Shivvering Along...

Seems that someone finally closed the window to all the warmth, and we're cooling down.  

I do remember a particularly warm early December a few years ago when I cleaned out the garage so I could park the car in it.  Which was ironic, because the house was built in the late 70s, but included a "two car garage" which was only two cars if both were subcompact.  In order to fit my car into the garage, I had to park with the front bumper over the first step into the house, which meant the back bumper was just far enough in to miss the fins on the garage door, so it could close.

So yeah, that was fun.  Two weeks ago we were looking at record warm temperatures, this past week we had thunderstorms, but the temperature is finally heading towards winter cold.  So that's fine, we're used to it, though they still sting.

I am still bumbling along here, after the earlier diarrhea of the keyboard earlier this week.  Seems some of the adults have returned to the voting electorate, while we'll see about the rest.  The infantile bitching and whining about making something already great "great again" is finally shown to be "I don't want others to have the same advantages I stole".  But we'll likely not see the back end of that asshole yet.  

That's enough time wasted on him.  As for me, I did do some trimming in my social network feeds this past week.  I've noticed a rather depressing development in recent versions of Firefox which leave me wishing for a more professional browser, one with fewer gaping holes in it for privacy like Chrome (aka "Crime" in this household).  

Some of the features which the Firefox community has chosen to depricate - that is, they decided they were no longer necessary - were things like the limit on the number of processes the browser could spawn.  I'm no browser development expert.  The limited experience I've had with software development started in college, continued through the development of a few simple tools I needed, the ability to combine existing tools to fill needs I occasionally have, to now sitting on the sidelines, whining about decisions others have made. 

In other words, I'm just a normal software user.  What really irked me with the Firefox development was that process limitation going away.  I used to restrict Firefox to six consecutive processes back when I was using a machine with 2 gigs of memory.  Now, I grant you the argument that I'm a dinosaur.  My first computer started with 5K of memory, which we expanded to 8 with a cartridge (thank you VIC-20), which made all of my programming choices pretty ... difficult.  

When I truly became aware of memory management, I took a class in college on "Programming games and simulations on the Commodore 64".  This was a J-Term class - that is, it was a class offered for a month between the end of the first semester, in December, just before Christmas, and the beginning of Spring Semester, in early February.  Back when colleges weren't the same sort of schools as technical colleges that turn out people trained for jobs, my college demanded I come out of the program with a rather broad education - that is, I learned more than one thing.  

So in my January term explorations, one year I took a course in analyzing balance sheets and corporate reports - that was the one course I could take within my major, which was Business.  The next year, I took a course on Greek Art and Philosophy.  It had been promised as "drink wine and argue" for a few hours a day, turns out it was much more about how the philosophy was reflected by the art.  The take-aways from that course were my first trip to a museum with a professional guide, my first trip to a strip bar (one of the guys in my car assured me he knew a good place for lunch.  We never got any food, somehow).  And my first trip to a real Greek Restaurant, which exposed me to another sort of ethnic food which I still enjoy.  And a little early Greek art which I still find interesting.  Then I took a J-term course on architecture history and designing your own home, with next to no discussion on the actual engineering of the house, it just needed to look good.  It had, however, completely changed my best friend's educational journey path from business to ... well, he wanted to become an architect.  However, that wasn't offered at our school, so he changed schools.  Eventually became a licensed architect, and now runs a commercial construction firm.  The next year, I had the Commodore 64 course.  Following that, I took a J-Term course in Computer Networking.  Yes, we're only supposed to have to take 3 for a 4 year degree, but as I ended up being one of the last to sign up for courses due to my student status, I got what was usually my 3 or 4th choice.  So it goes.

Anyway, in that class on the Commodore 64, I had other students who chose to write heavily visual games, one of which I remember was a fellow who wrote the game where he caught people leaping from burning buildings in a net.  If he was moving too quickly when he got under them, the person would rebound quite a distance, he needed to grab them again.  If he didn't turn them into, literally, pavement pizza.  Yep.  My choice was to adapt the Apple II game called Taipan into a space oddessy of a sort.  In Taipan, you captained a ship which traded some goods between ports.  Most of them were legal, some weren't.  Obviously, the illegal goods were often far more profitable.  However, they would also be found if you were inspected.  And you had to avoid the pirate fleets that sometimes appeared.  You could upgrade your ship as you traveled about, but only when the upgrade was randomly offered to you.  At least, that was how the version I played worked.

The variation I wrote started with a starship.  You had a computer which did your navigation, you had engines on the ship, you had a string of barges which you pulled which was your cargo hold, and you also had life support, shields, weapons.  You could upgrade any of those as you went along, and you could buy and sell any of eight different cargoes, five being legal, three being illegal pharmaceuticals, spare body parts, or alien artworks.  Yeah, the alien artworks were iffy, as some allowed transport, some didn't, and it depended on the aliens.  So as you traveled between locations, your chances varied.

I had to manage all of that data, which I did by using arrays.  The row of the array defined the item, 1 being ship, 2 being the computer, which had an affect on the overall chance of getting to the right port and getting away from pirates.  Better computers increased your chances, but they also cost.  Same with engines, row 3, and the number of barges you pulled. So on, so forth.

I did win the award as the most engaging game the afternoon of our "arcade" - AKA "Final".  I had a line of people wanting to play my game, and several people asked for copies.  I had to make them aware that it could not be played during regular hours in the physics computer lab, which was the only place on campus that had Commodore 64 computers available for use.  

Wait, what's that?  Why didn't I write it for Windows?  Uh, grasshopper, Windows was about ten years into the future at that time.  We did have a windowing style environment, but it only ran on these one-piece computer things called "Macintosh" made by Steve Jobs and Apple.  And there were about a half-dozen of them on campus, none available for everyone to borrow to use.  And we did have computer labs with IBM-DOS level computers people could use.  Though our big computer was a Digital Computer system known as VAX-11/785.  Loved that monster.  It had a whopping 24 MEGS of Memory and TWO 360-meg hard drives.  It also sported enough processing power to mean it only needed another 20 of them to equal the processing power available then to a Compaq 386 with the 80387 math co-processor installed.  As memory tells me (an imperfect recall, but so it goes), the Compaq hit the cover of PC Magazine with the processing power of somewhere around 14 MFLOPS, or million floating operations per second, the old way we used to measure computer speed (which didn't require all of your computers run the same operating system, etc).  The VAX we had was limited to around 700,000 FLOPS, but it was optimized for multiple users, allowing 60 people or more to be working on the system at the same time.  

Of course, it would bog down when we got that many people hammering away, but it worked.  

But I was dithering on about processes on a Windows computer.  And the one I'm in front of right now is likely even more powerful than that old Compaq, and it's got 4 GIGS of memory in it.  Yet for some sloppy reasons, I've got twelve processes fired up from my Firefox browser.  They're not window-to-process ratios, or anything like that.  I have nine windows open right now in Firefox.  One is my "home page" which is my links page, with links to probably 2000 or more destinations.  Most of them are state parks or woodworking plans, but there are others.  Some sites no longer exist, like Microsoft's Terraserver project, which predated Google Earth by a few years.  I've also got windows open on a game I play, that session has four tabs.  Then there's this window, and a couple of windows open on a Christmas Present I'd really like, a laptop computer.  I've found that Office Depot sells refurbished laptops, so I've got one window open on the laptop I'd like, another open on an Amazon search for a replacement battery for it, another on a spare power supply (just in case), and a possible battery bank attachment that might more than double the currently-advertised 4 hour life time...

But anyway, those windows have spawned 12 processes, with various amounts of memory being used.  So I downloaded and installed a software tool which lets me reset that limit on memory and processes, and I've currently got it set at 12 because when I tried 6 I had lots of strange things happening, such as scrolling on stuff like CNN's home page, the page would reload multiple times as I scrolled from top to nearly the bottom.  Which was annoying.

But what I've found that's been utterly annoying has been the local TV station which I watch for nightly news.  It's KARE-11, KARE TV, whose web site must have some deep links to Facebook.  If I have both Facebook and their web site open, things run very, very slowly, and my computer uses a lot of memory.  I found that if I no longer follow KARE-11 on Facebook, they both run better, the amount of memory used goes way down.

So I got that going for me.  And now I probably need to get into my day, and see what, if anything, I can accomplish.  We'll see what we see.