Random weirdness page 7
Mr Anonymous explained that, when the following dialog box appeared, either button would bring up another copy of the same dialog. And again. And again. He resorted to Force Quit as the only means of disposing of the program:
The following was really odd, and another bizarre mishap with Mac memory management. If I tried to launch Fetch, it would fail due to a lack of memory. If you look at the window behind, though, Fetch has clearly been loaded into memory.
With BBEdit quit, but (for no obvious reason) lili_Pad running, still no dice:
It’s not like I’m short of memory, though. With all other programs closed:
Apparently, of 257.2 megabytes of contiguous free memory, the system cannot find Fetch the mere 600 kB it’s asking for. Wait – Fetch only asked for 600 kB? Fetch’s minimum required allocation is 600 kB, preferring 1000. The Mac is giving it the full 1000 kB and this is, apparently, not enough.
One reboot later, Fetch is now happy, but using 1.1 MB (1126 kB), more than its manifest resource asks for:
This may be something to do with the 23 kB of temporary memory that it allocates, but why would it allocate such a ridiculously small amount of temporary memory? Surely it has that much free heap space? Curiously though – over half of its memory partition is reading as empty now (631 kB free with a window open on my site), but before, it was showing as completely full.
Whatever was going wrong, you probably don’t want to know.
Does the following inability to read a simple image not feel like sabotage?
The following dialog pops up from time to time in Firefox:
Aside from the lack of a title bar, would it suprise you in any way to learn that I am running QuickTime 7 already? Thought not. The rest of the time (that is, when QuickTime is not simply crashing Firefox completely) it sporadically reports that some necessary feature cannot be found on the server, or even identified. I need some feature of QuickTime that has no identity and Apple have no idea where I am supposed to find it even if they knew.
A while back, I installed .NET 2.0 and Visual C♯ Express 2005. During the install, some button in the window got forgotten about entirely:
Button? What button? Did I leave the gas on?
(No, I’m a freaking squirrel!) And then at the end, it proceeded to send Microsoft feedback:
Problem is, I never gave them any feedback and it never asked for any. It made sure to send Redmond a copy of feedback I was never asked to write and therefore didn’t write. Perhaps the feedback entry for \\SPIRE simply reads, “FileNotFound”.
Finally, some digging into an apparent REALbasic bug where context menus don’t appear for certain text boxes, revealed a long-standing bug in my own edit box class: context menus (entirely hand-rolled) work on disabled edit fields:
I never thought about that before. D’oh.