If you use QuickSilver on the Mac, as an-application-launcher-and-more, you may discover that you are having performance problems. This seems to have been happening recently and occurs with the current release. Naturally, it all  depends on whether you ever look to see what resources are being used by your apps, but you will probably do that if you suffer from the QuickSilver issue I’m about to describe:

Primary Symptom: The Mac seems to be running slow. You may especially notice that some activities like downloads or moving between Spaces are slowed. Also some browser activities (FireFox or Safari) may cause the “spinning wheel” to appear.

Secondary Symptom: You run the Mac’s Activity Monitor and discover that QuickSilver is running at or above 90% of cpu. Note that no application should be that much of a hog, except in short bursts, but in this case QuickSilver is running at that level all the time.

Application Hoggery – A Note

In application terms, there are only a few resource hogs. Both Aperture and Photoshop can hog resources – but that’s normally because they’re busy doing useful stuff. Back-up utilities (like Time Machine) can hog the network (if they use the network) because they’re sending data to disk. Browsers do hog resources and can chalk up high cpu usage, and so, of course can Skype, especially when you use video. Virtual machines like Parallels chew up resources, but you should expect that. Apart from that the indexing routine that serves the Mac’s Spotlight Search capability is a nasty little resource hog – so much so that I disable it. (I never use SpotLight anyway.)

The QuickSilver Problem Described

When QuickSilver starts to tie up a cpu it is almost certainly because it indexing frantically and that’s causing it to “thrash”. Under normal running QuickSilver only uses a few percent of cpu. Here are four possible remedies, depending on the cause:

1. Cause: QuickSilver’s indexing files have got their “panties in a bunch” in some way. Quicksilver has become confused.
   Action: Quit Quicksilver. Go to ~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes and move all the files out of there. (QuickSilver will recreate them.) Restart QuickSilver. If this doesn’t solve the problem try 2. below.
2. Cause: QuickSilver is frantically trying to manage its ClipBoard History. If you have set the number of clipboard items to remember above 25 items, this may be the cause – although it would need to be a high number to cause thrashing. Also check to see if you have the Shelf module as this can contribute to the problem.
   Action: Set ClipBoard History to 25 items. Switch Shelf module off. Quit Quicksilver and then relaunch. If this doesn’t solve the problem try 3. below.
3. Cause: QuickSilver is obsessively indexing its Catalog. This is most likely caused by Custom sources that you yourself have added.
   Action: Open the Catalog page in QuickSilver, and click on Custom. Go through the Sources you have added, one by one. For eacj click on i at bottom right corner of window and a draw showing source options will slide out. Click Source Options (bottom of the drawer) and it will shwo the depth of search. If you’ve set the search depth to infinity that’s almost certainly the cause of the problem. Set the value to no greater than the depth of the folder you want scanned (probably 3 at the most). Quit Quicksilver and then relaunch. If this doesn’t solve the problem try 3. below.
4. Cause: QuickSilver is indexing its Catalog insanely, but you never provoked it. This is most likely caused by a recent plug-in you added.
   Action: Open the Plugins page in QuickSilver. Start removing plug-ins you’ve added recently. (Best to take a snapshot of the ones you’ve got enabled first). You have to find the culprit, so the best way is probably to remove ones you know you added recently and while you’re at it, you may take the opportunity to remove ones you don’t use (if there are any). Quit Quicksilver and then relaunch. If this doesn’t cure the problem keep removing plugins.
   If you can’t make headway this way, then it may be a combination of a plugin and cause 1. above. In which case the only way out I can think of is to kill QuickSilver completely and reinstall. It performs fine on every installation I’ve done, so it should be clean on reinstall. After that add plug-ins one by one. Sorry but that’s the only way I know that can pin the problem down.

Incidentally QuickSilver is now Open Source and no longer controlled by its initial author. Problems caused by plugins are best directed to the plug-in authors, who will be best positioned to find out if the offending bug is in QuickSilver or the plugin.

Note: This posting also appears on the PDQ Mac web site, which is not officially launched yet. When it is launched, I’ll let you know.

The Web, Spam and the Recession

Aside from the Spanish Prisoner/Nigerian 419 scams, which are entertaining only in the extent of their variety – I love a well-crafted story – spam now seems to divide fairly equally between Sex and Pharmaceuticals, with the Viagra and Cialis ads qualifying as both. The “comment spam” that hits this blog divides pretty evenly between the two as well. If you’re not familiar with comment spam, it’s automated posting spiders adding comments to your web site that include links to their web sites, which are usually peddling porn and/or pharmaceuticals.

I have an Akismet plug-in that catches all such postings, mostly by spotting that the comments have links in. It’s very effective as the number of false negatives and false positives are very low. As the occasional legitimate comment does have links in it, I scan through the Akismet “spam bucket” every few days to rescue any false positives. On average there are about 35 spam comments posted per day, so the situation is a little like email where the illegitimate outnumbers the legitimate.

The point of this posting is to call attention to a relatively new phenomenon that has been probably been provoked by the recession. Both my comment spam and email spam now incudes a certain amount of eTail spam. It doesn’t cause me any particular pain – the Mac Mail spam filter works fine for me and so does Akismet on this blog – but I guess it’s a sign of the times.

Here’s a tentative long range forecast:

The web is going to be the business dynamic that pulls us out for the recession.

The logic behind this is simple (although it may be wrong). Of course, the web isn’t a business sector, as such, but the agglomeration of pretty much every other business sector, except arms, construction, mining and heavy engineering – all of which are pretty difficult to carry out over the web. The businesses that prosper in a recession are those that can deliver clear value-for-money (vfm) and that will happen through the web because the transaction costs are lower. There are several points to note:

• Consumers who previously used the web on an occasional basis will become regular users for the sake of vfm.
• eTailer and other dot com denizens will focus on vfm through the web.
• Web advertising will continue to flourish, despite current negative prophesies, because it offers the best vfm in advertising. This will itself reinforce the momentum of the web.
• The as-a-service movement has only just begun. This will lead to much more ambitious as-a-service business models well beyond software as a service/
• The web continues to evolve and will soon threaten the cable companies as it starts to become the dominant medium for entertainment.
• Web 3.0 (the semantic web) will soon be on us improving the web in a dramatic way (watch this space).

Although it is rarely referre to now, one of the dominant and counter recessionary businesses of the Great Depression was typewriters. It was a productivity/vfm thing.

Today it’s Thanksgiving – that American holiday which vies for Americanness with the 4th of July. As I’m a “legal alien” of quite recent standing in the US, I’m not particularly atuned to either holiday. The 4th of July is great for firework displays, but, as a Brit, when friends and family discuss what it is they’re celebrating, I have to remain somewhat in the background. I’m tempted to say, “OK, King George was a dunderhead and never understood your distaste for taxes, but can we have our colonies back now, please?”

Thanksgiving is easier to accommodate, although I have to say that the timing of the holiday makes no sense at all. It is way too late in the year to count as a harvest festival. Sensible, as always, the Canadians hold a national Thanksgiving day on the second Monday in October, at the right time. But that’s the time when the US is celebrating Columbus Day, in honor of the man who discovered the Bahamas, and, confusingly, referred to the natives there as Indians.

In theory, the first Thanksgiving Feast was held by the Puritan separatists, who founded Plymouth Colony and who were giving thanks to the almighty for surviving for a whole year. If so, then Thanksgiving should be on December 11th, since that was the day in 1620, when the Mayflower bumped into America – in the wrong place. (The pilgrims intended destination was North Virginia, but they never had Google Maps in those days.) Over 40 pilgrims died in their first Massachusetts winter from the extreme cold, so a survival celebration dinner on December 11th, just before the sub-zero weather draws in, seems a little bit premature to me – unless the long range weather forecast was predicting a really mild winter.

In fact there’s no convincing evidence to prove that the first Thanksgiving Dinner ever took place, or that there was a second one a year later. But neither is there any convincing evidence to prove that King Harold was hit in the eye by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. President Abraham Lincoln invented Thanksgiving as we know it today – the festival that keeps the US airlines alive because everyone flies around the US trying to meet up with the family. Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday in 1863, to be celebrated on the final Thursday in November, much to the dismay of millions of turkeys.

Pardoning The Turkey

As you may have noticed, each year, the President of the US engages in the bizarre ritual of pardoning a turkey before Thanksgiving. You might think that the turkey pardoning also dates back to Lincoln, but not so. The tradition is of very short standing. It was introduced by President George H W Bush in 1989, and thus a mere 20 turkeys have been saved by presidential clemency, 60% of them by a Bush. One pities the poor birds that are thus spared. They must wander around the turkey farm asking themselves “Hey, where’d everyone go?”

A clear sign that Sarah Palin still has her eyes on the presidency was her recent regrettable interview at a turkey farm where she’d come to pardon a turkey, just to demonstrate that she can do presidential things. She looks very presidential don’t you think, with those birds being slaughtered just behind her.

Problem is, of course, that no-one listens to her words anymore because they never seem to get arranged in an order that conveys meaning. So everyone is left to watch and learn the method by which Alaskan turkeys go to meet their maker. Don’t feel obliged to watch.

It sounds completely unlikely. In fact it would seem beyond the power of any normal human being to actually hit that little white cellulose ball with a nunchuck, never mind hitting it in a specific direction and never mind actually winning points against reasonably competent ping pong players.

The alternative explanation has to be that someone has messed with the film here, and maybe that’s so. But who cares? Enjoy….

(Note: If your company blocks Internet videos you will not see a video frame below this sentence. In which case, login from home to watch this.)

I’ve spent what must amount to a whole 5 days in the last two weeks developing and enhancing navigation for this site. I’m not finished and it will be a while before I do finish, simply because I also have the unwelcome job of going through every posting on this site and tagging it with relevant tags. Right now I’m painfully aware that there are bugs in the navigation, but I’d rather it was made available because it will motivate me to fix the bugs and add tags.

If you look down the side of the page you will now see 5 navigation buttons, that provide the following capabilities:

• The one labeled with a C displays a list of postings by category and covers every posting that’s been made to this blog (which is about 750).
• The one labeled with an E display the same things except that postings are “Expanded” and hence shows the first paragraph for each posting.
• The one labeled with a G takes you to a page where you can use Google to search this site. There’s more to that one than meets the eye, but what lies beneath isn’t going to meet the eye for quite a while yet, so I’ll not try to explain it.
• The one labeled with an S lists postings by subject. I don’t intend to assign subjects to all postings (and right now this capability is very primitive because I’ve not done anything like enough tagging to make it useful.
• The one labeled with a V lists postings by IT vendor. So if you want to see every posting that refers to, say, Google, you can. This also demands more tagging if it’s going to be useful.

Lets set aside the fact that there’s some work to be done before the last two actually become useful and, hopefully, there’s a chance that you’ll be able to browse this site effectively, should you so wish. If you allow the site to use cookies then you may also find it useful that only the llinks to postings you haven’t read are underlined.

Tags and Tag Clouds

I’m not finished, by the way. I intend to add a tag cloud and a tag list. You’ll see what these are when they turn up. Every blogger and his dog seems to provide a tag cloud, so I’ll do so too, but I’m not sure it’ll get used much.

I’ve got to the point with PHP where I’m coding like a code warrior, so it’s quite likely that I’ll be building in a good deal more capability. However, I’m not really building it for this site – I may have an interesting theory about rich navigation, but I don’t have a pressing need for this site to provide that.  This site is a test bed for other developments that are in progress.

There will be a tags page and a tag cloud by this time next week. After that, I’ll add the home page that this site has hankered after for a whole year. Yes, it’s true, this site has no home page.