The EFF anti-Disney Cartoon

The EFF have released an animation neatly summarising the problem with digital rights and Disney. It’s a bit slow to load and even if you aren’t interested in the argument (you should be), the animation is a great Disney piss-take

Memory Analysis in Java

Elliotte Rusty Harold is wondering about memory analysis for Java. I’ve recently been trying to answer the same question: How much memory does this object occupy? This is actually an incredibly difficult question to answer as most profilers only calculate the size of that object, not the size of the object and every other object it references. Also, garbage collection can’t be explicitly scheduled (calling System.gc() only hints that you want garbage collection performed, but it doesn’t necessarily perform it immediately). This leads to wildly inaccurate readings using freeMemory. I’ve had results varying from 11.5-268KB and the object I was trying to measure is probably smaller than this variation!

Elliotte reckons we need some form of “deep-linking” memory profiler and I would go a step further. We need a memory profiler which allows us to specify an object, capture its total “deep” memory usage, and then browse those deep references and selectively ignore some of them. As an example, if the object you’d like to measure has a link back to a container object (such as an EJB container) then it doesn’t make sense to include the memory allocated to the container in the total for the object.

Perhaps a better suggestion is to recursively monitor every new object allocated by the object you are measuring.

How do we achieve this? I have no idea.

Personal RSS Aggregators

Jon Udell has a nice article over at Byte on the move away from centralised RSS services to more decentralised ones. It’s nice to see RSS is still alive but Blogger (basic not pro) doesn’t support it. I’m seriously tempted to upgrade to the Pro version for the RSS capability (which I guess is the point of not providing it free) but I’m still slightly worried about the changeover.

More Aspects of the Blogging Network

courtesy of Dave.

Social Networking in Radiospace

Creating Communities from Thin Air

MetaLinker