Robert Brewer's dashboard

Robert Brewer reported a problem in Motionbox on September 18, 2009 22:03:

MXU seems to leak memory

I'm using the Motionbox Express Uploader version 0.6.8 on Mac OS X 10.5.8. I'm uploading an hour-long Quicktime movie once each week. The upload takes about 2-3 hours, and during this period there is a continuous growth in the amount of "Inactive" memory used on my MacBook Pro. I have 4 GB of RAM, but 1.6 GB is currently inactive. I'm fairly certain this is caused by the MXU, since I rebooted just before starting the upload, and this has happened on previous uploads.

Thus, I conclude there is some sort of serious memory leak in the MXU. If I needed to upload larger files, I think I would run out of memory and start swapping before the upload was complete. A quick Google search seems to indicate that many Adobe AIR applications have memory leak problems.

Anyone else seeing this? Motionbox, any plans on fixing this?

A comment on the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter:

@Susan, I think it's worth pointing out this is entirely a problem in Safari, and it just happens to be triggered by Twitter (among other sites). So can't really blame Twitter here. – Robert Brewer, on July 28, 2009 21:17

A comment on the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter:

@gabe, it should be permanent, because when you delete a page from Top Sites, Safari remembers this fact and won't put that page back on Top Sites. – Robert Brewer, on July 28, 2009 21:16

A comment on the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter:

If it works for you, please press the "This solves the problem" link just below the comment so other folks will know that it worked for you. Thanks. – Robert Brewer, on July 28, 2009 03:11

A comment on the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter:

The downside of the solution you mention is that it turns off all RSS feed updating, which can be undesirable for some people. The solution I posted earlier allows you to fix the problem just for Twitter and leave RSS working for other sites. – Robert Brewer, on July 28, 2009 03:10

Robert Brewer replied on July 28, 2009 00:30 to the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter:

I found the answer to this problem on Apple's support forum. The problem only seems to occur on Mac OS 10.4 systems running Safari 4. Safari 4 introduced the Top Sites feature that displays thumbnails of the pages you visit most frequently, and indicates if they have changed since your last visit. Apparently, one of the ways they check if the page has changed is by retrieving the RSS feed for the page.

So if you have looked at your Twitter page a few times, it's likely that the Twitter page is now on your Top Sites page, and Safari keeps bugging you to log in so it can retrieve the RSS data. The solution is to go to the Top Sites page (the little grid icon in your Bookmarks Bar), click the Edit button in the lower left corner, and then delete any and all Twitter pages from your Top Sites page. This solved the problem for me.

Here's the link to the Apple forum thread that contained the answer. It's near the bottom of the thread (not the message actually labeled as the answer).

Robert Brewer started following the problem "weird RSS message" in Twitter.

A comment on the idea "Add support for sending links to Instapaper" in reddit:

Yeah, just saw that yesterday. Most excellent, thank you! – Robert Brewer, on July 09, 2009 19:28

Robert Brewer marked one of Ross' replies in reddit as useful. Ross replied to the idea "Add support for sending links to Instapaper".

Robert Brewer marked one of QDawg's replies in reddit as useful. QDawg replied to the idea "A couple of features I'd like to see. :-)".

Robert Brewer shared an idea in reddit on March 03, 2009 23:42:

Add support for sending links to Instapaper

It would be cool if there was an option to send links to Instapaper for reading later. Instapaper has an API for doing this

Robert Brewer started following the idea "A couple of features I'd like to see. :-)" in reddit.

A comment on the idea "Access carbon footprint from API?" in Dopplr:

Thanks for the reply. So if Dopplr were to expose each user's AMEE ID via their API, I could use that with the AMEE API to retrieve their carbon footprint data? – Robert Brewer, on November 17, 2008 19:32

Robert Brewer shared an idea in Dopplr on November 15, 2008 03:20:

Access carbon footprint from API?

I'm working on a research project, and it would be great if the Dopplr API provided a way to access a user's carbon footprint information. I poked around with the various API methods, but didn't see any carbon data in the XML; if I've missed something please let me know.

Robert Brewer shared an idea in CenceMe on July 22, 2008 20:08:

Status updates -> News Feed?

Any plans to have CenceMe add status changes to the News Feed? It seems like an obvious thing to do, since normal Facebook status updates are put into the feed.