China’s RedBerry

Excerpt from an article:

On the eve of its long-delayed China launch, BlackBerry is facing a sudden challenge from a cheaper Chinese rival called, unapologetically, RedBerry.

The new service, aimed squarely at BlackBerry, was launched this month by China Unicom Ltd., the state-controlled telecommunications giant that ranks as China’s second-biggest mobile operator.

The new RedBerry service could pose a major challenge to Research in Motion Ltd., which is planning to launch BlackBerry in China by the end of next month. Its China launch has been delayed by two years of negotiations and regulatory obstacles, and RedBerry has now been introduced ahead of it.

Wow… Sweet! Chinese businessmen’s got to be one of the most “innovative” and “honest” people in the world… Innovative in stealing and coming up with original names for products they stole and honest in having no shame in doing it. I look forward to having such a great country and people to lead the world into the next century. I get excited just thinking about it! Woohoo!

Safari Still Unbearable

After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:

For Safari, in the command prompt, run

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks Safari
Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
.
.
.
(lines and lines or error codes)

For Firefox, run

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks firefox-bin
Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
.
.
.
(lines and lines of error codes)

When

1
leaks Safari

was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.

After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:

The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):

2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.

Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.

Safari Leaks

Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?

Argh… memory leaks are annoying…

Impeach Bush and Cheney Now

At least Nixon had some integrity when he was caught with the Water Gate incident. Now that Bush and Cheney are caught with their pants down, what will they do (again)?

US President George W Bush authorised the leak of secret intelligence to a newspaper to help defend the Iraq war, a former White House aide has said.
.
.
… in the past the president has said he does not approve of such leaks and would sack anyone involved.

How many lies does an administration have to tell for its members to be impeached?

Bush White House Wants Climate Researchers to Shut Up

Excerpt direct from Slashdot:

“Facts and science collide with tribal loyalties, the Washington Post reports: ‘Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.'”

WTF?

Fulltime Firefox

I have written about using Firefox and how to solve its memory leak problems. The trick I wrote about by limiting the “history” of previous pages on any given tab has been working magics in reducing the memory sneak-up on Firefox. Ever since I reduced the recorded history, the overall memory usage on Firefox has stayed at around 70MB to 150MB, mostly somewhere in between. But it is slow like a dog despite of me turning off many of the unused extensions.

After having used Firefox fulltime for the past several months, the occasional trip back to Safari makes Firefox feel like public transit, slow and dirty. I have been pondering on going back to Safari, but the fact that there are NO remedies to combat its memory leak issues makes me feel reluctant. Having 10 tabs opened at any given time all the time is not a small feat for just any browser, and Firefox has been able to handle it rather gracefully. If it were Safari, the damn thing would have blown up in 3 days, taking the Finder with it sometimes.

Maybe I will give Camino another shot now that I know how to control memory issues…

Blah…

Just another rant on browsers…

Taiwanese Charisma

The Chinese media has been heavily covering Mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-Jeou and his visit to the United States for the past few days. The sheer volume on the coverage of his speeches, people he met, his schedules, and… practically anything and everything about this man, has been unprecedented. If foreshadowing reveals anything of the future, this could signal the newly elected Chairman of KMT will be a serious contender for the 2008 presidential election in Taiwan.

Ever since DPP’s double blow in the past two presidential elections on KMT, Taiwan has been at its most polarizing point between different “ethnic groups” in recent memory. The political atmosphere in Taiwan has reached a point where the Pro-Blue (KMT) population of Taiwan simply can’t communicate with the Pro-Greens (DPP) and vice versa. Whenever Pro-Blue and Pro-Green issues arise among friends and family, you can literally feel the tension in the air.

While George Bush and the Republican Party in the United States are busy covering their lies about the war in Iraq, President Chen and his DPP simply live their lies out in the open with no one daring to prosecute him or members of his party — lies about scandals, money lundarying from public projects, purposely pitting one Chinese ethnic group against another, driving the Taiwanese economy to the ground… etc. I thought I’d never say this, but THANK GOODNESS China has been acting like a true world power in the matter of DPP’s thoughtless push for “formal” Taiwanese independence (yeah, like it will EVER happen). Like an adult irritated with a child’s annoying pranks, China simply yells at the little one to shut him up. The day when it stands up and takes Taiwan for a good spanking, there’s really not much anybody can or will do anything about*.

Now that I have painted a gloomy picture of Taiwan, let’s look at the silverlining… Chairman Ma (not MAO) has a pretty good grasp of world affairs and what they pertain to Taiwan as a whole (I am sure having a Ph.D from Harvar didn’t hurt). He’s not just another frog in a well who sees world affairs narrowly and carelessly. The Pro-Greens don’t like Ma because they think he’s pretentious** and has a track record of doing the “politically right” things. But hey, at least he’s not going to rock the boat and put the lives of the Taiwanese people on jeopardy against an enemy Taiwan simply can’t win fighting.

Having laughed at the Americans for having elected a dumbass president twice, now I have to laugh at my own dumbass people for putting a clown in the presidential seat two times in a row as well. But at least when an ant is run into the ground, nobody will notice, whereas when America is run into the ground, the world might explode (literally)***.

* China is a permeant member of the UN, that rules UN intervention out; US forces are too tied up with N. Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, “war” on terror and other things; Japan and S. Korea just want to watch Taiwan burn; the rest of the world would be too afraid to lose their investments in China to do anything. Sure, they will issue “statements” on how disappointed they are on China’s actions. But what is boils down to is this: there are no true friends between nations, just buiness as usual. In other words, Taiwan will be f*ucked within a week when China spanks.

** He CAN’T be more pretentious than Bush or Chaney!

*** And it has been “exploding” daily in Iraq.