plaxoed!

I downloaded the final RTW version of Windows Live Messenger a few days ago and it had been working well for the most part. Rose had mentioned that Messenger seemed to be crashing her computer, taking up almost 100% CPU and over 150MB of RAM. I thought that sounded a bit high, but her computer (my old IBM T30) is 4 years old, so I figured maybe it was just that it’s a bit outdated.

But lo and behold, a few hours later, my computer started getting really slow - quite a surprise since I wasn’t doing anything really and my computer is a totally decked out Pentium D 930 with 2GB of RAM and a 10k RPM SATA system drive. I looked in taskmgr and I see msnmsgr.exe going crazy at 48% CPU and using over 200MB of RAM (and the mem usage was growing while I was watching it). Looks like there might be a bug in there…

Note to Windows Live Messenger folks who might be reading this: it seems like a long haul bug. It only seems to happen after the client is running for a long time. Normally my messenger uses < 60MB of RAM and takes up < 10% CPU, even when I’m running a 2-way video chat session. Let me know if you need more repro details. Thanks!

I saw a few weeks ago that MSN was running a bot contest, so I’ve been thinking of different bots to build. To get started, I figured I’d create something simple: a ToDo Bot (side note: it turns out, nothing is ever that simple).

If you’re on MSN Messenger, you can use it immediately - no setup required! Just send an IM to:

todobot@hotmail.com

Basically, you can chat with it and it’ll keep track of To Do items you tell it about. You can then access your list from wherever, whenever - especially if you use a web-based IM client like Meebo

I got the basics of the idea from Lifehacker, which had an article about making a ToDo.txt file and then someone wrote a Perl-based AIM bot for managing your ToDos. Well, the problem with that was that it’s hard to setup. Anyways, give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s pretty basic right now, but then again, I’ve only put maybe 1-2 days worth of work into it so far

If you like the bot and want to link to it on your site, just copy and paste this code!

<center><a href="http://blog.plaxoed.com/2006/07/15/doodie-bot-lives/"><img src = "http://www.plaxoed.com/doodiebot2.gif"/></a></center>

Web Services Versioning - Google Style

Dare comments on Google’s policy of hard transitions to new versions of their API. Usually not a smart move for platform providers. I love this comment though:

“the old Web service end point stops being supported
2 months later. That’s gangsta.”

Nice!

Ah, this strong bad e-mail reminds me of my college days… hehe.

I was prompted to head over after I saw that they were back and creating new content over at homestarrunner.com

I got an e-mail today from John, a Dell Customer Advocate. He had read my blog entry about the flashing amber power button syndrome and wants to assist. Maybe Dell is taking cues from Lenovo and now has a group helping bloggers directly? If so that’s great news! Hopefully John can help me - maybe I’ll be back on the Dell bandwagon soon

Looking at their forums though, it looks like quite a few people would like some assistance. John, you’ve got your work cut out for you