Finally, this week-end, I was able to find the crazy memory leak that had crippled XBMC. JMarshall was able to constantly reproduce it by connecting his laptop to the same network the xbox was on. Finally, a few ethereal dumps later, I found out that he was running ICS on his laptop and that ICS would respond to the XBMC UPnP M-SEARCH requests that it sends every 6 secs. So it had to be that the response was causing the leak. Of course, somehow it took me 1h to figure out how to set up ICS (you need 2 active network adapters to even see the option in XP!). Even after setting it up, it wouldn’t respond to the M-SEARCH requests for me. Instead, I was able to see what would happen when ICS go alive (and catch the NOTIFY) using the Windows version of Platinum.
After hitting a pretty big race condition bug (2 threads accessing the same device list), I assumed the leak was there. While I was talking to GeminiSer on irc describing what I found, I was also stepping through the code as it was receiving the Device Description and SCPDs and then I saw it. Right there, the leak. Somehow, I made asumptions that the SendEvents attribute in SCPDs was required and was bailing out of my parser when it couldn’t find it. Of course, I was not cleaning up the dom tree in that case!
Now I don’t know if SendEvent is optional but in any case, it’s the first time I see this problem. In any case, the latest xbmc t3ch release is leak free at last!
Engadget recently wrote an interesting piece: An Open Letter to Microsoft – Why you shouldn’t kill FairUse4WM – Engadget.
While the tone is pretty candid, I have to say they have a point:
“Does the fact that we could quit and “keep” the music that we’ve been “renting” a problem? Theoretically, but what’s going to keep consumers paying those monthly fees isn’t the threat of losing access to their collection (though that’s part of it); what keeps them paying is the continuing access to a large, frequently updated catalog of new releases and older tunes.”
What if they were right?
On the fun side, what I love about the article is the last sentence:
“FairUse4WM means that all our PlaysForSure tracks will actually play for sure, so please don’t go and spoil it.”
Check out this interesting mashup. I finally got to use that stupid word on my blog.
Although I have been using Statcounter for a while (and I am pretty happy with it), I have decided to give Google Analytics a try. Interface looks cool. So please hit me! hit me!
-s
Wow. I just found out about this awesome idea. The meebo me widget! The little IM thing on the top left on my site is a live IM widget. This means that if I am connected on meebo, you can chat live with me! Isn’t that cool??!? Now I just need to figure out html so that the widget doesn’t get refreshed everytime a link on the site is clicked because this causes the meebo widget to relogin.
Any idea how to do that? A frame?
The best thing is that even if I am not logged in, all IMs are stored on the backend and displayed once I log in. This is freaking awesome.
Except the meebo UI is really slow. This ajax thing needs optimization…
In any case, mark my words. This company is not backed by Sequoia Capital for nothing. This is huge. You can bet this is going to be on every MySpace page in no time.
How do I invest in this company !?!?
Update: The novelty faded and I decided to remove it from the page for now.
Update2: I found out today via Om Malik’s blog that this company, which does the same thing and even more, just got acquired by AOL.
So I have been pretty busy the last week-end. I have decided to look into how Mozilla plugins work. So I have started to learn about XPCOM, XUL & JavaScript and it’s damn cool! I was able to write a Mozilla (Firefox) component using the gecko sdk. I found some really cool tools:
- A Firefox extension to debug Javascript
- An Eclipse plugin to write Javascript (haven’t tried it yet though)
I am slowly becoming a Web 2.0 expert. Who knows what the future lies in front of us now!
