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Did another class action suit against Microsoft really hurt?
Today's newspaper is reporting that Microsoft has settled a lawsuit with city and county governments in California. It has the same premise as all the other anti-trust suits against Microsoft in that Microsoft is a monopoly and used it to overcharge for software. I had to almost laugh with the settlement agreement...Microsoft will pay $70 million for qualifying computer hardware and software. Let's see, I bet most of that software will be Microsoft software. Now who is the big loser in this suit? I think that would be the taxpayers, as usual.
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$25 to control my air conditioning?
My local electric company, SDGE wants to pay me $25 per year to put a control on my central air conditioning unit that would allow them to turn it off in case of extreme demand. I haven't used the A/C in the almost 2 years I've lived in my house, so this would sound like a great deal. However, what happens if this year I really, really want to spend the insane amount of money to cool my house and it happens to be on the same day there is an extreme energy shortage? I won't be able to do it. Some of you may be thinking that it would be selfish for me to want to turn on my A/C when there is an energy problem, but I'm entitled to use it once in awhile as I conserve as much as I can all the time. When we first moved in, we have ceiling fans placed throughout the house so we wouldn't have to turn on the A/C and we have a programmable thermostat so that we only heat the house for a few hours a day when it is cold. While I don't want to use my air conditioning, I don't want anyone else to be able to say when I can't use it. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.
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Standing on my head debugging code
This weekend I was looking at optimizing a program I'm working on and tracked down high CPU using to NSProgressIndicator which shows progress, obviously. The CPU usage has to do with animating it. After hours tracking it down, it turns out I was calling [NSUserDefaults resetStandardUserDefaults] at the beginning of my app. I have no idea what one has to do with another, but I wasn't 100% convinced of this until this morning when I reproduced the issue with a bare bones test application. I submitted a bug to Apple; this really explains some slow downs with OS X. Amazing that the pretty pulsating progress indicator can slow down a machine so much. Uggh.
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Stupid me, I upgraded the kernel
I try to tell myself, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. Unfortunately I don't always listen. Periodically I update my Linux server to get the latest updates. Unfortunately lately I've been bitten by bugs in the kernel when I upgrade. The problem arises from the fact that I'm running software RAID-1 and those that work on the kernel don't seem to use it and therefore put out updates that break using RAID. I think it is great that people spend their own time putting out updates, but it is a little frustrating to keep having the kernel break. This is the 3rd kernel update I've done that has broken. It doesn't appear that I'm the only one with this issue as evidenced by some posts I've read. I'd really like to get the security fixes in the kernel, but I need to think harder the next time a kernel comes out before updating. (Wasted 2 hours on this, good thing I had nothing else to do.)