The Waffle Is Dead...

Long Live The Waffle!

Say what? Another blog??

I realize at first it seems counter-intuitive, since I'm rotten at updating this blog to begin with (which probably explains my essentially zero-person readership), but I've spun off a second blog.

Why?

Because I'd like to discuss web development (and to a lesser extent general programming concerns) in a space that isn't cluttered with personal cruft. Likewise, I'd rather not loose my opportunity to dump my personal cruft into a giant blog-shaped barrel for the world to occasionally stumble onto. So, The Angry Waffle will be my personal blog, as well as my place to ramble about games and things along those lines, and Bloody Great Leaf will (surprisingly?) be just a bit cleaner, and devoted primarily to discussing issues that one way or another influence my professional life.

Why does Firefox leak like a sieve?

I like Firefox... I like Firefox a lot. But: it leaks memory like a sieve. Either that, or ... get ready for it ... GOOGLE leaks memory like a sieve. Go ahead and leave your GMail or Google Homepage open for the better part of a day and watch the memory usage for FF climb.

I can get a way with it for a good long while... 60 MB, ok... 100 MB, ::sigh:: ok... 200 MB, getting clunky... 300 MB, time to restart my browser.

I'm very suspicious of the XMLHttpRequest situation. I have a feeling Googles creating an awful lot of extra request objects and FF isn't garbage collecting them. I seem to think I've run into this problem before, so it's not some baseless insight into the inner workings of FF. I also seem to think IE handled the situation a little more gracefully. At last, IE gets one point, I guess.

And on the topic of places getting one point: I'm not sorry I switched my blog away from MySpace, but I do miss the little emoticons a bit. Blogger lets me insert any image I want... but it's a big, complicated form and I just don't want to draw a smiley face for every emotion I need to express (...shut up, it's more than 2). Maybe there's an emoticon drop-down in beta over at Google... with some really fancy emoticons in it... SMART emoticons.

Hmmm... squishy

All right -- the truth is MySpace is crap. It's a terribly, clunky, badly broken site written in a language that never really matured (ColdFusion) on a collection of servers that was never really designed to scale up to uber-billions of hits per second. I just don't like blogging there.

I also don't like Blogger. It's clunky and hitting publish is a pain -- waiting for the uploads and the yada-yada, configuring FTP if I want to host my blog on another site. Meh.

So here I was today looking at the blogger page again (just thinking about hating MySpace) and the "New Blogger" is out of beta (Google seems to be getting in on the joke about their betas -- they left "beta" under the name and just crossed it out. Frankly I might not use a Google product if it didn't have "Beta" in the name somewhere now) and the whole thing seems a little more AJAX-y and all.

They added the all important ability to tag posts now too. All I need is some way to put a symbol (anybody up for [W[sometext]]) around some text and make links to Wikipedia automatically. [W[AJAX]] ... awwww crap. Maybe the next version of blogger will get this right.

Anyway, the blog, such as it is, lives here now, until somebody else gets it "more right" than Google has.