It’s hard to see how the Apple relationship with Intel isn’t paying off already. The new MacBooks sure look to me like they compare very well price-wise with business class laptops from PC vendors, and they’ll have Apple’s fit and finish to boot. According to Steve Jobs’ keynote, all of the Mac hardware will be migrated to Intel by the end of the year, so I guess if your heart was set on a desktop system other than an iMac or an iBook, you’ll get your wish soon enough.

Not that any Democratic Senators read this weblog, but I’m writing a brief note anyway that I believe that the Samuel Alito nomination is one that Democrats should be prepared to fight until the bitter end, taking advantage of any parliamentary loophole they can to put an end to. From everything I’ve read, Alito is exactly the worst kind of judge to put on the Supreme Court at this moment in history. I think that most people are only now wakening to the dangers of the imperial Presidency, unaccountable to Congress and unchecked by a passive judiciary. I honestly don’t believe that there’s any judge in America more likely to defer to executive power than Alito, and the idea of his nomination going through sends chills down my spine. It’s do or die for Democrats as far as I’m concerned.

I just wanted to post a brief update on where I am with the memory leak problem that I described back on December 19. I tried out both JProfiler and YourKit until the evaluation periods ran out, and while I was not able to isolate the memory leak with either of them, but to me, one came out far ahead of the other.

To me, JProfiler is vastly superior to YourKit. I have to say, YourKit didn’t get a completely fair shake because their telemetry features only work with Java 1.5 and I’m using Java 1.4. I know it’s not impossible to write such features for Java 1.4, because JProfiler provides them, so not being able to take advantage of them was a bit frustrating for me. However, even for features that both products provide, I found JProfiler to be more robust. It does a better job of showing a comprehensive view of which objects exist and how much memory they’re using. I didn’t get to use either product enough to reach a fully informed opinion, especially because I’m not very experienced with profilers, but it sure seemed to me that JProfiler is a much more advanced tool.

I originally assumed that tracking down the memory leak would be easier if I ran tests within JUnit or in a command line program, but I actually found that it wasn’t too useful, other than to determine that there is, in fact, a memory leak. If you run transactions through the program long enough, the telemetry readout clearly shows memory usage growing. However, the problem with trying to profile the application this way is that there’s no easy way to control the execution of the code that contains the leak. You can run hundreds of transactions, all of which increase the memory usage, but the key to finding the leak is to run some transactions, let the application idle, manually trigger garbage collection, capture a baseline, and then run more transactions. It’s easier to do that running under a servlet container like Tomcat.

I found out that the command line program wasn’t best suited to my needs on my owns, but I found out about the steps for finding the problem from an expert. The thing you have to do is create a JSP or servlet that manually calls System.gc() in order to establish the baseline I mentioned above. Any objects that are no longer in use that don’t get garbage collected are the cause of the memory leak. He suggested starting up Tomcat, running a few transactions, then triggering the garbage collector and setting the memory usage baseline in the profiler. Once you run another transaction, you can then run the garbage collector again, and anything that’s hanging around in memory beyond the baseline that was set is the problem. We’ll see how that method works when I get my JProfiler license.

Did you know that Guy Kawasaki has a blog? I’m surprised that it has taken the inventor of company evangelism so long to pick up the habit. Now that he’s started, though, he’s on a roll. His posts on the Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs and the Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists are particularly good.

Don’t miss The Smoking Gun’s lengthy exposé revealing the fact that the author of the best selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, James Frey, is actually a novelist. I guess this is going to send Oprah right back to dead novelists when it comes to making book club selections.

Apparently the climate change debate is officially over. Global warming is a fact and it’s mostly our fault. Now what are we going to do about it?

The other day I mentioned that my hard drive died and I lost all of the song ratings and play counts from my iTunes library. Some people made some excellent suggestions in the comments about how I might be able to rescue that data. As it turns out, fate was on my side. I had already burned an Ubuntu live CD so that I could test some hardware I had bought before my new Windows XP CD arrived via UPS, and I tried booting up the PC with the dead hard drive from that. Well, I stuck the CD in the machine too late, and it booted up into Windows instead of playing dead. I quickly zipped up the files I needed and used scp to copy them to a server, and ten minutes later I had the old iTunes data on the new PC.

Along with Google’s announcement that they’ll be selling video content via Google Video comes the news that they’ve created yet another DRM system. Reverse engineering hackers, start your engines!

Tivo previewed the Series 3 box today, with HDTV support and the ability to record two programs at once. Excellent!

The Edge Foundation’s question for 2006 is, “What is your dangerous idea?” They explain:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

As usual, they’ve gathered answers from bunches of smart people, some of whom you’ve heard of. I, of course, was not invited to contribute, so I’ll publish my answer here.

Everybody reaches their potential.

My idea is that when you take all factors into account, everybody reaches their potential. Take, for example, the 6’11” guy who works at the gas station. People will say they didn’t live up to their potential, that they could have been a famous basketball player if only they had been willing to work at it. Or that the brilliant but difficult programmer who never contributes what they could to a project because they’re too stubborn to mesh with a team squanders their intellectual gifts.

My hypothesis is that those personality traits are just as important as the physical traits in assessing what a person accomplishes. Socially, we are biased toward the short guy who works his butt off to make it in basketball rather than the tall guy who just goes through the motions, under the notion that character is a personal choice whereas height is beyond one’s control.

This idea is dangerous because it undermines the basic sense that everyone should work to make the most of themselves. However, nobody really can predict their potential, so everyone should probably live under the assumption that the sky’s the limit. I think that the concept of squandered potential is more useful as a motivational tool than as a description of reality.