" MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Dual Core. I was expecting dramatic speed improvements, but in everyday usage (with all the junk I have loaded), it doesn't seem blazingly fast. I've made a point to only run Intel native apps, but I'm suspecting that some apps that were just re-compiled for Intel have issues causing slow downs. However, compiling code is so fast that I can recompile an entire project with tons of subprojects in a minute or two.

One thing that is really bugging me is that, despite me having the energy saving preference set to sleep at 3 minutes, sometimes the machine doesn't go to sleep at all or sleeps a long time after 3 minutes. So, obviously, some program is causing this problem. I haven't been able to track it down, but I did write a program that logs all the processes running if the machine has been idle to 3 minutes and also logs processes running right before the machine sleeps. All this data hasn't told me anything, but maybe someone else can shed light on the problem.

The jury is still out in my opinion on how much of an improvement this machine is over my old one; it definitely is an improvement, but I was hoping for more.

Is it hard to polish software?

I've been using Parallels for a few weeks now running Windows XP and am amazed at how well it works. In the latest release candidate, they've cleaned up a bunch of things, but stil seem to be missing some very obvious user interface issues, most likely caused by the cross platform libraries they're using or something like that. If you look at the screenshot below you can see that the popup button definitely doesn't look right.

Is it so hard to fix this? I hope that it's cleaned up for the final release. Furthermore, the popup isn't a true popup button. Popups in OS X show the menu in line with the button. The image below clearly shows that this isn't a true popup button.

I think that the engineers working on Parallels are stellar at doing the low level stuff, but it looks like they need a bit of help with the user interface. (I'm available for contract work, if they need help :-)).