Last night, in a parking lot I saw a bumper sticker that said something like “Live lightly so that others may live”. A great sentiment, except I saw it on a gigantic SUV. And not one of the semi-practical ones that looked like it was on its way to a cabin in the woods or was full of climbing gear and skis, I’m talking one of those pristine, shiny, leather seats and chrome monstrosities that never leaves the pavement.
Month: February 2008
Updates and backups
Well, after I got home I tried Adobe Fucking Updater again. This time it popped up a dialog saying “no updates to be installed” so quickly I didn’t even notice how much RAM it was taking. Certainly a far cry from hours and gigabytes of memory that it took when I ran it at work.
Also, I did a Time Machine backup for the first time in a few days. I’d started it in the morning, but it was taking too long so I’d aborted it after about half an hour. I started it again when I got home, and expected it to take 5 or 10 minutes like it usually does, or maybe a bit longer because I’d just installed the Leopard 10.5.2 and Graphics updates. Instead it ground and ground and ground and finally finished 3.5 hours after it had started. I’m told this is because the disk was nearly full, and it had to re-arrange old backups to discard the appropriate old ones.
My God, Adobe, how much memory does an updater need?
Adobe is not my favourite software company. I’ve ranted before about splash screens that cannot be moved or covered. Today I was browsing a PDF file in Safari, which was an excruciatingly slow activity for some reason. But then it got an order of magnitude slower, and I see the infamous “Adobe Updater” icon in the dock.
I try to pop up the Activity Monitor to see what’s up. It takes at least 5 minutes, and it shows Safari and Eclipse, the two main reasons for having this computer here at work, as “Not responding”. It also shows that Adobe Updater has an RSIZE of 1.4GB+, and a VSIZE of 3.0GB+, and both numbers are still growing. I kill the Adobe Updater, and Safari and Eclipse both take a while to finish swapping back in their active parts and start working again.
But 10 minutes or so later, the Adobe Fucking Updater starts again. This time I decided to humour it. I closed Eclipse and Safari and waited. And it didn’t take long for the AFU to take up all the memory I had, and then die. I think it got up to about 3.3Gb of VSIZE. And yet, doing a quick back of the envelope calculating, I’m pretty sure it could have sucked every Adobe software product I have on my disk into memory and still not used 3+Gb.
So what the hell is happening? Why is Adobe Fucking Updater so badly written? Why is it chewing memory like that?
I have a theory that it might have something to do with being behind the corporate web proxy (which also sucks mightily). Or it just might be that Adobe’s programmers are incompetent morons who should all be fired and told to never touch a computer again. Or more likely, both. When I get home tonight, I’ll try updating again and see if it really needs more memory than I’m willing to give it.
Stabbity stab stab
My back/neck pain is mostly under control thanks to a chiropractor, some stretches, and some adjustments to my work environment both at home and at work. So of course, that occasional stabbing pain I get in my knees has flared up. So far, only in the right knee, and so far only enough to make me wince rather than the full blown flare up which has, in the past, made me fall to the ground writhing in pain. I’m sure it will get there. In the mean time, I’m getting constant small stabs doing anything that puts more than 1/2 my body weight on that leg, such as going up stairs, or transitioning from seated to standing or vice versa.
It isn’t just USB 1’s fault, it’s this stupid thumb drive
I don’t know what it is about this 2GB thumb drive, but it’s incredibly slow in USB 1 mode, but not too bad in USB 2 mode. I tried copying this 600+Mb ISO to it from my Linux box with it formatted at ext3, ext2 and FAT32, and the fastest time was over 35 minutes. The same file to a 1Gb thumb drive in the same USB slot was only 11 minutes.
On my Powerbook, USB 2.0, that same file copied to the thumb drive in 2:43. Copying it to the 1Gb thumb drive took 2:04. So it’s only on USB 1 that the other one is dog slow.