grack.com

CNN.com, before and after installing Adblock.

It takes a bit of getting used to (remember your old DOS wildcard days?), but it’s pretty easy to come up with good patterns to block 90% of all ads within about 20 minutes.

In a word - still really amazing!  Oh wait, that’s three.  Well, Firefox sure deserves all three anyways!

Install it today - even though the promise of automatically installed spyware sure is mighty appealing.

I’m not certain how many of my readers are fellow Canadians, but copyright is certainly something on my mind this coming election.  There’s an excellent editorial in the Toronto Sun that Canadians should read.

I think I’ll be voting NDP this time around.

Scoble’s link blog posts an excerpt from the article, then seems to pick one of the links from within the article as the “More…” item.  There’s no way to read the full article!

I’m not sure that the blog is too useful for original-content (versus external linking) articles. 

This is an excerpt from one of my posts on his link blog:

.NET Desktop Apps - Slow & Bloated (from: grack.com)

I’ve got a couple of .NET desktop apps running on my work system (with a gig of RAM nonetheless) and it seems like they are always the applications that are sucking up the most memory. …More

Posted by scoble at 10:32 PM

There’s no way to read my the text of my article from there - it picked up the reference to Draco.NET that I placed in the post, but won’t let anyone visit my blog to read what I said. :)

I’ve got a couple of .NET desktop apps running on my work system (with a gig of RAM nonetheless) and it seems like they are always the applications that are sucking up the most memory.

I run Sharpreader at work for a couple of interesting feeds and it hovers around 70MB when open!  Minimizing it seems to reduce the working set to 2MB, but it’s still using 69MB of virtual memory while sitting there.

A GUI monitoring tool that I wrote for Draco.NET seems to take up 30MB (plus 30MB of swap) all the time while it’s sitting in the taskbar.  It’s basically just a WinForms app that calls a remoting service - no fancy tricks.

We seem to be at the same place with .NET apps now that we were with Java apps five years ago - they hog tons of memory. 

Is there any way to get your apps to run leaner?  Heck, the AVG anti-virus console on my home computer uses 2MB of total RAM.  That’s physical + virtual.

For now, I’m questioning the usage of .NET for any application that normally runs in the background.  I’m not sure that 60MB for a simple monitoring app is a good call.