Author Archives: Clay

About Clay

I'm a Data Center Operations Engineer in beautiful Charleston, SC. I'm happily married to my wonderful wife Nan and we have an teenage daughter Lela. I'm a total geek. I got into electronics when I was around 9 or 10 and got hooked on computers shortly thereafter. I also love Sci-Fi, (not fantasy) particularly Star Trek. My favorite outdoor activities include rollerblading, biking and hiking. I'm also a bit of a car guy and amateur racing driver.

Memory leak in Safari 3.2.x?

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I recently wrote about an issue with the “Fraudulent Sites” feature in Safari 3.2 that causes excessive CPU utilization.  I didn’t bother to speculate about the cause in that article.  However, as I was thinking about the issue it occured to me that this was probably a memory leak introduced in the Safari 3.2.2 release.  (the timeframe seems to fit the release schedule) one of the last few releases.  I honestly don’t use Safari that much, certainly not for casual browsing, so I can’t say for sure.  (I just don’t trust anything outside of the Firefox/NoScript combo for that.)  However, the bug is definitely there in 3.2.2 and 3.2.3.  (I just confirmed the bug is present in Safari 3.2.1 on Tiger as well)  If you’ve got a copy of Safari 3.2.0, I’d be interested to see if the bug is there as well.  It’s simple to reproduce:

  1. open Safari, go to the preferences menu, click the security tab and check the box next to “Fraudulent Sites”
  2. Visit any website and wait.

After a minute or two, your CPU utilization should jump to around 100%.  At this point Safari should still be usable, but will no longer respond to the quit command requiring a force-quit.  Don’t let it run too long in this state as Safari will eventually consume enough resources to lock the system down entirely.

I had stopped using Safari entirely due to this issue, but knowing there’s a workaround is good.  I typically used Safari for remote management of devices where its speed and small memory footprint could be an advantage.  Now that Apple is beta testing Safari 4, I don’t see this issue getting much attention.  If you’re affected by it, just turn off the Fraudulent Sites security feature.  However, I wouldn’t recommend using it as your primary browser in that configuration.

Apple drops DRM, but fair use is just an afterthought

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Apple’s Steve Jobs wrote an open letter almost 2 years ago where he advocated the death of DRM. As he put it, (albeit in a much longer form) the 4 major music companies (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI) own 70 percent of the worlds music, yet only require the 10 percent sold online to be locked with DRM. (compared with the other 90 percent sold on CDs) Jobs’s open letter was taken by many to be a huge show of support for fair use rights. While his letter did make a lot of good points, and did eventually lead to removal of DRM from the entire iTunes catalog, it was more about good business than fair use. Apple spent a lot of money developing their FairPlay DRM system, and even more protecting it from attacks that would seek to undo it’s encryption scheme. During that time the music industry was distributing DRM-free music on CDs, so why should Apple have to shell out all this money to keep FairPlay afloat?  Apple is touting the advent of DRM-free music for its entire catalog in the form of iTunes plus, only there’s one thing they’re not telling you. While the songs aren’t encrypted and can be moved to any device you choose, they can still be traced back to their original owner. This is because Apple watermarks each file with the name and e-mail address of the purchaser. For most of us, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. If you don’t share your music, why should you be worried? Well, suppose a thief steals your iPod, copies the tracks and uploads them to a peer to peer network. Are you liable? Some people are understandably concerned about this possibility.  If you’re one of those concerned individuals, there are a couple of ways to scrub the personally identifiable information from your files.  One way may be the Hymn/JHymn project software.  Hynm has been around for a while and works to liberate the decrypted music from iTunes and convert it to a DRM-free file with no loss in sound quality.  It has historically preserved the personal information, but even in 2005 one of the maintainers admitted this feature might change if Apple were to use the information against its customers.  Another way is to resave the files without re-encoding them with software such as Amoeba’s Fission audio editing software.  As explained on MacWorld, Fission is only accidentally capable of removing the identifiers because of it’s rigid adherence to standards.  I can’t imagine the RIAA will be able to resist prosecuting people whose iTunes files are discovered on P2P sites.  While it’s unclear whether or not this will hold up in court, why risk it.  Personally, it shouldn’t be a huge deal.  I’ve only purchased a small handful of albums and tracks from iTunes and I don’t share my music.  (besides which, if somebody tries to steal my ipod they’d better be able to run like the wind…)  However, if the RIAA starts actively pursuing iTunes customers, I might just have to reconsider my options.

SC’08 – Supercomputing Texas Style

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This year’s SC conference was a lot of fun.  I’ve been to Texas before, but never to Austin.  Austin is big city, but it doesn’t really feel like one.  Nestled next to the Colorado river, the skyscrapers create an interesting contrast with their surroundings.  Many of the buildings seemed brand new, but the city seems fairly quiet for its size.  This year’s conference was special because it was the 20th anniversary.  In honor of the history of supercomputing, the conference had a musem with artifacts spanning those 20 years including a Cray 1.  The SC’08 staff also gave out commemorative DVDs with a copy of the keynote speach given by Seymore Cray at the first SC.  His speach sumarized the story of how he got his start after college and some of the interesting problems he and his colleagues had to solve.  Even though his speach included a lot of highly technical details, he told the story so well that it was very enjoyable and easy to follow.  SC is one of those places that can blow your mind the first time you’re there.  There’s so much cutting edge technology and so much talent that it can be a bit overwhelming.  Since it was my second time there, it wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the first, but it was still a lot of fun and a great experience.