Williamo’s Blog.

Here’s some great info on the Firefox 3 memory leak fixes (currently in Beta 4):

As the web and web browsers have matured, people have started expecting different things out of them. When we first released Firefox, few people were browsing with tabs or add-ons. I’ve written before about how web usage patterns have changed, so too have our strategies on how to effectively make use of system resources such as memory.

While Firefox 2 used less memory than it’s predecessor, Firefox 1.5, we intentionally restricted the number of changes to the Gecko platform (Gecko 1.8.1 was only slightly different than Gecko 1. on which Firefox was built. However, while the majority of people were working on Firefox 2 / Gecko 1.8.1, others of us were already ripping into the platform that Firefox 3 was to be built on: Gecko 1.9.

We’ve made more significant changes to the platform than I can count, including many to reduce our memory footprint. The result has been dramatic, and you can see for yourself by getting a copy of the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 4.

(via Firefox 3 Memory Usage)

…more here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b4/releasenotes/ 

This is the conference (and super session) I attended last week. It was really cool. =)

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run | Reg Developer

SD West 2008 For the second year in a row organizers at the Software Development Conference & Expo West felt the super sessions hosted by C++ legends Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter were worth some ink on the event agenda.

“There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they simply stopped advertising C++ sessions at this conference,” Sutter told attendees. “And yet they found a curious thing: every year for four years, C++ was the strongest track at the show. With zero advertising! That says something about the market. That says that there are problems that C++ is solving.”

document.write(’\x3Cscript src=”http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/adj/reg.developer.4159/code;’+RegExCats+GetVCs()+’chl=cpp;pid=’+RegId+’;'+RegKW+’maid=’+maid+’;test=’+test+’;pf=’+RegPF+’;dcove=d;sz=336×280;tile=3;ord=’ + rand + ‘?” type=”text/javascript”>\x3C\/script>’); The duo offered the C++ crowd day-long sessions at SD West. In fact, a session presented last year (Concepts and generic programming in C++0x”) was back by popular demand, alongside an additional day of new material covering the design and evolution of the grandpappy of object-oriented programming languages.

Sutter is the author of several books on software development, a lead architect at Microsoft, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and coiner of the phrase “concurrency revolution.” Stroustrup is also an author, a professor of computer science at the Texas A&M University’s college of engineering, and a research fellow at AT&T Labs.

Of course, the Danish computer scientist is best known as the creator and original implementer of C++.

Stroustrup doesn’t like to hear his brainchild referred to as an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, though he allowed that its main contribution was to make OOP mainstream. “Before C++, 99.9 per cent of programmers never even heard of it OOP,” he said during a post-session Q&A. “Those who’d heard of it believed that it was only for slow graphics written by geniuses.”

Benson Bubbler, originally uploaded by William WM.

Thomas Hawk has a great blog post today about the farce that is airport security which I completely agree with. Here’s an excerpt:

I’m tired of taking my shoes off at the airport. I can’t imagine anything really hidden in a shoe that could possibly take down a flight. I don’t know why my laptop has to be taken out my bag and put into a separate bin alone. Recently on a flight I put my MacBook and my cell phone in the same bin. I got an extra special personal security search by a TSA agent. While he was searching me he asked me, “do you know why I singled you out?” I answered “no,” and he said, “because you didn’t put your laptop in a bin all by itself. You’re supposed to know to do that.”

To me these kinds of interactions with power trippy cops are just stupid. What difference does it make if my cell phone is in the same bin as my lap top?

…full article here: Question Authority and Why It’s Time to Fight Security Superstition